Jane Campion is the second woman ever nominated for a Best Director Academy Award and the first ever for directing an English-language film, "The Piano."
It's exciting. It's groundbreaking. Campion could hardly care less."The awards, I don't take them very seriously," she said in a telephone interview from her home in Sydney, Australia. "They're useful for promoting audience enthusiasm for the film, but I've always had my own opinions about which films are great, and they're not usually the ones Oscar picks. I really just try to enjoy these things, take them pretty lightly."
A healthy-sounding attitude. Especially from a writer-director whose three features ("Sweetie" and "An Angel at My Table" are the two others) are rife with pathological behavior and dysfunctional relationships.
Take "The Piano," for example. Holly Hunter - who has won a closet full of awards herself and is the odds-on Oscar favorite for Best Actress - plays Ada, a 19th-century Scottish woman who has willfully refused to speak since childhood. She communicates through a personal sign language developed with her out-of-wedlock daughter (Anna Paquin) and through her prized possession, a piano.
Sent as a mail-order bride to colonial New Zealand, Ada has no interest in her never-before-seen husband, Stewart ("Jurassic Park's" Sam Neill). Slowly, however, she develops a consuming passion for their tattooed, illiterate and unselfconsciously kinky neighbor Baines (Harvey Keitel). By the time this overheated triangle plays out, everyone has gone at least a little nuts.
Campion is a brilliant observer of the ways in which people drive each other crazy.
"Jane's so attuned to the funny and tragic things people do in everyday life," noted "The Piano's" producer, Jan Chapman. "She has a very refined sensibility about the way people behave."
And as we have often seen, movie awards madness makes some people behave very strangely. So Campion is probably wise to stay half a world away from Hollywood these days, especially since she already has been embroiled in awards-related controversy.
Campion won the Best Director awards from both the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the New York Film Critics Circle late last year. Both groups, like every other major critics organization and the Golden Globes presented by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, gave their Best Picture award to Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List."
Many felt that the critics' associations were somehow slighting Spielberg by honoring Campion. New York Post movie reviewer Michael Medved even went so far as to suggest that the two groups were operating out of a politically correct desire to give a woman a major award. Medved compounded the insult by implying that Campion had received sympathy votes (the 39-year-old filmmaker's newborn baby died last spring).
Spielberg, who has since won a few directing awards including the Golden Globe, has stayed quietly above the fracas. And Campion has stayed farther away; she has remained in Australia through the early months of awards season, working diligently on her next film project, an adaptation of Henry James' "Portrait of a Lady" set to star Nicole Kidman. Recent reports that Campion cannot travel for medical reasons are, according to the New Zealand-born filmmaker, erroneous.
Perhaps the distance, along with general level-headedness, has helped Campion laugh at the overblown controversy.
"I love that (Medved wrote) that - I feel just like he did," said Campion, the first woman to be nominated for a directing Oscar since Italy's Lina Wertmuller was up for "Seven Beauties" 17 years ago. "I feel that it's completely political when they give those awards to men!
"He's only saying what's partly in the air these days. I don't feel bad about it because I take my directing seriously. I don't view myself as a girlie director. The reason for me to struggle with my craft is to give a gift to the audience: to try to make cinema better. That's a pretty big privilege. I take it seriously."
Campion's unapologetic, artistic bent makes "The Piano's" international box-office success all the more remarkable. A big hit in Europe and the South Pacific, the film has grossed more than $25 million at U.S. theaters - major money for a disturbing, foreign period piece that has proved open to multiple interpretations.
Indeed, "The Piano" elicits a wide range of passionate responses. Its strong female viewpoint, specific sensuality, primal setting and emotions, and evocative formal elements have moved many viewers to declare "The Piano" the best movie they have ever seen, if phone calls to this critic are any indication.
"I am surprised by `The Piano's' popular success," Campion said. "I hoped that it would have a broad base, but I didn't know that it would be embraced to the extent that it has. One of the treasures for me is finding people who respond so emotionally and romantically to the movie, who would otherwise be practical types and may never have seen an art film."