OK, guess that film:
Clue #1: It is nominated for Best Picture and Best Actor.
Clue #2: It is the biopic of an embattled, accomplished war hero who died shortly after his service for his country ended.
Clue #3: The protagonist is credited with having made the single, largest contribution to his country’s war effort during the time he served.
American Sniper, right?
Wrong.
The answer is The Imitation Game; the story of the Alan Turing, an introverted, homosexual mathematician whose work during WWII eventually saved the world from tyranny.
What’s with the Quiz?:
The exercise is not meant to diminish the value of American Sniper nor the importance of Chris Kyle. Kyle is a hero, his death is a tragedy and the film deserves to be lauded.
What is evident is this: The connotation of heroism is broadening.
Film heroes often take the form of conventional masculinity – they’re physically imposing, brazenly courageous and blatantly handsome. American Sniper portrays this type of hero, and it shouldn’t be criticized for doing so. There is nothing wrong with the classic, masculine cinematic hero.
Nonetheless, the emergence of atypical heroes in film is encouraging. Consider the spectrum of male heroism depicted in this year’s crop of Best Picture Nominees: Selma’s Martin Luther King Jr., The Theory of Everything’s Stephen Hawking, and as previously mentioned, The Imitation Game’s Alan Turing. In each of these films, it is mental fortitude, rather than superficial notions of strength, that proves valiant.
What about women?
It would be ignorant to overlook the absence of a heroine in this year’s pool of Best Picture nominees and the omittance of Selma director Ava DuVernay from the Best Director category has generated accusations of gender bias within the Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In fact, in the last fifteen years, only two films featuring female leads have won best picture – Million Dollar Baby and Chicago, and only two women have been nominated for best director. (The only woman to ever win the award is Kathyrn Bigelow for The Hurtlocker in 2009.)
Maybe gender bias does influence the outcome of film’s most prestigious awards ceremony. If so, then we are fortunate the Academy does not determine which movies are ultimately produced each year. That is left to the consumer – production companies are, above all else, a business.
The massive box office success of recent films like Frozen and The Hunger Games signals the earning capacity of the heroine. Combine this with the popularity of “small screen” characters such as Game of Thrones’ Arya Stark, Scandal’s Olivia Pope, and Homeland’s Carrie Mathison, and the future for leading women looks bright.
For some, the pace of change simply isn’t fast enough; although, the progression towards protagonist diversity is evident. For now, we shouldn’t chastise the male action hero for being popular, it’s not his fault. Instead, we should continue to celebrate the quiet, unassuming and unconventional heroes; because as Alan Turing reminds us,“Sometimes it’s the people no one imagines anything of, who do the things that no one can imagine.”