by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The 92nd annual Academy Awards was most notable
for the surprise Best Picture win for the South Korean movie Parasite, which I’ve been hearing a lot of “buzz” about —
mostly from film critics outraged that it didn’t sweep the previous awards
shows. The Golden Globes had given their two Best Pictures to Quentin
Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood for “Best Comedy/Musical” even though it’s neither a
comedy nor a musical, and Sam Mendes’ 1917 for “Best Drama.” I had assumed the Academy would give the Best
Picture Oscar to one of those two, even though Quentin Tarantino is still
considered one of the Bad Boys of Hollywood for the excessive violence in his
movies and the liberties he takes with history (in Inglourious
Basterds — the only fllm of his I’ve
actually seen — he brought World War II to a decidedly different ending than
the one history supplied, and my understanding is that in Once Upon a
Time … in Hollywood he has an over-the-hill
Western movie star and his stunt double kill off Charles Manson and his gang
before they have a chance to kill Sharon Tate and her friends) and his
reputation has not mellowed with
age the way Martin Scorsese’s has. Instead they gave the award to Parasite, a movie I suspect not that many Americans outside
the Academy membership have actually seen, for what might be the same reasons
they gave it to Moonlight instead
of La La Land two years ago in
what still stands as one of the most infamous snafus in Academy history. (At the start of the show Tom
Hanks joked that there won’t be any similar mistakes this year because they’ve
adopted the Iowa caucus system of reporting the results.)
Instead the director
of Parasite, Bong Joon Ho (who,
in accordance with the Asian system of putting the family name first and the
given names last, was referred to as “Mr. Bong” and some people got a good
laugh out of that), kept getting called for award after award when all he
wanted to do was go out and celebrate his win in the “Best International Film”
category (name-changed this year from “Best Foreign-Language Film”) by getting
drunk on whatever it is he drinks (I asked Charles what Koreans drink, and he
said Soju — the Korean version of sake — though he also is sure they have all
the major Western spirits just like other Asian countries do: remember that in
the film Lost in Translation the
company that flew aging, over-the-hill Western star Bill Murray to Japan to do
an endorsement commercial was a real company called Suntory which makes
whiskey), and instead he kept getting called back to the stage for award after
award after award until he, his film and a dumpy-looking older woman who was
apparently one of its multiple producers (Charles joked that there were more
Koreans on that stage than there are in the K-Pop boy band BTS) and who made me
joke, “I didn’t know they had Jewish mothers in Korea,” all won the big one.
Lorraine Ali, TV critic for the Los Angeles Times, published a rather pissy instant review of the show
lamenting that since virtually all the nominees were white people — and mostly
white men, at that (the biggest snub of the year was the good old boys in the
Directors’ Guild of America refusing to nominate Greta Gerwig for the latest
version of Little Women) — the
show filled the performance sections with as many people of color as they could
find, starting with Janelle Monáe and Billy Porter in an entertaining but
somewhat overblown song about the people and movies that didn’t get nominated.
The high point of the show was the
spectacular performance of the song “Stand Up” from Harriet, the biopic about Harriet Tubman, by the film’s
star, Cynthia Erivo (even though it turns out she’s not African-American but
African-British), who also co-wrote the song. Though we’ve heard a million of
these stand-up-to-oppression songs before, Erivo and the Black choir who
accompanied her delivered a riveting, emotion-filled performance that made me
think Erivo would be the perfect person to star in a biopic of Nina Simone.
Alas, as Charles pointed out, Harriet didn’t do well enough at the box office to make that likely — that
will probably lie on the ash heap of my dream biopics along with one about
Sister Rosetta Tharpe starring Brittany Howard of Alabama Shakes, and one about
Janis Joplin starring Maren Morris (though one of the biopics I dreamed about actually did get made
— Queen Latifah playing Bessie Smith — and, aside from the phony and
counter-factual ending, it was quite good). The low point of the show was a
horrible rap number featuring Eminem — Lorraine Ali ridiculed the Academy for
dredging up a performer who had his 15 minutes 18 years ago, while all I could
think during the performance was, “I hope I live long enough to see rap cease
to be popular.” About midway through them was the “In Memoriam” segment, which
was up to date enough to include the recently departed (at 103!) Kirk Douglas
and was accompanied by Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas performing the
Beatles’ song “Yesterday.” (If I were keeping a list of the artists I thought
were least likely ever to do a
Beatles cover, Billie Eilish would have been on it.) Charles also commented
that the win for the film Ford vs. Ferrari in Best Sound Editing was the confirmation of my late roommate/home-care
client John Primavera’s theory that the sound categories function as
consolation prizes for films that don’t win anything else. (There used to be
only one sound category, Sound Recording; now there are two, Sound Mixing and
Sound Editing, and the Sound Mixing category went to 1917 in what I thought was a warm-up for it winning Best
Picture … well, I’ve been wrong many times before.)
