True Brits

Have you seen or made a movie this year? Do you wonder if this movie has a shot at the Oscars? Here's a scorecard:

1) Is your movie about famous, real-life people? If so: +1

2) Are your main characters British? +1

3) Are any of them British royalty? +1

4) Does your protagonist have a poignant physical or mental affliction? +1

5) Is Harvey Weinstein involved? +1

This formula is known as Firth's Theorem, named for the Englishman who helped score a perfect 5 last year as stammering George VI in the Weinstein Co.'s The King's Speech, winner of four Academy Awards. High Firth scores often correlate with strong Oscar showings. The Queen (2006), with a Firth score of 3, won Best Actress for Helen Mirren. Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007) and The Young Victoria (2009), also with scores of 3, each received a little gold man. In 1999, Shakespeare in Love racked up a 4 and took home seven statuettes. (Last spring's blockbuster reality show The Royal Wedding, with a star-making turn by Pippa Middleton, scored a 3 but is ineligible for the Oscars.)

These films belong to a subgenre--and awards-season staple--we'll call the Anglophile Biopic. The latest AB is this month's Weinstein release The Iron Lady, which stars Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher and devotes much of its running time to the former Prime Minister's dotage as she succumbs to dementia. Streep has already won Best Actress from the New York Film Critics Circle and is all but assured an Oscar nod. No surprise, since The Iron Lady rates a 4 on the Firth scale--it's missing only a dash of royalty.

The AB's appeal to American Oscar voters is easy to parse. Stateside Anglophilia is, like Firth's Theorem, a matter of simple addition: colonial nostalgia (for the bratty aristo-Brits we call the Founding Fathers) + displaced princess fantasies + a guilty attraction to tidy class hierarchies + an assumed link between intelligence and perfectly rounded vowels. As for the biopic aspect, Academy voters love them because the acting can be fact-checked: "Does this famous person remind me of this other famous person?" is answered more readily than "Did this actor convincingly conjure a fictional being from scratch?"

Streep's impersonation of Thatcher is predictably excellent. (She nails the hawklike posture and roiling persecution complex if not the lead-with-the-overbite speaking style.) Where The Iron Lady departs from the successful AB formula is in refusing to burrow into a discrete pocket of time. The Queen confined itself to the immediate aftermath of Princess Diana's death, The King's Speech to the painful prep for a radio address. This viewer-friendly temporal discipline is typical even of lesser ABs such as multiple Oscar nominee Frost/Nixon (Firth score: 2) and current Weinstein offering My Week with Marilyn, which has a shockingly high Firth rating of 4 despite its iconic American protagonist.