by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s 89th annual Academy Awards was a
typically lumbering spectacle, marked by host Jimmy Fallon dragging in some of
the regular features of his late-night show on ABC (probably not coincidentally
the network that telecast the Oscars as well), including “Nasty Tweets” and a
lot of vicious barbs attacking actor Matt Damon (who apparently is to him what
Rosie O’Donnell was to Donald Trump all those years), including one making fun
of him for not playing the male lead in the film Manchester by the Sea (he produced the movie but hired Casey Affleck to
star — and Affleck won the award for Best Actor) and instead playing a
“ponytail role” in the film The Great Wall, which Fallon declared a flop. (I don’t know how he knows because the
film has barely opened — yes, I know
it’s common these days to declare a film a hit or a flop based on how it does on
its opening weekend, but The Great Wall was the second most-popular movie in the country on its
first weekend in theatres. Besides, when I saw the TV ads I thought I came up
with a better joke about it: “Matt Damon plays Donald Trump in The
Great Wall.”) There were a lot of Trump jokes during the awards — interesting the Los
Angeles Times had hired a rather kvetchy Right-wing columnist to denounce the whole idea of
celebrities speaking out on political issues, arguing that they’re basically
society’s court jesters and shouldn’t presume to do more than entertain us both
on- and off-screen (what this author didn’t realize was that in medieval times
court jesters regularly commented on political and social issues because they
were the only ones that could: in
these highly repressive, authoritarian societies the only way you could criticize the king or the feudal lords
was by pretending to be “just” making fun of them), but to me there’s a big
difference between what Meryl Streep said on the Golden Globes (she carefully
avoided using Trump’s name and spoke from the heart like the class act she is)
and the sniggering comments that peppered last night’s show. At the same time
Trump is virtually irresistible as a butt of humor — probably the real
reason he’s not attending the White House
Correspondents’ Dinner (it would require him to sit in a room of people making
fun of him, and you know how much
the famously micrometer-thin-skinned Trump would enjoy that!) — including one in which Kimmel announced that
reporters from any paper with the
word “Times” in its name (“even the Medieval Times,” he said) would be barred from the event.
The big
news last night was that the expected sweep for the film La La Land (a musical starring Ryan Gosling as an aspiring jazz
musician and Emma Stone as the aspiring singer and actress he falls in love
with — as I noted about this film after the Golden Globes, it seems like they
simply took the plot of the 1978 musical New York, New York and moved it to L.A.!) didn’t materialize, and instead
it won six awards out of its 14 nominations, including Best Director, but did not win Best Picture. Instead there was one of the most
spectacular snafus in the history
of the Academy Awards, as Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway were dragged out 50
years after they became stars through their roles in Bonnie and Clyde to present Best Picture, and for some reason Beatty
was given, not the envelope containing the Best Picture winner, but a duplicate
of the one that had already been read announcing that Emma Stone had won Best
Actress for La La Land. Just
seeing the title, he announced La La Land as the Best Picture winner, and the gaggle of producers involved with
it (I joked, “It takes a village to produce a movie”) came up on stage to
accept the award — the Academy once had a rule that only three producers could
be named on an awards citation but they’ve long since given up on that one —
only one of them noticed that the real Best Picture envelope named Moonlight (the “other” movie about Black people, besides the
seemingly more prestigious Fences
which starred and was directed by Denzel Washington and was based on a Pulitzer
Prize-winning play by August Wilson) as the winner. So another, only slightly
smaller, gaggle of producers came up on stage to accept the award, and of
course I couldn’t help but joke, “La La Land won the popular vote, but Moonlight won the electoral vote.” Aside from that it was a
lumbering spectacle (after the even more interminable red-carpet prologues
featuring the pretty ghastly costumes the women in attendance were wearing)
that started at 5:30 and droned on until 9:15, and Jimmy Kimmel was an O.K.
host except that he rather annoyingly treated it as if it were just another
episode of his late-night show, complete with gimmicks like steering the
passengers of a Hollywood tour bus into the Dolby (nèe Kodak) Theatre and putting them on camera in the
middle of the awards, and periodically having candy and other snacks lowered to
the Academy audience on miniature parachutes.
There was a ballot to make
predictions handed out at the viewing party I was attending but I didn’t bother
with it because, though I might have guessed a few of the awards just from the
“buzz” in the Los Angeles Times
and elsewhere, I have hardly seen any of the movies nominated and therefore I really didn’t have any skin in
the game in terms of who won — though I suppose one could interpret the Best
Picture going to a movie about a young Black Gay man coming to terms with his
identity as itself a slap in the face at Trump and everything he stands for
from a celebrity culture that’s clearly on the other side of America’s Great
Divide from the self-proclaimed “real Americans” who elected Trump and the
Republicans to take their country
back from all the “libtards” who seized it when Obama won. I did see an
hysterical (in both senses: crazy and funny) post on Breitbart News (http://www.breitbart.com/big-hollywood/2017/02/26/trump-fans-urge-oscars-boycott/)
calling on people to boycott the Oscars, reporting on a campaign launched by
something called Tempe Republican Women that “went viral” — most of the story
consists of various tweets from Right-wingers endorsing the boycott call, but
the story did contain this good
call: “Asghar Farhadi, the Iranian director of the Oscar-nominated
film The Salesman, will sit out the awards show to protest Trump’s
temporary ban on immigration from seven countries, which was blocked by the 9th
Circuit Court this month. A win for Farhadi could lead to more politicized
moments at the show.” It did: Farhadi didn’t come to the awards show but did send a written statement which was read, and was
probably the political statement that came closest to the class Meryl Streep
had shown on the Globes.