The multiple announcers —
for the second year in a row the Academy decided to do without a host, and I
have mixed feelings about that (a great host like Bob Hope or Billy Crystal can
really tie the show together, but there aren’t that many people left at that
talent level) — ultimately pointed out that Parasite was the first Best Picture ever in a language other
than English, which provoked Charles and some of his Twitter friends to point
out that the very first Academy Award for Best Picture went to William
Wellman’s Wings, a World War I
aviation drama that was a silent film. (Then again, I would count Wings as an English-language film because most of the
Academy voters would have seen it with intertitles in English.) I reminded him
that in 1927 the Academy gave two
Best Picture winners, Wings for
“Best Production” and Friedrich Murnau’s Sunrise for “Most Artistic Quality of Production,” and quite
frankly I wish the Academy would adopt that again. That way they could give
Best Picture awards to the movies people actually go see, like Star
Wars 9: The Rise of Skywalker, which got
relegated to one nomination in
one of the effects categories even though it was easily the most popular film of
2019, while the indies like Moonlight and Parasite could get
the Artistic Quality award. (This is essentially the reverse of the Academy’s
short-lived proposal to give a special award to “Outstanding Achievement in
Popular Film,” which was widely laughed at and not pursued.) The acting awards
were a mixed bag, with Best Actor going to Joaquin Phoenix for Joker (making him the second actor, after the late Heath Ledger, to win for
playing the Joker!); Best Actress to Renée Zellwegger for playing Judy Garland
in Judy (and to her credit she
gave the Academy the dissing it deserved for never having given the real Judy
Garland an award … though that’s not quite true since she won a short-lived
miniature Oscar for “Best Performance by a Juvenile” for The Wizard
of Oz); Best Supporting Actor to Brad Pitt
for Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood
and Best Supporting Actress to Laura Dern for Marriage Story (and among the people she thanked were her parents,
Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd).
The 92nd annual Academy Awards show
moved at a pretty decent clip — though it still lasted three hours and 40
minutes — and perhaps the most disappointing aspect of it was how lame the
writing was, including a long gag sequence between two women dressed in red who
made jokes that supposedly lampooned the industry’s sexism but just kept
landing with dull thuds. There’s a lot to kid about #OscarsSoWhite and #OscarsSoMale (though I liked the fact
that they brought on a woman conductor to lead the orchestra in the excerpts
from the nominated scores — and a woman composer, Hildur
Guðnadóttir, won for her score for Joker — the first woman to win in 20 years) and the Oscar
writers took the easiest and cheapest shots. There were also quite a few
political comments that made it clear that in America’s Great Divide most of
its creative filmmakers are on the anti-Trump, pro-diversity, pro-cosmopolitan
(I’m still reeling from the shock I felt when I read an interview with former
Trump adviser Steve Bannon in which he used the word “cosmopolitan” as an
insult!), pro-immigrant and pro-environmentalist side. Joaquin Phoenix used his
acceptance speech for a long political tirade which alternately annoyed and
bored me even though I agreed with most of what he was saying; he sounded more
like he was running for President than accepting an acting award, and any
moment I expected to hear an announcement that he was the real winner of the
Iowa caucuses. The fact that the mavens of America’s movie industry talk a much
better and more pr wogressive political game than they actually play is just
another of the many contradictions of capitalism in general and entertainment
capitalism in particular — along with the irony that while most of the
celebrities who speak out politically are more or less Left of center, the ones
that have actually got elected to office (Ronald Reagan, George Murphy, Clint
Eastwood, Sonny Bono) have generally been men of the Right.
