The Abominable Showman, December 11, 2011

A big absentee from the MECCAs - Patsy Gallant in Lies My Father Told Me

(photo: Andrée Lanthier)

And the winner is…

The Abominable Showman assesses the upcoming Montreal English Critics Circle Awards: Will showbiz living legends Theodore Bikel and Ranee Lee win their best acting categories? Who was snubbed? Will this year’s edition finally earn the MECCAs the respect they deserve? And what do the MECCAs and the Oscars have in common? 

by Richard Burnett

On the eve of the Montreal English Critics Circle Awards for that city’s 2010-2011 English-language theatre season, I am reminded of the 2006 Oscar race for Best Picture, when I was surprised to see my national column  Three Dollar Bill blurbed in a film company ad campaign for Oscar-contender Brokeback Mountain. It was the first time I’d ever been blurbed for a Hollywood film. 

“Jack [played by Jake Gyllenhaal], who strikes me as a sexual predator, tracks Ennis [Heath Ledger] down and coaxes him into sporadic trysts,” Shalit said on-air. 

“One of the most beautiful and most haunting love stories I’ve ever seen,” I wrote. “Heath Ledger’s monumental performance should win him an Oscar.”

Brokeback should also have won the Oscar for Best Film that year. 

Instead Crash won, just as LA Weekly’s Hollywood business columnist Nikki Finke predicted that film would since “[that] year’s dirty little secret [was] the anecdotal evidence pouring in to me about hetero [Academy Awards] members being unwilling to screen Brokeback Mountain. For a community that takes pride in progressive values, it’s shameful that Hollywood’s homophobia may be on a par with Pat Robertson’s.”

I too should have seen it coming when the sniping in reviews of Brokeback began to tell the real tale, like this doozy by Gene Shalit of NBC’s Today Show: “Jack [played by Jake Gyllenhaal], who strikes me as a sexual predator, tracks Ennis [Heath Ledger] down and coaxes him into sporadic trysts,” Shalit said on-air. 

Yes, you read right: sexual predator. 

Or how about Christy Lemire of the Associated Press, who noted, “The truly tragic element in all this, though, is not that these men cannot be who they want to be, it’s that they’re not sure who they are.” 

Uh, hold on a second there, Christy, while I take that cock out of my mouth. But Hollywood has always been a four-letter town. 

Not only did his publisher edit most of the homosexual scenes and F-words from his book, but Hollywood erased them completely...

The same shit happened to the 1953 big-screen adaptation of James Jones’ 1951 classic novel From Here to Eternity, which was based on Jones’s own army experiences in Hawaii on the eve of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Not only did his publisher edit most of the homosexual scenes and F-words from his book, but Hollywood erased them completely, Jones’s daughter, novelist Kaylie Jones, revealed in an essay for the U.S. news website the Daily Beast. 

Kaylie Jones cites one section cut from the novel: “I don’t like to be blowed [by a man],” the novel’s hero Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt (portrayed by, ironically, real-life homo Montgomery Clift in the movie) tells Angelo Maggio (played by Frank Sinatra). 

“Oh, all right. I admit it’s nothing like a woman,” Maggio replies. “But it’s something. Besides, old Hal treats me swell. He’s always good for a touch when I’m broke. Five bucks. Ten bucks. Comes in handy the middle of the month… Only reason I let Hal blow me is because I got a good thing there. If I turned him down I’d blow it sky high. And I want to hang on to that income, buddy.”

Producer Fred Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity was nominated for 13 Oscars and took home eight, including Best Picture. Over half a century later, director Ang Lee thought American society had evolved enough so that Hollywood – built and run by closeted Jews and homos for decades – would not only nominate a gay-themed picture, but reward it. 

No film that won the producers’, directors’ and writers’ guild awards ever lost the Best Picture Oscar, until Brokeback Mountain. 

What no one realized except for LA Weekly’s Nikki Finke was that Brokeback Mountain – despite my fabulous blurb – was down for the count. 

No film in Hollywood history that won the Best Picture award from both the Los Angeles and New York Film Critics Association had ever lost the Best Picture Oscar, until Brokeback Mountain. 

No film that won the producers’, directors’ and writers’ guild awards ever lost the Best Picture Oscar, until Brokeback Mountain. 

