by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The 2013 Academy Awards
lasted a shade over three and one-half hours — relatively short — and host Seth
McFarlane actually started promisingly with a joke about the movie Argo and the fact that the directors’ branch of the
Academy had snubbed its producer/director/star, Ben Affleck (doesn’t he play a
cartoon duck on TV commercials? Oh, never mind) by not nominating him for Best
Director. He said something along the lines of, “The CIA mission depicted in
the movie Argo is still so classified
that even the name of the film’s director remains a government secret.” (The
last time a movie won Best Picture without even a nomination for its director —
with Driving Miss Daisy — that
year’s Oscar host, Robin Williams, joked that Driving Miss Daisy was “the movie that directed itself.”) The advance
publicity for the show was not too promising — some Academy P.R. person said
that it was going to be not an awards show but “an entertainment show with some
awards” — apparently the thought was to copy the Grammy Awards (which over the
last few years have been drowning in their own glitz — the Latin performers
Miguel and Jaunés got the best reviews from this year’s Grammys simply by not drowning their performances in pyrotechnics,
chorus lines of a size that would have made even Busby Berkeley flinch, Cirque
du Soleil-style performers over their heads — one horrible year the genuinely
talented singer Pink even turned herself into a Cirque du Soleil-style performer — and the like) and create a
theme show on the subject of “music in films.” This meant in practice that
MacFarlane got to do a thoroughly tasteless song (backed by the L.A. Gay Men’s
Chorus, who you would have thought would have been the last people interested in this as a concept!) about how
many actresses have shown their breasts on camera — preceded by a lame attempt
to make fun of its own tastelessness by showing what purported to be a TV
monitor screen on which William Shatner (as he looks now) reprised his Captain
James T. Kirk role from Star Trek and posed as a time traveler from the 23rd century (odd
since the original Star Trek show took place in the 25th century) giving McFarlane reviews on his
performance as Oscar host. It was an abysmal conceit — I wanted to send Shatner
back to his hand puppets and his Priceline.com commercials — and was all the
more pointless because on his own McFarlane was actually a decent if not
brilliant host (but then only two people have really been able to make the
Oscar-host gig their own: Bob Hope and Billy Crystal).
The awards went
predictably, for the most part: Argo won Best Picture (it’s a measure of how weird Academy politics can get
that it got Best Picture largely due to the sympathy vote for Affleck being
snubbed for Best Director) but only two other awards; Ang Lee repeated his Brokeback
Mountain experience with Life of
Pi (a movie I have relatively
little interest in seeing because the entire concept — a boy on a lifeboat with
a tiger who doesn’t eat him
in a minute — just seems too phony to me) by winning Best Director but losing
Best Picture; Lincoln won for
Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance in the title role (and fortunately he did not give his acceptance speech in the nerdy voice he
used in the actual movie) but not much else (the Academy tends not to give awards to movies so consciously shaped as Academy Award Material as Lincoln, nor do they give awards to Steven Spielberg
unless they absolutely have to; they’re just too damned jealous that he’s made
half of the most popular films of all time); Zero Dark Thirty won a tie for sound editing with the James Bond
movie Skyfall (which seemed to be the
box-office blockbuster the Academy considered sufficiently worthy of at least a
few down-ballot awards; it got another craft award and Adele predictably won
for her theme song; the show also featured a tribute to the music in Bond films,
including Adele belting out her song and Shirley Bassey doing “Goldfinger” —
her breath control isn’t what it was 49 years ago but that bizarre Black
contralto still thrills). The snub of Kathryn Bigelow for a Best Director
nomination was generally explained by the reaction to the movie by three U.S.
Senators — two Democrats (California’s own Dianne Feinstein being one of them)
and Republican John McCain, the only sitting Senator who has actually been
tortured — who said the film left an inaccurate impression that torture (oops,
“enhanced interrogation”) was instrumental in finding Osama bin Laden in the
first place (I don’t know if the film overall gives that impression — I haven’t
seen it — but one critic called the first half-hour of Zero Dark Thirty “torture porn” and I suspect that here, as in The
Hurt Locker, Bigelow and her writer,
Mark Boal, talked a Left-wing movie but made a Right-wing one). I think it had as much to do
with the sheer jealousy of other women directors who are glad Kathryn Bigelow
cracked the glass ceiling and became the first woman to win Best Director — but
for damned sure didn’t want her to be the second one too!
Only about two of the
actual Best Song nominees were performed, and instead there was a really lame
montage purporting to be a tribute to the best musicals of the last 10 years —
Jennifer Hudson did “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” from Dreamgirls and showed that Weight Watchers hasn’t impaired
her vocal chops any, but the medley “cheated” big-time by featuring the song
“All That Jazz” from Victor/Victoria, which was made in 1982 and therefore hardly qualifies as one of the
great musicals of the past decade. Then again, what do you get in today’s
musicals? A whole bunch of actors who can’t sing; no wonder Les Miserábles won for Sound Editing — someone had to patch and AutoTune the soundtrack so Hugh
Jackman would sound like the modern-day Nelson Eddy! Jennifer Lawrence won Best
Actress for something called Silver Linings Playbook which from the reviews sounds like an inchoate
mixture of old-age drama and romantic comedy; the Los Angeles Times had run an article the day before lamenting that
she was nominated for a movie almost nobody has seen and not for her performance as Katniss Everdeen in a movie
almost everybody has seen, The Hunger
Games — as it was, the girl who
had moved through the killing fields of her blockbuster with grace and
self-assurance stumbled and fell on the steps on the way up to the podium to
accept her award (and frankly I was wishing her dress would have caught on
fire!). Anne Hathaway won a predictable Best Supporting Actress for Les Miz (as it used to be called when this show glorifying
poverty and revolution was inexplicably a hit among the 1 percent during the
Reagan years) even though she couldn’t really sing any more than the rest of
her cast could — still I have a soft spot for a member of the Brokeback
Mountain cast, and the fact that
she has the same name as Mrs. William Shakespeare also leads me to look on her
kindly.
The Academy Awards are a testament to the fragmentation of film — it’s
going to be a long time before any movie sweeps the awards the way Gone With
the Wind, Ben-Hur, West Side Story, Lawrence of Arabia, the James Cameron Titanic and the last episode of The Lord of the Rings did, and that’s not so much because the Academy is
deliberately ignoring the big-ticket blockbusters and nominating the smaller,
more human films instead — yes, there’s a lot of genre snobbery going on here and it was only Heath
Ledger’s death that made possible the first major-category Oscar ever given to a movie based on a comic book — as that
the industry itself has pretty much lost the knack of making a film that is
both a blockbuster commercial hit and a truly great, award-winning film. Expanding the Best Picture category
to “up to 10” films (this year there were only nine) hasn’t democratized the
awards, nor has it boosted the ratings. What I’d like to see them do is go back
to something they did in the very first Academy Awards in 1928 and bifurcate the Best Picture category into
“Best Production” and “Most Artistic Quality of Production,” so there’d be a
category into which they could nominate the audience-pleasers like The
Avengers and The Dark Knight
Rises (both comic-book movies
and the two most commercially successful films of 2012) and another in which
they can have films like Argo, Lincoln and Life of Pi compete
against each other — so the Academy members can have the feeling they’re
advancing the art of film (and, more importantly, giving nods to films that
need the help of the Academy’s cachet both at the box office and on DVD sales instead of ones that are going
to be enormous hits regardless) and they can also have a category that acknowledges the films large
audiences are actually paying to see.
