Jonathan Dodd‘s latest column. Guest opinion articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the publication. Ed
It’s Award Season again. For some people the big event of the year is the Cup Final, or the climax of the Six Nations, but these leave me relatively cold. I live for February, when the Baftas and then the Oscars take place.
Sadly, this is a minority sport, so the BBC refuses to shell out on a show that takes about six hours and goes on all through a Sunday night at the end of February. I can’t imagine why. They would if it was the final of the European Cup. Though they do grace us with the paler British imitation that is the Baftas.
Ritual Humiliation
Every year film stars get dressed up and walk a soaked red carpet in freezing rain with their coats off and smile for the cameras, all the time secretly believing they’re going to die of hypothermia at any moment. Still, you need to suffer for your art.
Last Sunday they all assembled at the Royal Opera House for a session of ritual humiliation from Stephen Fry, who was not only wonderfully rude to enormous numbers of American A–Listers, but he also threw in lots of references to strictly local concerns, such as horsemeat and swapping speeding points, which went straight over their heads.
Choosing to watch The Master instead of Argo
I wouldn’t miss it for anything. I try to see as many of the nominated films as I can. There’s always a moment when I curse my bad judgement – as in choosing to watch The Master instead of Argo this year.
I hated The Master and felt horribly let down by Paul Thomas Anderson, who has been unerring until this horrible mishit. And then Ben Affleck won Best Film and Best Director for Argo.
There’s always at least one nominated film I wish fervently I had managed to see but missed, for one reason or other. This year there were two – Argo and The Life of Pi. Hopefully I’ll manage to catch them both before they disappear into that strange hinterland between Cinema and DVD/Blu Ray release.
The other 364 nights
There’s always a particular film that I take to heart, and support from my sofa with passion. Last year it was The Artist, and this year it was Amour.
When Emmanuelle Riva won the Best Actress Bafta and Michael Haneke won Best Foreign Film for directing it I felt a warm glow of satisfaction. I’d have been heartbroken if the Bafta voters had been stupid enough to get those awards wrong.
So after the Baftas there’s a two-week break to gather my breath for the Oscar onslaught. For many years I wasn’t able to watch the Oscars, because no terrestrial channel shows them in this country. Then I put aside all my principles and subscribed to Sky simply because of that one night in the year, thinking that there would be at least some other programmes I would like to watch for the other 364 nights, but there weren’t, and last year I decided I couldn’t give Sky houseroom any more, so it went.
Satellite confusion
We now have a very nice Freesat box which records stuff for us, but I started getting twitchy a couple of months ago. What would I do on the night of 24th February? I started looking for a hotel room for the night that had Sky Movies. It would still be cheaper than paying for Sky.
But of course the problem with a hotel room is that they want you to leave in the morning, and I want to sleep afterwards, so the hotel stay became two nights, and then we decided to make a long weekend of it – as one does.
So that meant a couple of days off work. I started to google. I expect you have no idea how difficult it is to find a hotel room that has Sky Movies available. No. Nor did I. Firstly, most hotels don’t consider it important-enough information to put in their websites. Then some of them say they have Sky, but it turns out it’s only in the Bar, which would be closing just as the Oscar programme starts. I found a lot of hotels that advertised Sky in their rooms, but when I phoned they admitted that they only had Freeview. None of them seemed to understand that Freeview is not the same as Sky Movies. The hotels that do have Sky Movies in every room are hideously expensive.
Thatched roof with satellite dish
After several weeks I gave up on the hotel idea and started to look for holiday homes. The only ones that had Sky seemed to be those huge houses with seven bedrooms that cost several hundred pounds even for a long weekend in February.
But eventually my perseverance paid off, and we found a one-room thatched-barn annexe somewhere in England with everything we could wish for, so we can have our Oscars Heaven weekend. I can’t wait.
Of course they’ll get some decisions right and some horribly wrong. I’ll be able to shout and groan at off-sides, own-goals, bad decisions and remarkable celebrations of skill just like any football supporter at the Cup Final. All through the night.
If you have been, thank you for reading this.
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