by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s 88th annual Academy Awards was one
of the dullest, most lumbering awards shows it’s ever been my displeasure to
sit through, which made me astonished that the Los Angeles Times actually gave it good reviews. On the front page of
this morning’s paper were two articles on the ceremony, over a joint headline
reading “Spotlight on Harsh Truths,” while under it one of the pieces, by John
Rothenberg, subheaded “Biting Comments on Race Dominate the Awards Show,” and
the other piece, by Times TV
critic Mary McNamara, had a subhead that called it “A Show That Did More than
Hand Out Gold Statues.” Certainly it would have been inappropriate for the
Academy Awards show to ignore completely the controversy over the fact that for
the second year in a row all the
acting nominees in both lead and supporting categories — 20 people in all —
were white and the #OscarsSoWhite movement that has sprung up with the intent
of integrating both the Academy’s list of nominees and its membership. Instead
they went whole-hog in the other direction, using a Black host, Chris Rock
(whose work I am totally unfamiliar with so I can’t tell whether he’s always
this lame or just got really
victimized by the quality — or lack of same — of his writing) to tell dull and
snotty jokes about Blacks and the Academy all night. (Earlier the Times had noted that it’s not just Blacks who draw the
short straw in the Academy and the movie business generally; there was a
previous front-page article on how virtually no Latinos are being cast for anything these days, not even in the silly servant roles that
used to be sinecures for them.) The Academy and the show’s producers were so
scared about the thing running overtime that for just about every winner there
was a long crawl expressing all the people they wanted to thank but wouldn’t
have time to mention in their actual acceptance speech —though just about all
the winners tried to crowd as many names as possible into the speeches
themselves — and both Charles and I would have rather heard longer speeches
from the Oscar recipients and fewer lame jokes about Blacks and their
acceptance, or lack thereof, as part of the Academy and the Hollywood community
as a whole
As for the awards themselves, the Best Picture award was won by Spotlight, a film about the investigative journalists at the Boston
Globe who broke the story about how not
only were several Roman Catholic priests serial molesters of children but the
church was actively working to cover it up, often moving the abusive priests
around from parish to parish, saving the institutional image of the Church at
the expense of the fresh new crop of victims the molesting priests would have
access to in each new city. Spotlight was definitely on my list of movies I wanted to see — how many
big-budget, big-studio films have there been since All the
President’s Men in which journalists were
the good guys? — but it only won one award besides Best Picture, Best Original
Screenplay for Tim McCarthy and Josh Singer. Alejandro Inárritu won Best
Director for the second year in a row (offhand I can’t think of another time that happened) for The Revenant, which won two other awards: Emmanuel Lubeski for
Best Cinematography and Leonardo di Caprio for Best Actor. In a night full of
gaseous political rhetoric (just because I agree with most of it doesn’t
necessarily mean I want to listen to it, especially all night!) di Caprio used
his speech not only to warn of the dangers of human-caused climate change but
to tie them in with his movie. He said that though The Revenant takes place in 18th century New England,
they had to shoot it at the tip of South America because that was one of the
few places left in the whole world where there was enough snow to meet the
needs of their production. The big winner of the night was Mad Max:
Fury Road, which seemed to have been put on
the Best Picture list of 10 more to give token inclusion to a crowd-pleasing
blockbuster than because it had any real chance of winning, but it cleaned up
so well in the back awards — Film Editing, Sound Editing, Sound Mixing, Costume
Design, Production Design, and Makeup and Hairstyling — it won more awards than
any other single movie and for a while I was wondering if it was going to sweep
à la The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, or (even worse) that god-awful Lionel Richie album
which won the 1985 Grammy for Album of the Year over two deathless
masterpieces, Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. and Prince’s Purple Rain.
The other acting awards went to an assortment of
different films: Best Actress went to Brie Larson (if she ever turns in an
overwrought performance some smart-aleck critic is sure to call her “Ham and
Cheese”!) for her role as the sex slave imprisoned in a shack in Room, a film I really want to see partly because I read (and richly
enjoyed) the source novel by Emma Donoghue (who also wrote the script) — a
story of a sex slave told from the point of view of the six-year-old son she
had with her captor, who has literally never known any life outside the room until they escape in the middle
of the story — and partly because I want to see how the director handled the
challenge of making an interesting movie set so totally within a confined
space. Supporting Actor went to Mark Rylance (whom I’ve long been a fan of, at
least partly for non-artistic reasons: as I’ve pointed out in these pages
before, I first saw him in a British Last Tango in Paris knockoff called Intimacy, in which he went full-frontal and showed a long and
blessedly uncut cock; he’s well-hung enough and a talented enough actor — I thought his performance
in Intimacy was way better than Brando’s in Last Tango, but then I’m decidedly a non-fan of Mumblin’ Marlon
— I’ll forgive him for being a believer in the Earl of Oxford-wrote-Shakespeare
idiocy), and Supporting Actress went to Alicia Vikander in The Danish
Girl (so the woman who ends up with a
Transwoman won out over the woman who ends up with a Lesbian in Carol! And I was a bit put out by the euphemism whereby
twice during the ceremony the term “gender-reassignment surgery” was replaced
with “gender-confirmation
surgery,” which may be superficially more Trans-sympathetic but also might be
read as a slap in the face to all the Transgender people who choose to live in
the identity of the gender they identify with but not to have their bodies surgically remodeled to
“confirm” it).
