by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched the 90th annual Academy
Awards show at home, though he wanted a “festive” atmosphere so we ordered a
pizza delivered from Sicilian Thing (now that they deliver) and got it early
because we know there can be a big rush on these sorts of things on Oscar night
— one year we waited over an hour for a pizza delivery from Papa John’s (well
before they somehow got the reputation of being white supremacists’ favorite
pizza, much to the consternation of Papa John’s marketing department!) because
so many other people were calling in to have pizzas delivered the night of the
Oscars! In a lot of ways it’s not your father’s or grandfather’s Academy Awards
anymore — and not only because winners, nominees, presenters and Academy
officials alike were bending over backwards to show inclusiveness to women and
people of color (even though most of the winners were still white males — the
one female Best Director nominee, Greta Gerwig, didn’t win, and neither did the
pioneering first woman nominated for Best Cinematographer; and Jordan Peele won
for writing the anti-racist film Get
Out but not for directing or producing it) but also because the
days when one film would sweep most of the big awards are definitely over. The
simple fact is that the movie industry doesn’t make films that are both audience-pleasing blockbusters and films of real
quality anymore — there are no more Gone With the Winds, Lawrence of Arabias, Titanics
or Lord of the Rings. The biggest
movie of 2017, both in terms of box office and inclusion (a woman action lead and a woman director!), was Wonder Woman, and it didn’t get a single nomination because
superhero films are ghettoized into a “not Oscar-worthy” category even if
they’re great movies and
commercial successes. (You don’t believe me? See if any of these people who are
so loudly promoting “inclusion” give any nominations to The Black
Panther next year.)
Guillermo del Toro’s The
Shape of Water got more nominations than
any other film — 13 — and it did
win Best Picture as well as Best Director for del Toro (I haven’t seen it but
from the clips I’ve seen it looks like his attempt to do Creature
from the Black Lagoon only with the woman
the Creature is after genuinely falling in love with him, and I was a bit put
off by how much of the creature we
saw in the clips — I guess from the earlier trailers I was hoping for a more
Lewtonian treatment in which the creature would be suggested and we wouldn’t get that good a look at him), but it
won only two other awards: Best Score for Alexandre Desplat (one of those
modern minimalist composers who are just sort of there, providing commentary on the action but without
actually making themselves felt as an integral part of the film the way
classic-era composers like Korngold and Steiner did) and Best Production
Design. The biggest single award that irked me was that Best Song went to
“Remember Me,” another anodyne ditty from a Disney-Pixar movie, and not either
of the two songs which received incandescent performances and were, to my mind,
far superior: “Mighty River” from the film Mudbound — co-written and performed by Mary J. Blige, who
also appeared in the film and won a Best Supporting Actress nomination; Blige
did the song on the show and turned in a searing soul performance that shows
what a great singer she is when she turns off the drum machines and gets back
to her roots in the Black church — and “This Is Me” from the P. T. Barnum
biopic The Greatest Showman, sung
by a woman singer “of size” who’d probably be good casting, physically and vocally, if anyone wants to make a biopic of Mama
Cass Elliott. (I’d heard “This Is Me” before but never sung with such searing
power and emotion as it got last night — just as a few years ago, when “Let It
Go” from the film Frozen won,
Idina Menzel’s performance of the song on Oscar night was far more intense and
emotionally riveting than the one on the actual soundtrack.)
I liked Jimmy
Kimmel as host — I still think the only two people who’ve ever really mastered the job are Bob Hope and Billy Crystal, but Kimmel was better than most, personable and genuinely witty instead of just dumb or
snide. (It was Jimmy Kimmel,
wasn’t it? I keep getting him and Jimmy Fallon mixed up; can’t one of you call yourself “James” instead?) His oddest
moment was when he brought a $20,000 Jet-Ski on stage — complete with a
back-stage announcer promoting its virtues in the style of the assistant MC on
a quiz show — and said he was awarding it to the person who gave the shortest acceptance speech, which turned out to be the
costume design winner at 36 seconds. Despite that inducement towards brevity
(one of my favorite Oscar anecdotes was the year after Greer Garson gave her
seemingly endless acceptance speech for Mrs. Miniver, Bob Hope joked that the Academy had made a new
rule: your acceptance speech could not be longer than your film) the show still
lasted almost four hours, but it was a tribute to Fallon’s skill as MC, the
inclusion of montages from movie history (at least one of which made a mistake:
it was a tribute to Best Actress winners and it included a clip from Bette
Davis in Of Human Bondage — not one of the two movies she won for, Dangerous and Jezebel) and an overall positive theme of the show — instead of making snide
jokes about Donald Trump, Harvey Weinstein or any of the other obvious targets,
the Academy and its guests decided to present the “inclusion” theme in a
positive way, pointing out how many of the winners were immigrants and the wide
variety of nationalities represented among the nominees — the show didn’t seem that long and didn’t seem to drag the way some
previous Oscar shows have.
Of course, there was also the inevitable joking
about the famous fiasco that happened last year, when La La Land was named as Best Picture and then one of its
producers leveled that the real
winner was Moonlight — the camera
even zoomed in for a closeup of the envelope containing the Best Picture winner
and Fallon announced that this
was the envelope that would be opened on the air — and they even got Warren
Beatty and Faye Dunaway, stars of Bonnie and Clyde 51 years ago, to repeat the Best Picture
presentation they’d bollixed up the last time and give the Oscar to The
Shape of Water. There were other things
about the show that amused me, including the fact that all five of the nominees for Best Visual Effects — Blade
Runner 2049 (the winner); Guardians
of the Galaxy, part 2; Kong: Skull Island; Star Wars: The Last Jedi; and War for the Planet of the Apes — were sequels (and some of them, including Kong and War,
were sequels of remakes or reboots!) — and of those five films only Blade
Runner 2049 was nominated in any other
category. Overall it was a good program and worth seeing even though Charles
and I, who hardly ever go to movie theatres anymore — we’ve accustomed
ourselves to waiting for the DVD’s to come out — had only seen two of the
nominated films, Logan (the last
in the X-Men cycle featuring Hugh
Jackman as Wolverine) and the documentary Abacus: Small Enough to
Jail, which ran as a PBS Frontline special on September 12, 2017.
