Oscar hopefuls based on true stories
10 Oscar-nominated films which prove
the maxim that real life can sometimes be strangeR or at least more
entertaining than fiction
Advertisement By Frankie Taggart
From biopics and historical epics to
spy stories and harrowing tales of abduction and abuse, this year’s list of
Oscar nominees features a bevy of films based on true stories.
Some stick faithfully to history,
but many play fast and lose with the facts -- and others are almost entirely
fictionalized. Here are 10 Oscar-nominated films which prove the maxim
that real life can sometimes be stranger -- or at least more entertaining --
than fiction:
‘The Revenant’ -
Famous as much for the brutal
filming conditions and Leonardo DiCaprio’s liver-eating antics as its
glittering array of pre-Oscar honours, “The Revenant” tells the story of
real-life 19th century frontiersman Hugh Glass.
Left for dead after a bear attack
and grieving his murdered son, he embarks on an epic quest for survival,
fuelled by a blood-thirsty desire for revenge.
The film is up for 12 Oscars,
including best actor for DiCaprio, best picture and best director for Alejandro
Gonzalez Inarritu.
Glass was left to die by his
companions in real life, but there’s no record that he had a son, and he seems
to have been motivated by the desire to get his rifle back and demand an
apology, rather than revenge.
‘Bridge of Spies’
Steven Spielberg’s espionage
thriller is nominated for best picture and five other statuettes, including
best supporting actor for Mark Rylance.
Set in the Cold War, it tells the
story of the 1962 prisoner exchange of American spy plane pilot Francis Gary
Powers and graduate student Frederic Pryor for Soviet spy Rudolf Abel.
The Washington-based Smithsonian’s
National Air and Space Museum wrote a blog post listing five myths propagated
by the film, including that Powers was tortured.
“I didn’t expect a documentary, but
as someone who is a stickler for historical accuracy and someone especially
familiar with this story, the movie was a disappointment,” wrote Layne
Karafantis, a museum curator.
‘The Big Short’ - Adam McKay’s “The Big Short” is based on Michael Lewis’s
non-fiction 2010 book of the same name on the 2008 global financial meltdown.
Boasting an all-star cast including
Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt, it is nominated for
five Oscars, including best picture and best director.
Described by The New York Times as a
“true crime story and a madcap comedy, a heist movie and a scalding polemic,”
the film tells the story of Michael Burry, a hedge fund manager who bet against
the subprime mortgage market at the heart of the crisis.
‘Room’ - “Room,” up for four Oscars including the best actress prize
for Brie Larson and Jacob Tremblay, was adapted from Emma Donoghue’s novel of
the same name, shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
The film tells the story of Joy “Ma”
Newsome, a young woman and her escape after 10 years in captivity, as told
through the eyes of her five-year-old son Jack.
While entirely fictional, the story
was inspired by the case of Austria’s Josef Fritzl, who locked his daughter,
Elisabeth, in a basement for 24 years, raped her repeatedly and fathered her
seven children.
‘Spotlight’
“Spotlight” depicts the painstaking
investigation by The Boston Globe newspaper on how the Catholic Church hushed
up the activities of nearly 90 pedophile priests in the northeastern US city in
the early 2000s.
Nominated for six Oscars and a slew
of other prizes, the film is based on a series of stories by the real Spotlight
team, who earned the Globe the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.
Journalists Walter Robinson and Mike
Rezendes, part of the investigative team, told AFP last month the child abuse
scandals plaguing the Catholic Church are only the tip of the iceberg.
‘Trumbo’
“Trumbo” tells the story of
screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who in 1947 was blacklisted along with other
artists for refusing to testify before Congress about alleged Communist
propaganda in Hollywood films.
Bryan Cranston -- of “Breaking Bad”
fame -- is up for an Oscar for his portrayal of Trumbo, but some critics have
attacked the film for being historically misleading.
Godfrey Cheshire, of the “Roger
Ebert’s Journal” website, described the biopic as “another of those simplistic,
made-to-order films about the Hollywood blacklist in which the blacklisted
movie folks are all innocent, in every conceivable way.”
‘Steve Jobs’ - The biopic of
Apple’s visionary boss, for which Kate Winslet has a best supporting actress nomination,
has been hit by numerous claims of inaccuracy.
Pixar and Disney Animation Studios
president Edwin Catmull told the Hollywood Reporter that Jobs would “be
appalled” by the film, arguing that he was much kinder than the character
portrayed by nominee Michael Fassbender.
‘The Danish Girl’ - “The
Danish Girl” -- up for four Oscars including best actor for last year’s winner
Eddie Redmayne -- was loosely inspired by the lives of 1920s painters Lili
Elbe, one of the first known recipients of sex reassignment surgery, and her
wife Gerda Wegener.
The film has been marketed as a
“true story,” despite containing many of the deliberate historical inaccuracies
of the 2000 novel of the same name on which it is based.
Some characters and scenes are
entirely fictional, and the film distorts the timeline of many of the real-life
events in the main characters’ lives.
‘Joy’- Comedy drama “Joy” stars Oscar-nominated Jennifer Lawrence
as Joy Mangano, a real-life divorced mother-of-three who became a millionaire
after inventing the self-wringing Miracle Mop.
Mangano is reported to have given
director David O. Russell permission to take many liberties with the facts,
including giving her a fictional half-sister and two children, rather than
three, and making her ex-husband a Venezuelan singer.
‘Straight Outta Compton’ -
After the biographical drama about
Los Angeles-based gangsta rap pioneers NWA was released, MC Ren took to Twitter
to complain that his significance in the group had been greatly diminished. The
film has also been accused of omitting a number of women who played significant
parts in NWA’s success and criticized for whitewashing Dr Dre’s history of
physically abusing women. Dre issued a statement in response apologizing to
“the women I’ve hurt. I deeply regret what I did and know that it has forever
impacted all of our lives.” (AFP)
