Transatlantic cultural learnings of Borat

Sacha Baron Cohen has been honoured at the Golden Globes in the US - and ignored in his home country

Sacha Baron Cohen has been honoured at the Golden Globes in the US - and ignored in his home country. Mark Lawsonexplains why.

Last year, reports in the British press that Sacha Baron Cohen's movie, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, had topped the US box office were rapidly followed by suggestions that his reputation in the US was in serious trouble. Some senior reviewers rebuked the film for crudity, while Americans who had believed Baron Cohen's Kazakh alter ego to be a real reporter were, on an almost daily basis, said to be suing over claims that they had been duped or humiliated.

Rather less space was given to the fact that the first of those legal claims was kicked out of court by a judge. And so movie-goers may have been surprised to hear yesterday that Baron Cohen had taken a best actor prize at the Golden Globes, usually seen as Oscar tip-offs. As the actor and the film were ignored by this week's Bafta (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) juries, it even seemed possible to conclude that Borat's creator was more popular in the US than the UK.

In fact, his stateside status is complicated. While Helen Mirren, who took the best actress trophy at the same ceremony, will now almost certainly graduate to an Oscar, Baron Cohen almost certainly won't; he may not even get an Academy Award nomination.

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The reason is that the Globes give separate acting gongs for performances in dramas, and for performances in comedies and musicals. To even get a nod at the Oscars on February 25th, Baron Cohen will be competing with Forest Whitaker, Peter O'Toole, Will Smith and Leonardo DiCaprio. When it came to the Bafta nominations (from which single prizes for best film and acting are awarded), Borat was squeezed out by voters' traditional preference for the heavy (The Queen, The Last King of Scotland, Babel) over the light - and this will probably happen again when the little gold men are handed out.

Even so, Baron Cohen's American victory raises the question of whether it is right to regard comedy as a separate art, and whether the Baftas and even the Oscars should follow the lead of the Globes.

The problem is that divisions between comedy and drama are arbitrary and increasingly hard to apply as the two genres coalesce: Little Children (drama, according to the Globes) and Little Miss Sunshine (ranked as a comedy) both have moments of humour and of bleakness. For years, the fine line between the two became a running joke at the London Evening Standard Drama Awards, where humorous and serious plays were given separate statuettes. Alan Bennett, missing out on best play one year but receiving best comedy instead, said it was like entering a flower show and getting the prize for biggest marrow. In the year Alan Ayckbourn took best play and Tom Stoppard best comedy, Stoppard joked that he took consolation in the fact that, while his play wasn't as good as Ayckbourn's, it was clearly much funnier.

If you were defending the distinction between the two categories, you could quote the story about the comic actor on his deathbed. Asked if he was finding his final moments difficult, he is supposed to have replied that dying was easy; it was comedy that was hard. That anecdote is probably a comedian's bitter joke, but it encapsulates the argument for comedy being considered a separate category of acting, requiring distinct and, arguably, higher skills.

One objection to that view is that, as Bennett's and Stoppard's speeches show, when two routes are offered, humour is generally regarded as the junior option. Another obstacle is that the latest Globe results tend to confirm the popular prejudice that cinema voting panels end up honouring only one kind of acting, regardless of whether it is comic or dramatic - the performance of exaggerated and obvious transformation.

All four main acting awards at the Globes - Mirren and Whitaker for dramatic roles, Baron Cohen and Meryl Streep (The Devil Wears Prada) for comedy - have gone to portrayals in which the performer was working at a considerable visual, verbal and emotional distance from their own persona. Mirren and Whitaker transformed themselves into famous real-life heads of state, while Borat and Streep's fashion maven are high-comic grotesques.

AT THE OSCARS, meanwhile, two kinds of film have tended to be disproportionately honoured: the biopic (Walk the Line, Capote, Erin Brockovich) and the movie dealing with physical or mental stress (Rain Man, Boys Don't Cry, Shine, The Pianist). The reason for this is that voters can be absolutely certain that acting is taking place, a harder judgment to make when someone is playing closer to their own appearance and delivery.

In his victory for Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen has proved a beneficiary of the way Golden Globe voters think. At the Academy Awards, however, he is likely to be a victim of the rather different way the Oscar business works.