Academy Awards 2022: Why The Power of the Dog could be bigger than Ben-Hur
If Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog wins its 12 Oscar nominations, it will become the most successful film in the history of the awards. Can she do it?
When Peter Finch was named best actor for Network at the 1977 Academy Awards, he could not repeat his famed line from that Sidney Lumet movie about mania in the media: “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this any more.”
Finch died, aged 60, of a heart attack two months before the Oscars. The night before his death he had been on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.
Whether his irascible TV anchorman character, Howard Beale, would have linked the two events is something only the kid from The Sixth Sense can tell us.
Even so, let’s extrapolate, for journalistic purposes, that “mad as hell” line to the Australian film business.
In 1977, Finch became the first posthumous Academy Award winner and the first Australian to win best actor (he would be followed by Geoffrey Rush for Shine in 1997 and Kiwi-Aussie Russell Crowe for Gladiator in 2001). He became the 11th Australian to receive an Oscar and in doing so made it a Down Under double, as earlier that evening Suzanne Baker, who is still with us, became the 10th, and the first Australian woman to win an Oscar, for her animated short film, Leisure.
The Oscars were first awarded in 1929, so until Baker and Finch, there were nine Australian wins in 48 years, three of which went to the remarkable Kiama, NSW-born, costume designer Orry-Kelly. (For a fascinating take on his life and times, see Gillian Armstrong’s 2015 documentary The Women He Undressed).
That scorecard might have made some people a little mad.
In the 44 Oscar years post-1977, Australians have collected 49 golden statuettes.
Our friends across the Tasman have picked up 26 since 1929, most of them courtesy of Peter “Lord of the Rings” Jackson, though the multi-talented Taika Waititi (six nominations and one win for Jojo Rabbit in 2020) is also doing his bit.
If we choose to adopt the Anzac spirit, as we should do in everything bar rugby union and cricket, the 2022 Oscars, to be announced on March 28 at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, are shaping as a historic year for antipodean film.
Even before an envelope is opened, Sydney-based Kiwi filmmaker Jane Campion has set one Oscar record – as the first female director to be twice nominated: first in 1994 for her NZ-set colonial drama The Piano and, now, for The Power of the Dog.
Only two female directors have won Oscars in the 93-year history of the Academy Awards: Kathryn Bigelow in 2009 for the war drama The Hurt Locker and Chloe Zhao in 2021 for Nomadland.
If that suggests gender discrimination, consider this: no black person has been named best director. Six men have been nominated: Spike Lee, John Singleton, Barry Jenkins, Lee Daniels, Steve McQueen and Jordan Peele. Two of them did a Bruce Beresford/Driving Miss Daisy: directed the best picture – Jenkins/Moonlighting and McQueen/12 Years a Slave – but were not considered best director.
To return Down Under, there’s a chance Campion will set a few more records come Oscars night.
One is certain regardless of how much she wins or loses: her Montana-set (but Otago-filmed) 1920s western has 12 nominations, more than any previous antipodean film (Mel Gibson’s Braveheart from 1995 and George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road from 2015 each had 10).
It’s a longshot, but if it wins all of them, it will become the most successful film in Oscar history, surpassing the 11 wins of William Wyler’s Ben-Hur (1959), James Cameron’s Titanic (1977) and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003).
The last was directed by Campion’s aforementioned compatriot Jackson and holds a unique record she has a chance of bettering: it converted 11 nominations into 11 Oscars.
Importantly, The Power of the Dog is chasing the headline-grabbing and box office-boosting awards: best picture, best director, best actor (Benedict Cumberbatch) and best screenplay (Campion’s adaptation of Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel).
Unfortunately, Campion cannot pull off the celebrated “big five” – picture, director, actor, actress, script – because Kirsten Dunst is nominated not in the lead
but in the supporting role (as are Jesse Plemons and the Australian Kodi Smit-McPhee).
Only three films have taken home the big five: Frank Capra’s 1934 screwball comedy It Happened One Night, Milos Forman’s 1975 insane asylum drama One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Jonathan Demme’s 1991 serial killer thriller The Silence of the Lambs.
Personally I think it should be a “big six”, with cinematography added. The Australian cinematographer Ari Wegner is in the running for The Power of the Dog.
