Sandra Bullock didn’t deserve her Screen Actors Guild and Golden Globe Awards.
And James Cameron shouldn’t have won the Globe for Best Director.
Now, I don’t bring this up because those are my opinions.
(Which they are, but for the moment, that’s beside the point.)
Rather, those are the words of Bullock and Cameron themselves, both of whom played what I’m calling the “‘I Don’t Deserve This’ Card” when they took home recent awards.
At Saturday night's DGA Awards, will somebody take the stage and point out that they're an undeserving winner? Don't bet against it.
And what if it dawns on Academy members sitting in the audience, or watching at home on TV, that these solicitous speeches are right?
Here’s Cameron, onstage after receiving his Golden Globe for directing “Avatar”:
“I’m actually not well prepared. Very frankly, I thought Kathryn [Bigelow] was gonna get this … and she richly deserves it.”
And here’s Bullock in the SAG pressroom after her victory Saturday night:
“It was a fluke. I feel it’s wrong, if you really want to know the truth.”
Then she launched into a detailed, passionate description of a moment in “Julie & Julia” that demonstrated, she said, just how much better Meryl Streep is.
It’s a time-honored tactic, the IDDTC; perhaps it’s not as common or as safe as paying tribute to all your fellow nominees and insisting that filmmaking isn’t really a contest, but it's an approach that has been trotted out regularly over the years.
When Juliette Binoche scored a big upset victory over Lauren Bacall in the Oscar Supporting Actress category in 1997, for instance, the stunned winner began her speech by saying, “I thought Lauren was going to get it. And I think she deserves it.”
Gwyneth Paltrow said she wasn't worthy of her Best Actress for “Shakespeare in Love” two years later, though she didn’t single out who was. And Roberto Benigni, who was named Best Actor that same night for “Life is Beautiful,” said, “I don’t deserve this, but I hope to win some other Oscars.”
No, he didn’t (deserve it). And no, he didn’t (win any more Oscars).
Of course, Ving Rhames is the king of the tactic, and the only one who actually had the cojones to back up his words with action: When he won the Golden Globe for TV Actor in a Miniseries 1998, he called fellow nominee Jack Lemmon onstage and forced Lemmon to take the award.
Now, I think we can all be reasonably certain that if Bullock and Cameron do win Oscars, Streep and Bigelow will not be going home with the hardware.
So what’s the point of playing the “‘I Don’t Deserve This’ Card?” Is it a pose, a way to make yourself look humble – which, let’s face it, is something that Cameron could always use?
In this case, I’m not so sure.
