Dench and McKellen lead Britain's Oscar charge
February 13, 2002

From Nicholas Wapshott in New York

BRITISH stars are likely to dominate the Oscars next month after receiving a host of nominations for the Academy Awards announced in Hollywood yesterday.

The Lord of the Rings leads the field with 13 nominations, including in Best Supporting Actor category for Sir Ian McKellen, while Gosford Park, which also features a largely British cast, has seven.

Eight British actors in total were nominated for principal Oscars, including the distinguished stage and television actor Tom Wilkinson. He is up for Best Actor for his powerful performance as the vengeful father of a murdered son in In the Bedroom. “It’s a very nice little interlude in an actor’s life to be involved in a successful film that is recognised as such,” he said yesterday.

Wilkinson, 53, will be competing against Russell Crowe, who plays the Nobel Prize- winning mathematician John Nash in A Beautiful Mind, Sean Penn, who plays a man with a mental age of seven in I Am Sam, Will Smith as the former world heavyweight boxer Muhammad Ali in Ali, and Denzel Washington who plays a narcotics detective in Training Day. Crowe, who won the title last year for Gladiator, will become only the third actor to win the award in two consecutive years, after Spencer Tracy and Tom Hanks, if he triumphs next month.

Dame Judi Dench, 67, received her fourth Oscar nomination in five years for her portrayal of the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch in Iris. She faces stiff competition for the Best Actress award from Nicole Kidman for her performance in the musical Moulin Rouge, Halle Berry as the wife of a convict on death row in Monster’s Ball, Sissy Spacek as a vigilante mother in In the Bedroom and Renée Zellweger for her performance in Bridget Jones’s Diary.

British actors take three of the five nominations for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar: Sir Ian McKellen, 62, for his role as the wizard Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings; Jim Broadbent, 52, for his role in Iris; and Ben Kingsley, 58, who won an Oscar in 1982 for Gandhi and who hopes to receive another for the British crime caper Sexy Beast.

Sir Ian denied that the three British actors competing for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar considered themselves rivals. “We don’t feel we’re in competition with each other,” he said. “There’s great pressure on us from our studios to feel that we have to win but I think we all take it with a pinch of salt. You can’t compare your performance with another. But attention is drawn to our work, which is personally satisfying.”

The two American actors nominated for supporting roles are Jon Voight for his part in Ali and Ethan Hawke for Training Day.

Three British actresses are nominated for the Best Supporting Actress award: Helen Mirren, 56, as the housekeeper and Dame Maggie Smith, 67, as a fallen aristocrat in Gosford Park and Kate Winslet, 26, as the young Iris Murdoch in Iris. The British nominees face two American rivals, Jennifer Connelly for A Beautiful Mind and Marisa Tomei for In the Bedroom.

The British director Ridley Scott is nominated for Best Director for Black Hawk Down, which attracted three other nominations. He missed out last year to Steven Soderbergh, although his film Gladiator was one of the big winners of 2001. Scott’s rivals for the Best Director Oscar are Ron Howard for A Beautiful Mind, Peter Jackson for The Lord of the Rings, David Lynch for Mulholland Drive and Robert Altman for Gosford Park.

“I am honoured to receive these nominations,” Altman said yesterday. “Working on Gosford Park was a joy and a delight thanks to the glorious cast. To be recognized by the Academy makes it all the sweeter.”

The film relies heavily upon its all-star British cast which, apart from Helen Mirren and Dame Maggie Smith, includes Alan Bates, Derek Jacobi, Stephen Fry, Michael Gambon, Emily Watson, Kristin Scott Thomas, Kelly Macdonald and Clive Owen. It also boasts two other British nominations, for Jenny Beavan’s lavish period costumes and for Julian Fellowes’s screenplay.

Gosford Park, part financed by the British company Capitol Films and the Film Council, has not only proved a hit with the academy and the critics but has also scored highly with the British public. Since its opening on February 1 it has taken more than £2.5 million at the British box office.

Another nominee for best film, The Lord of the Rings, also has a largely British cast, with McKellen, Alan Howard, Sean Bean, Ian Holm and Christopher Lee in prominent roles. The other challengers are Moulin Rouge, which features the British actors Jim Broadbent, Ewan MacGregor and Ozzy Osbourne, A Beautiful Mind and In the Bedroom.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone proved to be a flop with members of the academy who shortlisted it for just three behind-the-scenes titles but none for its stunning effects.

Two British pop musicians are nominated for Oscars for their musical compositions, Sting for the song Until from Kate & Leopold and Sir Paul McCartney for the Vanilla Sky theme. Two Britons vie for the screenwriting Oscar, with Fellowes up against Christopher Nolan, director of Memento, nominated for writing the film’s screenplay from his brother Jonathan’s story.

BBC2 is showing the Oscars live on March 24 with highlights on BBC1 the following day.

Source: The Times