My mom told me that being less sensitive to it would improve my quality of life

I have this unerring knack for hearing errors in American accents.  An actor will start talking in a movie, and, if I’m with someone and I’m not in the theater, I’ll say, “Oh, he/she isn’t American, is he/she?”  When I’m with my mom, she’ll always say “sounds fine to me”.  But I’m never wrong.  I have false negatives, to be sure: Jamie Bamber’s IMDB profile says he is English, but if he has a British accent in real life, the accent is perfect to me in BSG (I can’t tell with Kandyse McClure on that show, either.)  But when I was first introduced to Hugh Laurie, Naomi Watts, Ioan Gruffudd, Simon Baker, and on and on including, tonight, Mischa Barton — I’ve thought “Oooh.  Wrong.”

Now, I can’t always tell certain Australian accents from South African accents, which I assume should be easy.  But that doesn’t annoy me.  The American bit does, because it sounds insulting: it is almost always a little too broad, a little too flat, a little too lifeless, and I’ll think, “Hey, we do not sound that bad.  Knock it off!”  Fortunately, incredibly patronizing accents (Kenneth Branaugh, Catherine Zeta-Jones, etc.) are not the norm.  But it will often severely detract from my enjoyment of a film.  It can be forgiven by making up a theoretical American accent, one so stylized (Hugo Weaving, Eddie Izzard) that it’s kind of just there — after all, Stallone is American — but when it’s supposed to be perfect, and it’s not.  Gah.

Within my lifetime, Mel Gibson and Nicole Kidman perfected theirs.  It’s clearly possible.  Yes, it does make me wince at how badly American actors could be butchering non-American accents.  But, come on.  Voice.  Training.  Please.