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Britain's been here before, most famously in 1982, when Chariots of Fire picked up four Academy Awards including Best Picture, and screenwriter Colin Welland accepted his Oscar with the cry, "The British are coming!" Few British films have done that well since - but, then, it's getting harder to define a British film. According to the Treasury, Britain's Finance Ministry, a film is considered British if it fulfills a certain number of cultural points: one point if the director is a British citizen, two if over 50% is shot in Britain, and so on. What's a little...
bafta and Oscar best film nominee The Queen is a prime example of how to make an utterly British story resonate for filmgoers all over the world. But Paul Greengrass's best directing Oscar nomination for United 93 shows how a British perspective can also work for a very American event. Both films were made with a mix of British and U.S. funding, but both directors know how to get the best stories out of the smallest budgets. "In Britain, you don't necessarily have $50 million to throw at a movie, so you need to come up with something...
...Dayton and Faris didn't get nominated, and that's a bad sign for Sunshine's Best Picture chances. Oscar, you see, was an auteurist long before the French critics of Cahiers du Cinema proclaimed that the director was the author of his films. The winner of the Best Director statuette has made film named Best Picture 76% of the time - 53 of the 70 possible years - since 1937, when the Academy standardized the category with five nominations...
...only once did the Best Picture Oscar go to a film whose director didn't receive a nomination: in 1990 with Driving Miss Daisy and Bruce Beresford. So the odds against Little Miss Sunshine are 70 to 1. That a lot of Oscar history the indie movie has to buck...
...Maybe we can find, or invent, a more hopeful trend: the Crisis-Time Pick-Me-Up. In troubled times, Oscar sometimes looks for an antidote (or palliative), and chooses a happy-think movie for Best Picture. It happened during World War II, when the Catholic musical Going My Way won, and in the Vietnam War, with the Dickens musical Oliver, and at the apogee of the Watergate crisis, with The Sting, and just after the Clinton impeachment, when the modest comedy Shakespeare in Love snipered Steven Spielberg's bloody Saving Private Ryan...