The 2015 Emmy Awards celebrate the best achievements on television over the past year. “Grace of Monaco” got in the running for Best Television Movie only due to its controversial and dramatic lead up. Could this further Nicole Kidman’s Fall From Grace.
Nicole Kidman Blues
Nicole Kidman may be feeling blue after the downward spiral from “Grace of Monaco”. She will now be performing on stage in ‘Photograph 51” about the woman who cracked DNA – described as “not so much theatrical Viagra” compared to the last time she was in a play 17 years ago in the somewhat sexually explicit play “Blue Room” (showcasing the “vastly over-hyped baring of Nicole Kidman’s very attractive butt“). It was back in 2013 that Nicole Kidman had talked to playwright David Hare about wanting to go on stage – which he did not take entirely seriously because she was at the height of her fame and it seemed very unlikely.
Kidman Taking Talents to TV?
In the United States, Nicole Kidman will be teaming up with Reese Witherspoon to bring forth the television series “Big Little Lies” about a group of moms whose perfect lives begin to unravel. Before then there will be a couple of likely limited theatrical release films such as “The Family Fang” which just premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, but there are some Oscar-bait films like “Genius” (which was acquired by Lionsgate at Cannes 2015) with Colin Firth and Jude Law.
More Bios for Nicole!
Further down the road Nicole Kidman will appear in “Queen of the Desert” (with James Franco) portraying Gertrude Bell in the chronicle of her life as a traveler, writer, archaeologist, explorer, cartographer, and political attaché for the British Empire at the dawn of the twentieth century.
These movies should all garner more acclaim than the recent Australian film “Strangerland“. Yet this Indie film gave Nicole Kidman the opportunity to collaborate more, as director Kim Farrant states: “Anything that wasn’t believable she would really jump on and make sure we didn’t go down that path.” Too bad Nicole Kidman did not have the power to remove all of the unbelievable elements in “Grace of Monaco”, which is still being highly criticized despite its Emmy nomination. Those who knew Princess Grace are even more outraged at “Grace of Monaco”, including Princess Grace’s goddaughter who states that almost nothing in the movie should be believed:
OUTSTANDING MOVIE?… OUTSTANDINGLY AWFUL!
It is truly unthinkable that today the overwrought melodrama “Grace of Monaco” – an outrageously fictionalized film disguised as a biopic – is nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Television Movie. It is far more fitting that the movie is nominated for Outstanding Hairstyling, since Nicole Kidman’s hair is the only thing in the movie that actually resembled Grace (except that they could not even get the hair color right!).
What is absolutely appalling is that Arash Amel, the writer and one of the producers of this garbage, is being rewarded with essentially a “best picture” nomination for some of the worst writing in history – in fact, for completing distorting history itself.
When Eddie Radmayne so deservedly won the Oscar for playing Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything he said: “I am one of those people, when I watch a film, I believe what I see on the screen. So our responsibility to tell their story truthfully and authentically, we felt it.”
I wish that the writer, Arash Amel, and the director, Olivier Dahan, had felt the same responsibility to tell Princess Grace’s story truthfully in “Grace of Monaco”. Instead, this is what the director told a French newspaper about the film: “I am not a journalist or historian. I am an artist. I have not made a biopic. I hate biopics in general. I have made a human portrait of a modern woman who wants to reconcile her family, her husband, her career, who gives up this career to invent another role.”
Dahan completely invented the personas of Grace and Rainier, telling the actors that he did not want them to mimic the real people. He also admitted that some scenes in the film are indeed pure fiction: “Of course there are historical inaccuracies. Gen. [Charles] de Gaulle never set foot at the Red Cross Ball,” he said of the French president’s attendance at the ball in which Nicole Kidman gives an overly dramatic fictional speech as the film’s climax. “But I need this stage to tell my story.”
This movie is indeed “his story” and NOT history. It is so flawed, so inaccurate, that it would be much shorter to tell you what was right with the film: 1) the names of the places and people are correct (but the portrayal of every character was completely erroneous – especially Princess Grace, Prince Rainier, Count D’Aillieres and Countess Baciocchi); 2) there really was a crisis with France where Prince Rainier almost lost his throne – other than that, everything else in the film was pure fiction. If you want to know the true story, my mother’s eyewitness account in “My Days with Princess Grace of Monaco” gives you a behind-the-scenes view of what really happened, and what Princess Grace and Prince Rainier were really like.
The saddest part is that any Google search for Princess Grace or Grace Kelly is now associated with this awful movie… My sincerest wish is that people do not believe what they see in this film, and that future generations do not think that this is what Princess Grace was really like. I hope that this movie quickly fades into obscurity and that the Emmys do not reward character assassination…
Emmys Inside Joke Explained
Hollywood Reporter explains….
“Sunday night’s Emmys included lots of laughs, a few tears and moments of pride for history-making winners (or feelings of frustration for viewers rooting for the losing nominees).
But while host Andy Samberg got the crowd cracking up starting with his musical intro and monologue, Samberg and others who took the Emmys stage may have left viewers, particularly those not in the entertainment industry, scratching their heads with some inside jokes.
Before his opening monologue, Andy Samberg kicked off the Emmys with a musical sketch that put the Brooklyn Nine-Nine star in a viewing bunker to watch the year’s overwhelming amount of critically-acclaimed programming…
“I even saw Grace of Monaco — I watched every show!”
.. further, he notes that he even watched Grace of Monaco, the troubled biopic that featured Nicole Kidman as star-turned-princess Grace Kelly, was directed by Olivier Dahan and focuses on a period in the early 1960s when Monaco was involved in a standoff over taxes with France, and Grace was contemplating a return to Hollywood. After the film’s release was delayed multiple times by The Weinstein Company and blasted by Grace’s children as “needlessly glamorized and historically inaccurate” at the Cannes Film Festival, the once-buzzy awards contender — which was panned by critics — ended up airing on Lifetime in May”.
Find out all the stories behind four insider jokes from Sunday night’s Emmys.
Grace of Monaco Surprise at Emmys
Perhaps the only surprise for those looking for Grace of Monaco or Nicole Kidman at the Emmys was that the category of “Most Outstanding TV Movie” was actually awarded the week before the prime time televised Emmys show of Sunday September 20, 2015. You could have followed Variety on Twitter as they live-tweeted the Creative Arts Emmy Awards on September 12, 2015.
American Horror Story
That same afternoon, Grace of Monaco lost out to “ American Horror Story: Freak Show” for OUTSTANDING HAIRSTYLING FOR A LIMITED SERIES OR MOVIE
