A much-deserved victory

Six months ago almost to the day, Alejandro González Iñárritu was sitting out on a quiet, waterside terrace on the Venice Lido, grinning a grin that seemed to reflect the entire lagoon. It was the morning after the world premiere of Birdman, which had earned rave reviews almost across the board: Iñárritu was surprised by that, and he joked that he was experiencing the same lunatic popularity boost that his film’s main character, the has-been actor Riggan Thompson, thought would somehow give his life meaning.

“To be popular doesn’t mean to be good,” he reflected. “But for a new generation, what is popular is absolutely the proof of success and value and everything. And that disappears in two days.”

Fast-forward half a year, and it’s the way Iñárritu is living too. Birdman’s success at the 2015 Oscars brings the whole Ouroboric project full circle: a film about the slippery seductions of fame jumping into a seething jacuzzi of the stuff on the film industry’s most frothily self-indulgent night. Its four Oscar wins, for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best Cinematography, suggest the industry has rallied behind this spiky and swaggering picture — something that, I didn’t think was possible.

On Twitter, some are already writing off Birdman’s victory as a straightforward “ego bath” for the business — the triumph of a film about show business over a film about real life, represented of course by Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. It’s the third Best Picture winner in four years to be notionally “about” movie-makers, alongside The Artist and Argo.

But to dismiss Birdman in this way is to wilfully ignore so much that’s great about it — not least the way it reimagines film as a kind of hyper-caffeinated theatrical performance that unfolds apparently live before our eyes, throwing out the familiar visual grammar of shots and cuts in a way that makes the experience of watching it feel completely, invigoratingly fresh. And don’t forget its considerable satirical bite, either.

As Iñárritu said in Venice, popularity — the awards-ceremony stuff — can disappear in days, but Birdman feels like a film that’s with us for the long haul. If its victory at the Oscars looked to you like a self-congratulatory slap on the back for the industry, check again. On the industry’s back, you’ll find a Post-It note that reads “kick me”.