by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The 86th annual
Academy Awards turned out to be a well-turned program — it ran just a few
minutes over the 3 ½-hour time slot ABC allotted to it — but also a dull one.
Ellen DeGeneres was tapped as the host for the second time (she did it before
in 2005) but it seems as if years of hosting a talk show have really taken the
edge off her humor. She took a “selfie” of herself and posted it to Twitter
(the biggest acknowledgment of what century this is was the heavy references to
social media in general and Twitter in particular; at one point Ellen claimed
to have crashed the whole Twitter network, which she hadn’t), and she also ordered
three pizzas delivered as if they would be enough to feed the Academy’s entire
live audience. The awards were oddly split: for much of the evening Gravity (a peril-in-outer-space thriller with George
Clooney and Sandra Bullock as astronauts thrown from a damaged spacecraft and
fighting for their survival — not a movie I’m in any hurry to see; my reaction
was basically, “I’ve already seen Apollo 13”) seemed headed for an old-fashioned sweep. It
ultimately won seven awards, more than any other single film, but the Best
Picture went to 12 Years a Slave (once again the Academy’s weird prejudices strike: they gave 12
Years a Slave Best Picture but passed
over its Black director, Steve McQueen, in favor of Alfonso Cuarón for Gravity — so instead of the first African-American Best
Director winner we got the first Mexican Best Director winner), which also won for Best Supporting Actress (Lupita
Nyong’o) and Best Adapted Screenplay (John Ridley — they’ll give a Black guy a
writing award but not one for
directing). The Great Gatsby, one of the few films on the nominated list Charles and I actually saw
together, won awards for production design and costume design — both of them
for Catherine Martin, who got her job by sleeping with the boss (she’s the wife
of the film’s director, Baz Luhrmann) and wore one of the most spectacular
costumes of the night: apparently she was determined to show the Academy and
the international TV audience that she’s just a good designer for herself
off-screen as she is for her husband’s casts on-screen!
By far the most
powerful moments of the telecast were two with women singing; Darlene Love came
up as part of the ensemble to accept the Best Documentary Feature award for the
film 20 Feet from Stardom (a film about backing vocalists) and did a stunning a cappella version of “His Eye Is On the Sparrow,” and later
in the show Idina Menzel, a singer I’d never heard of before, came on and did
an absolutely riveting version of one of the nominated songs, “Let It Go” from
the computer-animated film Frozen. Menzel is the best white woman soul singer I’ve heard since Duffy, and
I’m sure it’s the sheer power of her voice (singing a quite good number that’s
absolutely right for her) — she did the song in the film itself — that helped
the song win the award over competition from U2 (a low-keyed all-acoustic
number called “Ordinary Love” from a film about one of Bono’s pet subjects, the
fight against apartheid: Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom), Pharrell Williams (who came out not only wearing
that silly Mountie hat with which he disfigured the Grammy Awards but an even
sillier Mountie jacket as well;
recalling that at least according to the script of Happy Face Killer, Keith Jesperson committed his first murder when
the trick he’d brought home insisted on trying on his Mountie hat and sent him
into a murderous rage, I couldn’t help but wonder where Jesperson was when we
needed him!) and someone named Karen O. There were a few of the usual tributes
to older movies, including a 75th anniversary salute to The Wizard
of Oz that featured all three of
Judy Garland’s children, Liza Minnelli and Lorna and Joey Luft, as well as a
performance of “Over the Rainbow” by Pink. That was an odd experience because
Pink has quite a good, powerful voice but little sense of phrasing; she’s great
in her usual material but clueless as to how to project a standard, and I
couldn’t help but wish the Academy had got Lady Gaga instead (Gaga proved in
her marvelous version of “The Lady Is a Tramp” with Tony Bennett on the Duets
II album that she does know how to phrase a song of that vintage!).
