The little gold man is back.
As David Thomson and Joe Queenan have both suggested, some voters in the internecine ballot for this year's Oscars will feel obliged to honour Martin Scorsese or Peter O'Toole, not because they necessarily believe their efforts to be the best in their respective categories, but to make amends for all the times these movie legends have been cruelly overlooked in the past.
They wouldn't be in bad company. Humphrey Bogart, Dustin Hoffman, Henry Fonda, Paul Newman, Al Pacino and Judi Dench have all bagged statuettes for performances that were far from their best. They were accepting belated compensation for past mistakes: all the times the Academy's lotharios had awoken, hung-over and horror-struck, with the wrong blonde in bed next to them.
But such retrospective, cosmetic exercises are counterproductive, because they fail to disguise the appalling track record of the Oscars. The fact remains that over the years, a substantial number of voters have made the informed decision that Rocky is a better film than Taxi Driver; Ordinary People than Raging Bull; Dances With Wolves than Goodfellas. Scorsese, of course, is not the only victim of such collective brainfarts: if we truly believe that the Oscar means anything, then Forrest Gump is a better film than either The Shawshank Redemption or Pulp Fiction; Julia Roberts' performance in Erin Brockovich was better than Ellen Burstyn's in Requiem for a Dream; Hilary Swank, Kevin Costner and Ron Howard have each made more significant contributions to the history of film than Alfred Hitchcock, Cary Grant and Marilyn Monroe combined. (As O'Toole himself noted, honorary awards don't really count.)
It's time for a 70s revival. Most people remember Marlon Brando refusing his Oscar for The Godfather as a protest against the treatment of Native Americans; fewer recall George C Scott spurning his statuette (for his title role in the similarly forgotten war movie Patton) because he thought the whole idea of prizes for acting was just silly.
Who has the chutzpah to do such a thing today? Oscar is, above all, big business, and can add millions to the box office take of a movie. Helen Mirren surprised many by accepting a gong from the woman she now portrays, so to turn down an Oscar now would look frivolous. Scorsese? I don't see it somehow.
But O'Toole has nothing left to prove. If the institution that has spurned him so often finally deigns, in an ooze of sentimentality, that he might be a bit better than Leonardo DiCaprio, he has the capacity for one last great performance. Blue eyes blazing, summoning up the swashbuckling shades of Jeffrey Bernard, of Alan Swann, of Lawrence riding his camel against the Turks, he should wave the gilt knicknack in the surgically-enhanced faces of the Academy voters and tell them to shove it where Little Miss Sunshine doesn't.
