60th Academy Awards (1988)
Nominations: 9
Wins: 9
A month ago, I posted a list of my “Top Ten Horny Movies” where I crowned Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers as my number one. The film has become such a favorite of mine I had to see what else Bertolucci had to offer. Which is tough, because his two biggest movies are 1) A movie no one likes to talk about anymore because of a a sex scene that traumatized its female star and 2) A film about the life of China’s last monarch of the Qing Dynasty, which sounds like a movie I’d watch stretched over a week in school.
Not to mention The Last Emperor is an ’80s Oscar movie. I wrote in my review of Ordinary People last year that I believe the 1980s weren’t just a boring decade for the Oscars, but a boring decade for cinema in general. Now hold on, there’s no need to run me down in your DeLorean just yet. Yes, of course there were good movies in the ’80s, lots of them, but the center of gravity in Hollywood had shifted.
The risky, director-driven “New Hollywood” of the ’70s had been replaced by a more corporate, risk-averse system. Studios had learned the lesson of the blockbuster and weren’t eager to bankroll messy, morally ambiguous adult dramas anymore. Instead, they gravitated toward high-concept hits, sequels, and polished prestige pictures, the kind of films that looked expensive, respectable, and safe chillin’ on an awards ballot.
The Last Emperor is interesting because on one hand it does feel like your typical award-season pabulum. It’s a biopic, it’s long, it’s expensive, but it also did something no Western film had done since 1949. It was shot entirely in China, including extensive scenes inside Beijing’s Forbidden City. That alone was a gamble. The production depended entirely on the cooperation of the Chinese government, which meant the film could have collapsed at any moment if political winds shifted. For a massive international epic, building the entire production around that uncertainty was a risk in itself.
But is it any good?
