Oscar wild

HOW appropriate that Meryl Streep, the queen of the Hollywood acting fraternity, should sing The Winner Takes It All in the film of the Abba musical, Mamma Mia!

She knows all about collecting awards, having won two Oscars and with another 67 wins and 80 nominations to her credit. Those figures might be wrong. She may well have acquired more since I started writing this. When the nominations for the 81st Academy Awards – as they’re more commonly known – are announced today, she’ll be on the list yet again for her turn as a stern nun in the drama Doubt.

“As you can imagine, all day this has come up,” says Streep one day last week as she passed through London on the Doubt promotional trail.

“This” refers to awards. “I have to say, it’s so much fun to publicise a film in July, because you talk about the film, you don’t talk about a horse race,” she says smiling.

“This is a different thing altogether that has to do with the market and judging people and studios. It’s a political thing,” she adds.

She says it jokingly but I wouldn’t mind betting that she’d really like everyone to shut up about awards and let her get on with her work. Some hope.

The awards season reaches a climax with the Oscars ceremony on February 22 when all of Hollywood put on their best designer frocks (and not just the women), adorn themselves with millions of dollars of jewels (borrowed) and smile, smile, smile (courtesy of their plastic surgeons) as they walk along the red carpet into the Kodak Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard.

There will be mishaps. The odd stumble, the inappropriate remark made to interviewers and perhaps even a wardrobe malfunction.

For most, it’s not the winning, but the playing the game that counts. The most-watched film awards ceremony in the world offers exposure above and beyond revealing cleavage.

Streep accepts the ritual as part of the system, although she doesn’t need to play. She’s Streeps ahead of everyone else, successful enough without all the palaver of getting dolled up and playing up to the cameras.

She has only a one in five chance of winning, unlike Kate Winslet who finds herself competing against herself at the Baftas, or The Orange British Film Academy Awards to give them their glitzy title. She has best actress nominations for both The Reader and Revolutionary Road, having already won Golden Globes for both performances.

The British version of the Academy Awards has come a long way in recent years under its chief executive, Darlingtonborn Amanda Berry, by repositioning itself as second only to the Oscars in glitz, glamour and importance.

This meant bringing the date of the ceremony forward – this year it is on February 8 – to before the Oscars, so the British awards don’t get lost in the aftermath of the American prizegiving.

The venue was changed to make the ceremony bigger and better, moving from the Odeon cinema and its leopard-print seats, in London’s Leicester Square, to the plusher Royal Opera House, in Covent Garden.

This year, there’s another North-East face alongside Berry as the new Bafta chairman is Sunderland-born David Parfitt.

The former child actor, who played Wendy Craig’s son in And Mother Makes Three, is now a film producer whose successes include the best picture Oscar-winner Shakespeare In Love.

Some complain that the so-called British Oscars should only reward homegrown films, but determining a film’s nationality in these days of international funding is as easy as finding an acting award for which Streep hasn’t been nominated.

What’s good about Bafta is the ability to surprise. Members who vote display a quirky Britishness that saw Billy Elliot star Jamie Bell named as best actor in a field that included Tom Hanks and Russell Crowe, while another Brit, director Sam Mendes, lost out unexpectedly to Spanish director Pedro Almodovar.

One of Parfitt’s duties this year has been to justify keeping Jonathan Ross as host of the ceremony so soon after his return to work following his suspension. We’re all wondering if he’ll behave himself when the Bafta awards are screened on the BBC or won’t be able to resist a dig at the employers who made him stand in the corner like a naughty boy.

Whatever happens, it wouldn’t be a proper prize-giving if something didn’t go amiss, whether it’s Rob Lowe serenading Snow White at the Oscars soon after his sex tapes scandal, or the soggy red carpet at the Baftas that got more coverage than nominees.

What a very long awards season it is, stretching from first vague guesses at potential award-winners in the autumn, right through to the big one, the Academy Awards.

On top of that, endless film festivals around the world feel it their duty to hand out prizes too, usually with fancy names like the Palme d’Or (Golden Palm) at Cannes and the Leone d’Oro (Golden Lion) at Venice.

These are straightforward competitions with juries, like Strictly Come Dancing without the voting paddles and sudden changes in the rules.

The Oscars and the Baftas are by secret ballot, with nominees voted for by colleagues within the industry. Membership runs into thousands whereas the influential Golden Globes in the US are decided by only a handful – just 50 or 60 – of LA-based journalists working for overseas publications.

No one can resist giving out awards. The list is as endless as a Kate Winslet acceptance speech.

They’re called Genies in Canada and Cesars in France. In the US, every branch of the industry from cinematographers to publicists has its own awards.

No one is immune from awards fever. The UK Regional Critics’ Film Awards became the Richard Attenborough Film Awards, or Dickies as we like to call them, last year. Previous winners have been Pan’s Labyrinth and Atonement, which took four of the six awards last time.

Those who don’t get much of a look in are cinemagoers. Most votes are done in-house. The exception at the Baftas is the Orange Rising Star Award for which the public decides the winner. This year’s nominees are Noel Clarke, Michael Fassbender, Rebecca Hall, Toby Kebbell and the lone American, Michael Cera.

The Academy Awards aren’t the oldest annual presentation, which is the US’s National Board of Review of Motion Pictures awards, which dates from 1917.

But the Oscars are the biggest and most influential, although today’s star-studded, glamorous night is a far cry from the first, held in a private hotel in 1929.

The aim was to dignify the efforts of film-makers and counter the somewhat tarnished reputation the film industry had earned during the roaring twenties. Considering some of today’s red carpet behaviour and voting practices, they haven’t entirely succeeded in achieving this.