"The King's Speech," shrug

“The King’s Speech” has all the momentum to win Best Picture. It has 12 Oscar nominations more than any competing Best Picture nominees.  The film has gone full-sweep with the guilds, winning top honors from the Producers Guild, the Directors Guild (!) and Screen Actors Guild (!!!), and has become a word-of-mouth sensation at the box office. Cue the obligatory backlash.

While “The King’s Speech” is by no means a bad film, it is not great.  The story is sentimental boilerplate (King George VI overcomes his humiliating stutter and finally finds his voice, both metaphorically and literally) and your parents will love it, especially if they are fond of Masterpiece Theater. The whole movie is essentially a feature-length submission to White Whine.

Colin Firth is all but guaranteed to win Best Actor for stuttering like a pro as King George, and the performance is certainly strong enough to justify the win. Geoffrey Rush is also quite good as the King’s humbly assertive speech therapist, but really, you’ve seen Morgan Freeman play this role in his sleep a dozen times.  Helena Bonham Carter plays the future Queen Mum with the same winking sense of humor she frequently wields, but all of this amounts to only so much.

Whenever there’s a clear frontrunner in the Oscar horse race, a backlash is guaranteed.  I felt similarly about “Slumdog Millionaire” a couple of years ago, and especially “Juno,” much of which made me want to scream.  Both movies were pop culture sensations, riding the magic combo-wave of Oscar buzz all the way to the bank.  The same has been true this year for superior Oscar nominees like “Black Swan” and “True Grit,” both of which have become unlikely blockbusters on the basis of audience support and critical adoration.  But those are better films, and “Black Swan” is not the kind of movie that makes $100 million.

"The King's Speech"

But “The King’s Speech” is essentially “The Karate Kid” with a British accent, and frankly I enjoyed last summer’s Jackie Chan/Jaden Smith remake a good deal more.  Both movies are thoroughly rousing crowd pleasers – I got the same rush of misty adrenaline when little Jaden finally kicked ass at his Kung-Fu tournament as I did watching Colin Firth finally enunciate confidently just when his country needed a leader most.  

Honestly, the most striking thing about "The King's Speech" is probably its magnificent art direction, with plenty of opulent sets to please the eye. The large, sparely furnished room where the speech therapist coaches all his patients is particularly dazzling.

The Best Room of 2010

But neither should qualify as the stuff of Best Picture, and if “The King’s Speech” beats “The Social Network” (presumably its only real competition, as it won the Golden Globe and virtually every Best Picture prize from critics groups nationwide) on Oscar night, I will be pissed. Not as pissed as I was five years ago when the pandering “Crash” won Best Picture over “Brokeback Mountain,” but still.