Cinematography is an area where Australians have excelled, winning six Oscars: Robert Krasker (The Third Man in 1950), Dean Semler (Dances With Wolves in 1990), John Seale (The English Patient in 1996), Andrew Lesnie (the first Lord of the Rings in 2001), Russell Boyd (Master and Commander in 2003) and Dione Beebe (Memoirs of a Geisha in 2005).
Perhaps no surprise then that Wegner’s main obstacle is Melbourne-born Greig Fraser, short-priced favourite for filming Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi epic Dune (he also filmed The Batman, which is in cinemas now).
The big five bonanza eluded Mad Max: Fury Road. While scoring 10 nominations its six wins were in categories that while important do not sell tickets. Miller’s Mad Max films have made millions, but his only Oscar as a director is for Happy Feet, the 2006 animated feature about a dancing emperor penguin.
Braveheart, directed by and starring Gibson, an adopted Australian and the original Mad Max, shot closer to the bullseye with its 10 nominations, winning best picture and best director.
These are the two films from this part of the world, Braveheart and Mad Max: Fury Road, that stand in comparison with The Power of the Dog when it comes to Oscar nominations.
Before them, it is Campion’s The Piano, which received eight nominations and won two of the big five: best actress for Holly Hunter and best script (this time original) for the director.
The Canadian-Kiwi actor Anna Paquin, then aged 11, was named best supporting actress, making her the second youngest winner after Tatum O’Neal for Paper Moon in 1973. However, the top chocolates in the 1994 Oscars box went to Forrest Gump and its director Robert Zemeckis.
All up, Australians and New Zealanders are in contention for 11 Oscars in 2022, nine of which lie in The Power of the Dog. The superhero movie Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is a live chance for visual effects artists Joe Farrell, Dan Oliver (Australia) and Sean Walker (NZ).
However the other contender that will make the front page if she wins is Nicole Kidman, nominated as best actress for her remarkable inhabitation of Lucille Ball in Aaron Sorkin’s Being the Ricardos. It would be Kidman’s second Oscar, following The Hours in 2003, putting her level with Cate Blanchett (The Aviator in 2005 and Blue Jasmine in 2014).
Since 1929 Australia has received 184 Oscar nominations, covering all categories. The most successful to date is costume design, with seven wins thanks mainly to Orry-Kelly (three) and Catherine Martin (two), who also has two for production design, making her the most Oscar-ed Australian.
Her director husband, Baz Luhrmann, is Oscar-less, but will be hoping that changes in 2023 with Elvis, his film about the king of rock’n’roll, due out in June.
Australia’s first Oscar came in 1942, for Ken G. Hall’s documentary feature Kokoda Frontline! The only categories where we are without a win are foreign language film (Tanna, in Vanuatu dialect, made the shortlist in 2016), documentary short and, a little surprisingly, original score.
The Power of the Dog is nominated for the latter, but the composer is one of the non-antipodean cast members: English musician Jonny Greenwood, of Radiohead fame.
If Power of the Dog is named best picture, it will be another feather in the cap of Australian film producer Emile Sherman. It’s his third Oscar nomination. He won with The King’s Speech (2010), starring Colin Firth and Rush, and was in the running with Lion (2016), starring Dev Patel and Kidman, and filmed by Greig Fraser.
Indeed, 2017, when Lion was in contention, remains Australia’s strongest year, with 14 nominations: six for Lion, six for Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge, centred on a pacifist soldier in World War II, one for Tanna and one (special effects) for the disaster film Deepwater Horizon. The only win, however, was for sound mixing in Hacksaw Ridge.
As we started with Finch, let’s allow him the final word. Asked about being a star, he said, “Success is not two cars or a swimming pool. It’s the approval of your peers.”
He was dead before he won Oscar-plated approval.
On March 28, Campion might win it in person.
In a recent interview with the ABC, she said something with which Finch’s Howard Beale might agree. Backstory – which we see so often in movies – was not a satisfactory explanation for “the whole mystery of a human”.
“You can say,” she continued, “‘Oh, this happened to them’, [but] does that really mean, therefore, they’re like this? I don’t think so. It’s too mysterious to say there’s any simple way of explaining anybody.”
The 94th Academy Awards will be broadcast on Channel 7 on March 28.