The Best Documentary Feature award went to a film about Amy
Winehouse over a film about Nina Simone — I don’t think I need to belabor the
point about which of those two women had the more significant career; Nina
Simone, for all her eccentricities, was a powerful, commanding artist who made
major work over three decades, while Amy Winehouse was a drug-soaked weakling
who sounded like a has-been even before she was an ever-was; as I sang, in
bitter parody of her biggest hit, when I heard the utterly unsurprising news of
her drug-fueled demise, “She said she wouldn’t go to rehab, and now she’s dead,
dead, dead!” Surprise, the Best Documentary
Short winner was not the film
about the Holocaust — when my late roommate/home-care client John Primavera and
I were working out our rules of Oscar prognostication, one of the rules I
suggested to him was if a documentary category contains a film about the
Holocaust, it will always win
because all the Jews in the Academy will vote for it — but A Girl in
the River: The Price of Forgetfulness, a
film about so-called “honor killings” of rape victims by their families in
Pakistan, whose director, Sharmain Obaid-Chinoy, said she had shown the film to
the Prime Minister of Pakistan and got him to sign a law banning such “honor
killings.” Charles was irked at the awards show producers’ decision to play
outro music while she was still talking, since she had just said she’d had the
rare experience of making a movie that not only exposed an injustice but
actually contributed to ending it (or at least making it illegal, which alas is
not always the same thing). If you want to establish an idea that “movies
matter,” it’s hard to get much better than a head of state saying, “I signed a
bill because you persuaded me with your film that I should.”
Ennio Morricone
won Best Score for Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight — and, much to the surprise of both Charles and I,
delivered his speech in Italian, which his assistant interpreted into English
(which makes me wonder how he and Tarantino communicated through their
collaboration — did they do it long-distance, did the assistant interpret for
them, or does Tarantino know enough of the language of his forebears to be able
to talk to Morricone unaided? Or does Morricone know enough English to
communicate with the director of an English-language movie but not enough to feel comfortable making a public speech to
an English-speaking audience?), and Best Song went to Sam Smith and Jimmy Napes
for their song “Spectre,” from the latest James Bond movie of that title.
Smith, who rubbed his Gayness in everybody’s face when he accepted his Grammy
awards (I loved his dedication of
his award-winning album to the man he’d just broken up with before he wrote and
recorded it: “He broke my heart, but he helped me win four Grammy awards!”),
did it again last night, announcing that he’s sure he’s the first openly Gay
man to win an Oscar. (I had thought Tony Kushner had won it for writing Steven
Spielberg’s Lincoln, but he was
only nominated.) That one really rankled me because, as good a song as it was
(and as powerfully as Smith performed it), Lady Gaga’s nominated song “’Til It
Happens to You” from a movie about the sexual abuse of women whose title I
haven’t been able to run down on line was a far better, more powerful song, and
Gaga’s staging of it — with a backdrop of people (mostly women but at least one
man) who’d been victims of sexual violence joining in on the choruses and
wearing tattoos on their arms expressing their determination to survive the
experience — was by far the show’s most honestly powerful moment and, as much
as I like Sam Smith, the gap between him and Lady Gaga as talents is about as
enormous as … well, the gap between Amy Winehouse and Nina Simone.
The
Big Short, another movie I want to see
mainly because I read the book it was based on, won Best Adapted Screenplay for
Charles Randolph and Andy McKay (who adapted it from a nonfiction book by Moneyball author Michael Lewis — and one wonders if the film
reproduces Lewis’s cynical comment that the financial schemers who make a
killing shorting the housing market in the run-up to the 2008 crash would have
lost their shirts if the government had actually intervened to protect the
underwater home buyers, but they didn’t really have to worry about that
happening given that the government has become mainly a wish-fulfillment
machine for the 1 percent), but the film didn’t win anything else — and the big
shutout of the night was Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which probably because it was the highest-grossing (by far!) movie of 2015
didn’t win any awards — the Academy voters probably reasoned it was already so
super-successful it didn’t deserve any help, not even the Special Effects
award, which went to something called Ex Machina almost no one’s even heard of, much less seen! I noticed that I’ve written about
the Oscars in years before and said that the current awards are a testament to
the fragmentation of the movie audience — it’s probably going to be a long
time, if ever, before we see a movie sweep the awards the way Titanic or Lord of the Rings: The Return of the
King did, and that’s largely because
Hollywood has lost the art of making movies like Gone With the Wind and Lawrence of Arabia that are both entertaining, crowd-pleasing blockbusters and artistically great films.
