Tilda Swinton Never Watched the Oscars Until She Won, and the Ceremony Was Underwhelming for a Hilarious Reason
Zack Sharf
Tilda Swinton is an Oscar winner, but she doesn’t spend her time obsessing over awards — or even tuning in to watch the Academy Awards. The actress recently spoke with Rolling Stone about her acclaimed career and revealed the only time she has ever watched the Academy Awards is when she attended them because she was nominated for “Michael Clayton.” Swinton won Best Supporting Actress at the 80th Academy Awards in 2008, and that’s the only time she’s watched an Oscars ceremony.
“[The Oscar speech]…I have no memory of it, and please don’t remind me of what I said,” Swinton said. “Funnily enough, at that time, I’d never seen the Oscars on the television. I knew that it was a big deal, but it didn’t have any real impact in my life. I remember being a little bit disappointed that it wasn’t more magnificent, [that] it wasn’t in a bigger room.”
Swinton hilariously blamed her disappointment with the Oscars ceremony on “The Bodyguard,” the 1992 romantic thriller starring Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner. “That was the only time I’d ever seen the Oscars,” Swinton said about the film, “and it was in a much pumped-up version. Nobody ran across the stage or got shot or anything!”
“Michael Clayton” starred Swinton as Karen Crowder, a powerful lawyer on the verge of a mental breakdown. The actress beat out Ruby Dee (“American Gangster”), Saoirse Ronan (“Atonement”), Amy Ryan (“Gone Baby Gone”), and Cate Blanchett (“I’m Not There”) for the Oscar. The film not only gave the actress her first Oscar nomination and win, but it also was released in the middle of Swinton’s transition into making Hollywood studio movies, not that she ever viewed “Michael Clayton” that way.
“The reason I don’t think of it as a studio picture is because it was in New York and because it felt fairly intimately made,” Swinton told Rolling Stone. “Of course it was a studio picture, and it had a massive film star in it, but it didn’t really feel [like that]. I noticed a while ago that the studio pictures that I had made up until that time — in fact, it still goes on — they’re all experimental films. They’re all pretty out there. They’re all made by film geeks who are trying something new, whether it’s Andrew Adamson making his first live-action film [“The Chronicles of Narnia”] when he’s only made animation, or David Fincher making Brad Pitt younger [in ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’].”
Swinton is currently in theaters with Luca Guadagnino’s “Suspiria.”
