The Oscars are hung-up on race and, it seems, on kids

11 February 2016 - 02:57 By Robbie Collin, ©The Daily Telegraph

Child actors are getting better and better. So why are they consistently forgotten in awards season?Awards-season buzz is a valuable thing and Room has been blessed with a beehiveful.Lenny Abrahamson's film, about a young mother and her five-year-old son being held prisoner in a shed is often hard to watch but if its four Oscar nominations are anything to go by it's proving easy to vote for.The film's 26-year-old lead actress, Brie Larson, already has Golden Globe and Screen Actors' Guild awards in the bag.Abrahamson, meanwhile, beat legendary talents like Steven Spielberg and Ridley Scott to a best director nomination - while the film itself, with a budget of $6-million, is by some distance the cheapest best-picture nominee.There's almost no imaginable way in which it could have been better received. Almost.One name has been largely absent from Room's avalanche of awards - and if you've seen the film you're probably wondering if there's a conspiracy afoot. Jacob Tremblay is the nine-year-old who plays Jack, the Larson character's son, and he's been singled out for special praise in every review of the film that I've read.Yet the Oscars, Baftas and Golden Globes have ignored him completely. He'll be appearing at the Academy Awards later this month, but as a presenter. He won the Critics' Choice award for best young actor or actress, and was nominated for an SAG award, but in the supporting actor category, which makes no sense.Jack is unquestionably Room's lead character: even Larson's character disappears for two stretches of screen time, but Tremblay's searching eyes and painfully vulnerable frame appear in almost every shot. If the film works - and despite some reservations, I think it does - it's because of him.So what's going on? We're all aware of the Oscars' entrenched hang-ups when it comes to race and gender, but does the academy have it in for children, too?Tremblay wasn't just unlucky: only a handful of the great child performances of the last few decades have been so much as nominated for an Oscar and, even then, almost exclusively in the supporting category.Tatum O'Neal, was the youngest ever winner of a competitive Academy Award. She played the co-lead in Paper Moon when she was 10, alongside her father, Ryan. But at the 1974 ceremony the plaque on her statuette read "supporting".Then there's Mary Badham: also 10 when she played Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, and also crazily nominated in the supporting category. Considering Scout is the film's narrator, and every second of the story is seen through her eyes, that's a hell of a demotion.And these are the lucky ones. ET: The Extra Terrestrial was nominated for nine Oscars and won five, but nine-year-old Henry Thomas, who played Elliott, didn't get his name on any of them. Ditto Empire of the Sun's six nominations and its 12-year-old star, Christian Bale.The academy doesn't have rules about what differentiates a lead performance from a supporting one.Distributors can promote performers in whatever category they choose and Room 's chose to promote Tremblay as a supporting actor. That decision doesn't remotely reflect reality, but that's awards season for you.Most of the child actors cited above, including Tremblay, have something in common: in the films in which their work was undervalued, they shared the screen with a widely admired adult co-star. Larson in Room, Gregory Peck in Mockingbird, Jeff Bridges in True Grit, and so on. Perhaps nine-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis, nominated as a lead actress for her performance in Beasts of the Southern Wild in 2013, slipped through the net because there weren't any adults in the film whom you could argue were carrying her along.Almost no one in the film industry seems to know what child acting is, or how to recognise it when it's done well. Are the kids working or having fun? Are they innately talented or just well-coached?In one of Room 's showpiece scenes, Jack's mother tries to tell him the truth : that she was kidnapped seven years ago and that a whole world exists outside their four foam-padded walls.But Jack, who's come to believe that all he has is all there is, becomes furious with incomprehension. "I want a different story!" he yells at his mother. "No," she yells back. "This is the story that you get."In a recent interview, Abrahamson described how tricky it was to convince the young actor to shout at his co-star. After a few halting takes, Tremblay whispered to the director that he didn't want to shout at Larson because he liked her - and it would be rude.Abrahamson's solution was to stage a shouting competition."We got the whole crew in and ... made it into a game, and at that point he lost any immediate self-consciousness."In a sense, that makes Tremblay's performance the opposite of acting as we normally think of it: to express an emotion convincingly, he had to forget why his character actually felt it. ..

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