No film that won the Golden Globe, the Directors’ Guild award and led in Oscar nominations had ever lost the Best Picture Oscar, until Brokeback Mountain. 

But what does all of this have to do with the 2011 Montreal English Critics Circle Awards that will be held at Montreal’s Theatre Ste-Catherine on December 19?

Well, to reference LA Weekly’s Nikki Finke, sometimes those who deserve to win don’t always get to take home the trophy. 

Ranee Lee

There are a couple of big-name nominees who are not only deserving of a win in their respective best actor categories, but would big-time raise the public and media profile of the 14th edition of the MECCAs, one of the oldest Critics’ prizes in Canada.

As Finke wrote about Brokeback Mountain versus Crash, “The issue is more like which movie was seen by the Academy. Frankly, I find horrifying each whispered admission to me from Academy members who usually pose as social liberals that they’re disgusted by even the possibility of glimpsing simulated gay sex. Earth to the easily offended: This movie has been criticized for being too sexually tame. Hey, Academy, what are you worried about: that you’ll turn gay or, worse, get a stiffie by just the hint of hunk-on-hunk action?”

So this year’s MECCAs (click here for the full list of categories and nominees) should prove especially interesting for two reasons: There are a couple of big-name nominees who are not only deserving of a win in their respective best actor categories, but would big-time raise the public and media profile of the 14th edition of the MECCAs, one of the oldest Critics’ prizes in Canada. 

Bikel in Lies (photo: Lanthier)

Of this year’s bumper crop (75 productions nominated by 12 Montreal theatre critics, not including myself), two nominations really stand out: Hollywood and Broadway living legend Theodore Bikel, nominated for Best Actor for his role in the crowd-pleasing Lies My Father Told Me, which played at the Segal Theatre; and Montreal jazz legend Ranee Lee, nominated for Best Actress for her role in Black Theatre Workshop’s excellent production of A Raisin in the Sun. 

I saw both plays and neither production would have been nearly as good without them. More importantly, Bikel and Lee both brought much-needed gravitas to their plays. And wins by both actors would do the same for the MECCAs – give the awards the much-needed gravitas to take them to the next level next year.

Other nominees truly deserving of a win include John C. Dinning for Best Set Design, for the incredible set he constructed for Schwartz’s: The Musical that played at the Centaur. (Dinning, incidentally, also designed the amazing set for the memorable 2008 remount of Tennessee Williams’ Pulitzer-prize winning Cat On a Hot Tin Roof at the Segal Theatre).

Like the Oscar race of 2006, it’ll be interesting to see who the MECCA voters reward. 

On the flip side, many performers who should have been nominated were not, like Montreal’s famed 1970s disco siren Patsy Gallant for Best Actress, for raising the roof and bringing down the house night after night in Lies My Father Told Me with her ballsy musical number to kick off the second act (Gallant played Edna, the local prostitute who evades the police while charming the men of Montreal’s Jewish district in the 1920s). And the famed late Montreal playwright Ted Allen – who earned the Academy Award for Best Writing (Original Screenplay) for Lies My Father Told Me in 1976 – was not even nominated for a MECCA Best Text award.

Then there is The Lion King which – say what you will about it – made its long-awaited and much-anticipated Montreal debut in August: It was not nominated for Best Visiting Production even though it pretty much sold out the 2,990-seat Salle Wilfred-Pelletier for four straight weeks (read my CharPo rave review here). In fact, when it comes to Best Visiting Production, the MECCAs stated in their list of nominees, “No award to be given as there were no clear nominees or winners.” 

Uh, hello?

J. Anthony Crane as “Scar” and Dionne Randolph as “Mufasa” face off in 

THE LION KING National Tour.  ©Disney.  Photo Credit:  Joan Marcus.

Despite a few misfires, The MECCAs – founded in 1998 by Charlebois Post publisher  Gaëtan Charlebois and the late renowned Montreal theatre critic Myron Galloway – did much right this year, especially nominating Theodore Bikel and Ranee Lee. 

Now let’s see if they take home the prize.

The MECCAs will be held December 19 at Theatre Ste-Catherine beginning at 7 pm. Click here for more details.