Three Reasons Why The AACTA Awards Were More Un-Australian Than The ABC Could Ever Hope To Be

There's been a lot made of Tony Abbott's comments this week about the alleged anti-Australian sentiment and general sense of contrarianism that permeates our national broadcaster. In case you hate the news, politics, or events that directly affect you as a media consumer, and you missed it, he suggests that in order to more effectively fulfil its role as a neutral, journalistically integral institution, it would be better served by joining a pro-government circle jerk and just telling everyone how great everything is all the time forever.

Ignoring the very obvious problem in ol' T-Spoon's logic – namely, overt, unquestioning pro-Australianism isn't really any better than being “un-Australian” as far as biases go – it also would seem to the casual observer that if Abbott's problem is with supposedly Australian things feeling like they distinctly lack that whole “Australian” part, then he needn't really look any further than Thursday night's deservedly maligned AACTA Awards, or the “Ozcars”, to people who like being added to my list of people I am determined to punch in the face at least once, maybe twice, before I die.

But first things first.

Anyway, if you hate yourself enough to have tuned in for a few hours of the most misguided self-congratulatory balls-licking ever staged, then you already know where this is going. And it all centres on Baz. Fucking. Luhrmann.

3.  BEST FILM: THE GREAT GATSBY

It might seem strange to start at the end of the night, but roll with me here – this is actually probably the most defensible of the majorly un-Australian moments at the AACTAs, and even then it's only because Australians historically love an underdog and Gatsby was received with such mixed, polar feelings that I don't think anyone really considered it had a real chance of winning.

Do you see what I'm saying, old sport?

But if they did genuinely think of Gatsby as an Australian film that deserved to be in that line-up of nominees, then that in itself is problematic. OK, a good portion of the production and staffing on Gatsby was Australian in origin – that doesn't, unfortunately, make it an Australian film, especially considering the source of most of its funding. And even if it did, I mean, do these sound like the opinions of people who thought this was “best film” material upon its release?

"...what brings this Gatsby crashing down to Earth isn't its blatant disregard for the nuances so prevalent in Fitzgerald's book ... (but) the nagging feeling that after 142 minutes, this Gatsby feels as disposable as the socialite parasites who inhabit the great man's world." - Ed Gibbs, The Sydney Morning Herald

"As an allegory of its own failure, the film ends by feeling faintly poignant..." - Jake Wilson, The Sydney Morning Herald

For brevity's sake, that's a necessarily and admittedly small sample of two whole journalists, but it's well-documented that, upon its entry into cinemas around the world, people weren't exactly unanimous in heaping praise upon the - shall we say - "bold" stylistic choices Luhrmann made in realising his gaudy vision.

Sure, most critics don't exactly shoot it and leave it for dead facedown in a pool, but they're not wildly enthusiastic about it, either. There were just inarguably better, vastly more Australian options that wouldn't have had such far-reaching consequences across the ceremony, because…

2. BEST ACTOR: LEONARDO DICAPRIO

…Once you deem a film like Gatsby “Australian” and hand it the best film honours, you'd be remiss not to acknowledge that Leonardo DiCaprio is a better actor than everyone in the country. That's the message the AACTA Awards sent when they chose to honour “the best actor to have never (yet) won an Oscar” with the top award for display of talent in an Australian production, thereby really kind of cheating genuine local talent of a moment of recognition – and for what? I'm not entirely sure the esteemed AACTA, that no doubt proudly dominates a central position in his attic, is exactly going to quell his Academy Award desires.

"Well... at least I'll always have my AACTA." (via 9gag.com)

Don't get me wrong, I greatly enjoy DiCaprio's work, especially that Inception meme where he squints at Cillian Murphy, but it was a bit rich to give him that award when so much fine talent could have done with the push – especially considering his (expected) absence from the ceremony relegated the presentation of the award to a few-second-long text message on the screen as Ten returned from ads that parade the morbidly obese around like zoo animals for our entertainment.

"Tell me more about the sorts of cruel nicknames people have for you,
maybe bust out some tears if you can, while I push you up this hill."

It really gave the whole thing an incredibly prestigious air, you know? It genuinely made me feel like I should care about the AACTAs. And if you believe that, fantastic; I should be in the running for one next year, given their obvious integrity. Maybe I'll even get an ostentatious tribute, since…

1. BEST EVERYTHING: BAZ LUHRMANN

Hate me all you want, but I'm saying it – Baz Luhrmann is easily one of the most overrated film directors of our time. “But Mitch, Baz Luhrmann made Strictly Ballroom and Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge and Australia and The Great Gatsby, which is an AACTA Award-winning best film, thank you very much! He is as Australian as it gets, and he deserves more than just a showy song-and-dance routine in his honour – he should live in perpetual ecstasy while beautiful women lick honey off his nipples around the clock and genetically engineered meerkats with human hands fan him with palm fronds and sing him old Slim Dusty songs,” you… probably… say. Maybe not that second part – I don't know where that came from – but definitely the “look at all these great films” argument. You were thinking that for sure.

"Everyone smile about how much money we'll make on this!"

Granted, Baz Luhrmann made all those films. And… that's it. He has literally directed five films in his decades-spanning career, and not all of them were even that great. Australia was successful, but that's not the same as being good, and we've already established that The Great Gatsby was kind of a polarising, confused mess. Yet the public would happily condemn, for example, a director like Steven Spielberg as having lost his touch over one shitty film, but we'll throw a mini-parade for Baz Luhrmann because he threw some rap into the Jazz Age and conceived a creative parallel that spawned fanfic about how Jay Gatsby is really Jack from Titanic.

This is why we can't have nice things

And that's the irony at the centre of staging a ceremony that, in essence, amounted to one big Luhrmann love-in with a few other acknowledgements thrown in for a semblance of "diversity" – that it ignores the fact that one of Gatsby's central themes is an abhorrence for the exact kind of excess that swirled around the director and his elegant, indulgent creation at the event, but it speaks to a deeper, uglier “un-Australianness” within the AACTAs, and that is that it was a very white celebration, which, much as it might pain some of you to admit, is not really a reflection of modern Australia.

Yes, Redfern Now (deservedly) nabbed one of the statues, but that achievement will inevitably be overshadowed when people look back upon the third AACTA Awards as BazFest 2014, the year in Australian TV and film (especially film) that celebrated the idea that near enough really can be good enough and that the devils we know are always better than the devils we don't.

Wait - maybe I was wrong, after all.

Want to relive those mixed reviews of The Great Gatsby? Our own Film Carew reviewer called it "modern-day cinematic gimmickry with century-old wardrobe in a filmic flim-flam that's undoubtedly inauthentic."