LONDON – It’s said that what swayed so many of the Academy’s 6,000 members in the direction of The King’s Speech came down to the question of heart. It was billed as the battle between The Social Network and The King’s Speech. In the end, the night of the 83rd Academy Awards belonged not to the ultra-modern story of a nerdy billionaire with 500 million friends but to a period piece about a British monarch struggling to overcome his stammer.
The ‘Social Network’ picked up three Oscars (from eight nominations); ‘The King’s Speech’ picked up only one more (from 12 nominations). But the latter included three of the Big Four, with Best Picture, Director (Tom Hooper) and Actor (Colin Firth), plus Original Screenplay, which went to David Seidler, whose gracious acceptance speech alluded to his relatively advanced age of 73, “My father always said I’d be a late bloomer.”
The ‘Social Network,’ directed by David Fincher, won Best Original Score (written by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross) and Film Editing, plus one of this year’s supposed shoo-ins – Best Adapted Screenplay, which went to Aaron Sorkin, previously best-known as creator of the monumental American TV series ‘The West Wing.’ And, though the pundits were right with their predictions for that category, the Academy voters wrong-footed them elsewhere, particularly in the case of ‘The King’s Speech.’
At the beginning of the year, about halfway through the awards season, everything seemed so clear-cut. No one seriously doubted that Firth would be crowned Best Actor, but the consensus was that ‘The Social Network’ would be Best Picture (thanks as much to Sorkin’s screenplay as anything else) and that Fincher would be Best Director.
This thinking was confirmed last month by the Golden Globes, awarded by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) and regarded as a strong indicator of likely Oscar success. Firth won (with seeming inevitability), and ‘The Social Network’ was chosen as Best Motion Picture (Drama), while Fincher was deemed Best Director. But then the mood changed, and Hooper’s film gradually started to gather what industry commentators like to call “momentum”. Why was this?
For one thing, a number of awards chosen by industry insiders – rather than, say, the journalists of the HFPA – began to favour ‘The King’s Speech.’ It won the Screen Actors Guild award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture, which is pretty much SAG’s way of saying Best Picture. And Firth won Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role.
The Producers Guild of America, meanwhile, also named ‘The King’s Speech’ best of the year. While these awards don’t have the profile or prestige of the Globes, they are chosen by voters with a much better idea of how the Academy is thinking. And, in the end, the key to what swayed so many of its 6,000 members in the direction of ‘The King’s Speech’ came down, it’s said, to the question of “heart”.
‘The King’s Speech’ is such an emotional ride, heart-breaking and heart-warming in equal measure, that it simply became irresistible to the Academy voters, suckers always for the triumph of the human spirit in trying circumstances. In The Social Network, a socially inept computer geek becomes an accidental billionaire making many enemies along the way. It was a brilliantly scripted story, but we don’t really care much about the fate of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (played by Jesse Eisenberg); indeed, we probably feel that all those billions in the bank have provided an enviably comfortable cushion against the vicissitudes he’s faced.
‘The King’s Speech,’ on the other hand, grips from the painfully moving opening scene, in which the future George VI ascends from the bowels of Wembley Stadium to address a crowd of many thousands as if he were climbing up the scaffold to his own execution.
And when finally, thanks to the help administered by eccentric speech therapist Lionel Logue, he addresses the nation on the radio with barely a slip in his delivery, it’s impossible to stifle a tear of sympathy. ‘The King’s Speech’ is the story of a challenge heroically overcome. That’s why the Academy lavished so much love on it.
