94th Annual Academy Awards (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sceinces, ABC-TV, aired March 27, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 5 I settled on to watch the 94th annual Academy Awards. This turned out to be an unusual spectacle whose big moment was Will Smith apparently punching out Chris Rock on stage after Rock made a joke about Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, losing her hair. (Apparently she has a medical condition called alopecia, one of whose symptoms is total or partial hair loss.) Rock said that Mrs. Smith was preparing to star in a sequel to G. I. Jane and “I can’t wait to see it.” On the actual TV show, with most of the scene censored to meet the bizarrely prudish standards of American television, I had first assumed it was a bizarre schtick between the two actors in which Will Smith pretended to punch Chris Rock, but it was apparently a real blow – as Smith delivered the punch he told Rock, “Keep my wife’s name out of your fucking mouth” – and the sound was bleeped out for quite a long time before Rock said, “That was the greatest night in the history of television.” Later Sean “Diddy” Combs tried to tell both Smith and Rock to settle this “like family” later – you know you’re in the land of surrealism when Sean Combs is your voice of reason – and when Will Smith subsequently won the Best Actor award for playing Richard Williams, father of tennis legends Serena and Venus Williams, in a film called King Richard, he delivered a long, self-pitying speech in which he seemed to be trying to break Greer Garson’s record for the longest Oscar acceptance speech of all time. Smith praised Williams as “a fierce defender of his family” and added, "I know to do what we do, you gotta be able to take abuse and have people talk people about you. In this business, you gotta have people disrespecting you. And you gotta smile and pretend that's O.K."

It was a weird incident that was the low/high point of an evening that was generally pretty dull. All the nominees for Best Animated Feature were done in that stiff, blocky computer-generated style – as I saw the clips representing them I thought to myself, “Doesn’t anybody draw anymore?” – though one movie from Denmark that was nominated for Best International Feature (what used to be called the Foreign-Language category), Flee, was drawn animation. (Flee was also nominated for Best Documentary Feature, though just how is an animated film a documentary?) I really don’t like the look of computer animation, though I’ve been able to overcome my overall distaste of the look to enjoy several computer-animated films, notably Ratatouille and Soul. In keeping with the recent pattern of Academy Awards shows, there was no clear winner among the top nominees: Best Picture went to Coda, a romantic melodrama about the hearing child of a pair of deaf-mute parents who take it as an insult when she decides she wants to become a professional singer, which also won Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor to Troy Kotsur for playing the father. The filmmakers, to their credit, went with genuinely deaf actors for the roles of the parents, Kotsur and Marlee Matlin (who of course had long since won an Academy Award for Children of a Lesser God), and they’re the only deaf acting winners in Oscar history.

The Best Actress award went to Jessica Chastain for playing Tammy Faye Bakker in The Eyes of Tammy Faye, which also won for Best Makeup and Hairstyling (well, anyone who could reproduce the real Tammy Faye Bakker’s appearance and get within hailing distance of it deserved an award!), and Best Supporting Actress went to Ariana DeBose for West Side Story, becoming at least the third performer in history to win the same award as the actor or actress who played the part in an earlier film (the others were Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro for playing Vito Corleone and Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix for playing The Joker) – and she was clearly a lot more comfortable giving her speech than Rita Moreno when she won for the earlier version. DeBose told us she was “openly Queer,” so there were probably a lot of straight guys whose fantasies about her from seeing her breasts flopping around under her gown had them dashed (and no doubt some Lesbian viewers got their hopes up!). The biggest disappointment was the virtual snubbing of the film Belfast, which I expected would sweep the awards but got only Best Original Screenplay for Kenneth Branagh. (I remember when his marriage to Emma Thompson broke up after she won an Academy Award decades before he did.)

The biggest winner last night was the science-fiction epic Dune – or at least Dune, Part One since they only filmed the first half of the book – which won awards not only for Best Sound (they no longer give separate awards for sound editing and mixing) but Best Original Score, Best Cinematography, Best Visual Effects, Best Production Design and Best Editing: That’s six awards, but none in the marquee categories – but then the Academy has long considered science-fiction and fantasy films pretty much beneath their regard (the only science-fiction or fantasy film that has ever won Best Picture was the third in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and one of the biggest black marks in Academy history was the failure even to nominate Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey for Best Picture; the winner that year was Oliver!, a manipulative piece of musical treacle whose only redeeming qualities were the few shards of genuine emotion and drama left over from Charles Dickens’ original novel). The Best Director Oscar went to Jane Campion for The Power of the Dog; it was nice to see a second woman win Best Director and even nicer to see her win for a movie that has important female roles in it (the first, Katnryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, was a tale about men and the few women in it were just peripheral characters).

TThough the actual awards show was held in the Dolby nèe Kodsk Theatre, the opening song was a typically gargantuan production number featuring Beyoncé and her co-writer, Dixon, performing “Be Alive” from King Richard with a chorus dressed in pink. They took pains to inform us that the number was being staged in Compton – so it’s nice to know that that Southern California city has inspired better music than the rap garbage of N.W.A.’s album Straight Outta Compton – but it was still one of Beyoncé’s overdone productions. She didn’t win Best Song, either; that went to Billie Eilish (O’Connell) and her brother Finneas for the title song of the new James Bond movie No Time to Die: a good song, but to my mind the song that should have won was “Somehow You Do” from a film called Four Good Days, unexpectedly soulfully performed by Reba McIntire. I was amused not only that the winner for Best Costume Design was Jenny Beavan from the film Cruella, but she was wearing a costume she had deliberately designed herself to look like Cruella de Vil – albeit an older and suitably humbled version. And despite the relegation of the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award and the Board of Governors’ Lifetime Achievement Awards to ceremonies held before the telecast, there were so many interminable tributes to older movies – the 60th anniversary of the James Bond franchise, the 50th anniversary of The Godfather, the 30th anniversary of White Men Can’t Jump and the 28th anniversary of Pulp Fiction (from which Samuel L. Jackson and Uma Thurman both look like older versions of themselves but John Travolta is so bald and bloated he looks like he’s auditioning for the Syd Barrett story) – the show still ran 40 minutes over its scheduled three-hour time slot.