by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I watched the 87th
annual Academy Awards telecast, a rather dispiriting spectacle — it was compact
and well organized, lasting just three hours and 40 minutes (almost an hour
shorter than the Grammy Awards), but it wasn’t terribly interesting, though
having surprisingly little skin in the game (I don’t think I’ve seen any of the eight films that were nominated for Best
Picture) I may simply not have cared that much if one intellectually
pretentious movie with a single-word seven-letter title beginning with “B” beat
out another intellectually pretentious movie with a single-word seven-letter
title beginning with “B” for Best Picture. The two movies in question were Birdman and Boyhood, and Birdman (saddled
with the ridiculous subtitle Or: The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) won. It’s the story of an actor who once was a
major movie star playing a superhero — cast with Michael Keaton, an actor who
was once a major movie star playing a superhero (Batman in Tim Burton’s two
films involving the character) — who’s attempting a comeback on the Broadway
stage and whose divo
hissy-fits are getting in the way. I hadn’t realized it until last night that
it’s really a remake of the John Barrymore plot thread of Dinner at Eight (1933)! Charles, who came home from work after the
whole thing was over, said he’d seen Boyhood on his most recent trip to the Bay Area to see his
family; Boyhood got Brownie points for the
sheer audacity of its concept (a boy matures from 5 to 17 and director Richard
Linklater actually filmed the movie in bits and pieces over 12 years so that
instead of casting the boy with multiple actors he could use the same one,
Einar Coltrane, as he naturally aged — there’ve been precedents, including
Michael Apted’s Up documentaries and the
cycle of five films François Truffaut made with actor Jean-Pierre Léaud over
the years, starting with The 400 Blows, that had Léaud play the same character as he aged from troubled
adolescent to middle-aged man). Boyhood’s only win was Patricia Arquette for Best Supporting Actress (playing
Einar Coltrane’s mom) and the only win for Selma, which eked out a Best Picture nomination though
its Black woman director was shut out of that category, was Best Song (John
Legend and rapper Common for “Glory” — they took the songwriting credit under
their real names, John Stephens and Lonnie Lynn.
Birdman won four awards, including three of the big ones —
Best Picture, Best Director (Alejandro
G. Iñárritu, who joked during his acceptance speech that he’s
the second Mexican director to win in a row) and Best Original Screenplay as
well as Best Cinematography — while the other major winners were The Grand
Budapest Hotel and, of all things, Whiplash, which is basically the boot-camp scenes of Full Metal Jacket transferred to the world
of music education, with the sadistic teacher browbeating his charges into
either better performances or nervous breakdowns. In some respects the
production numbers were stronger than the awards portions of the show — Lady
Gaga once again showed off her chops as a standards singer with a medley of
songs from The Sound of Music (she’s more suited to the urbanity of the Rodgers and Hart songs than
the sentimentality of the Rodgers and Hammerstein ones, but she still did quite
well) that introduced a surprisingly well-preserved Julie Andrews as one of the
presenters. Host Neil Patrick Harris did a leaden opening number, yet another
tribute in song to the movie industry, with a pretend heckler from the
audience; he also told some pretty lame jokes about the male participants’
bodies (I expect him any day now to come out with an ad in which he says, “I’m
not Gay; I just play one on awards shows!”) but he was a decent, inoffensive
host. Indeed, “inoffensive” was probably the word that would best describe last
night’s show — no wardrobe malfunctions, no bizarre production numbers like
that one they did one year in which Rob Lowe looked like he was about to lead a
gang-rape of Snow White — though there was a lot of political and social commentary, not only from
people you’d expect it (like Laura Poitras, director of the Best Feature
Documentary winner CitizenFour, about Edward Snowden) but people you wouldn’t (like Patricia
Arquette). Best Actress went to Julianne Moore for playing an Alzheimer’s
patient in Still Alice — a
movie that won nothing else — and Best Actor went to Eddie Redmayne for playing
Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything (so the guy who played the straight British
scientist beat out Benedict Cumberbatch, the guy who played the Gay British scientist Alan Turing in The Imitation
Game). One can readily imagine
the knives coming out on talk radio and Fox News about “liberal Hollywood” at
its most self-congratulatory — and the show did put an awful lot of people of color on stage to
make up for how few of them the Academy actually nominated for awards!
