Tom Hooper's drama The King's Speech received 12 Academy Award nominations. On Tuesday, the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced the nominees for the world's leading film award. The winners of this "royal" race will be revealed at the February 27 awards ceremony. Meanwhile, the drama about the British King is up against a film about the "new Bill Gates" Mark Zuckerberg, one about an Irish-American boxer and another about a ballerina - respectively David Fincher's The Social Network, David O. Russell's The Fighter, and Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan.
All these films are about heroic figures - a King who overcomes his natural shyness and stuttering, a brilliant programmer and Facebook creator, a boxing champion and a gifted ballet dancer. The most important task confronting each of these characters is to overcome their complexes, manias and phobias.
And there are quite a few of the latter - geniuses often "drift" between reason and madness. The main character of The Social Network, student Mark Zuckerberg (played by Jesse Eisenberg), is obsessed with all kinds of communication by everyone and anyone on Facebook, and his mental state at times seems reminiscent of autism. New York prima ballerina Nina (Natalie Portman) is suffering from delusions of persecution. The boxer and the king are, perhaps, the most mentally sound film characters in this entire gallery. Both are desperately "boxing" their own uncertainty and struggling with physiology.
King George VI did not initially see himself ever ascending to the throne. His brother Edward VIII was to become king, but he abdicated and was never crowned. His sickly brother Prince Albert, who suffered from a stutter, was next in line to the throne. He was crowned King George VI in December 1936. The new king did not believe that he was capable of running the country. In the film The King's Speech, an almost fanciful "miraculous assistant" - speech therapist Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush) - helps him to find his feet in his new role, and the monarch begins to cope with his most august responsibilities.
A lead character of that order simply cannot help but elicit sympathy, but when the King is played by an actor as talented as Colin Firth, who has played British aristocrats of all stripes - from the noble Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice based on the Jane Austen novel to the vicious Lord Henry in the Oscar Wilde adaptation The Picture of Dorian Gray - the film's success is assured.
Britain, in principle, likes its monarchs, and British cinema in 2006 "feted" Elizabeth II in Stephen Frears's film The Queen (Helen Mirren won an Oscar for this royal role, and the film won two Golden Globes). And in 2005, Mirren played Elizabeth I in the legendary eponymous TV drama (nine Emmy Awards). All these films, including The King's Speech, are odes to monarchs in a restrained English style.
And now a word about another kind of ruler - social networking sites. Billionaire and Time Magazine's Person of the Year in 2010 Mark Zuckerberg saw Fincher's film The Social Network and criticized it, labeling it pure "fiction." He claimed the filmmakers had not understood his story. But generally speaking, what is there to "understand"? Except for maybe hackers' computer technology.
The Social Network was nominated for eight Oscars. On January 17, the film triumphed at the Golden Globes, taking four awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. Fincher's film is psychologically multifaceted and dynamic. Each of the young actors (most notably, Jesse Eisenberg as the charmless genius) did an excellent job and the film contains barely any lackluster performances.
It is reminiscent of other equally successful films about geniuses - Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind, and Gus Van Sant's Good Will Hunting. In terms of money and fame, Zuckerberg was more fortunate than all these film characters simply because he mastered computer technology, broke onto the World Wide Web with an idea that had long been gestating in the IT world. He put this idea into action, in so doing catching the whole world in his "web."
Christopher Nolan's film Inception, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, was among the contenders for Best Picture. This is another film about a genius, who invented a new form of theft by infiltrating people's dreams. DiCaprio's character is also a genius of the virtual world, if by "virtual" we understand the conscious space that lies "through the looking glass." And his ability to ensnare the world in his "network" is also limitless.
In a nutshell, we can say that cinema has grown tired of gray, ordinary-joe protagonists, instead focusing on vivid personalities, including those with intriguing reputations, if not all-out adventurers.
The views expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.
