93rd Annual Academy Awards (Ac admen of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, ABC-TV, aired April 25, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night was the 93rd annual Academy Awards, and if the previous weekend’s Academy of Country Music Awards had been an example of how to do an awards telecast in the middle of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and make it look as normal as possible, the Oscars went to a bare-bones presentation that sometimes made it look like The Academy Awards of Dr. Caligari. Instead of using the Kodak Theatre or whatever it’s called this week (Kodak withdrew its subsidy when the advent of digital cameras and picture-taking smartphones pretty much demolished their main business of selling film), the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences took over Union Station in Los Angeles (the locale was familiar to Charles since he’s taken several train rides to L.A. and he recognized soem of the artistic landmarks). I suspect they did that because they needed a big enough space to accommodate everyone they wanted to invite and still maintain the sacred six-foot “social distancing” (a phrase I totally loathe, hope will die when the pandemic ends but fear will linger, especially if John Brunner’s prediction in his novel The Sheep Look Up is correct and as the environment deteriorates we’ll have one pandemic after another and a new one will spring up as soon as the old one ends).

Instead of an orchestra, there was a D.J. – making the Oscars look like a low-budget wedding whose participants hire a D.J. because they can’t afford a band – named Questlove, who was also credited (under his birth name, or at least his off-booth name, Ahmir Thompson) as the show’s musical director. (This had the interesting side effect of allowing the award winners to go on and on in their acceptance speeches without fear of being “played off.”) The Academy had already pioneered the “hostless” format after an incident a few years ago in which the Black comedian they’d hired as host turned out to have posted a number of anti-Queer slurs on his Twitter page, and the P.C. Enforcement and Thought Control Police came down hard on him and demanded the Academy fire him. They did, but there wasn’t enough time to recruit another host in time for the ceremony, so they did without a host and decided to continue that in future years. The show opened with Regina King, African-American actress and director of the current film One Night in Miami, delivering a diatribe against the shooting of unarmed African-Americans by police officers. She interrupted her speech by acknowledging that there were some people in the audience on TV that might not want to hear her “preach” – and I told Charles, “Hey, I don’t want to hear her preach – and I agree with her!”

King’s speech was an opening declaration of a point made throughout the program: that in this highly divided country, politically and culturally, the artists – or at least the ones that participate in filmmaking at the level of Academy Award consideration – are part of the Left side of the culture, committed (at least nominally) to equality for women, people of color and what are hideously called, in yet another example of P.C. language I can’t stand, “LGBTQ peope.” (If there had been a Pride Parade last year I would have marched wearing a custom-made T-shirt that would have said, “I am a Gay man, not an ‘LGBTQ+ Person’!”) The producers of the show seemed to be going out of their way to put Black faces on TV as much as possible – though the Academy voters foiled what they were probably hoping would be their biggest coup. Instead of building up to the Best Picture award as the last item (of which the winner was La La Land – oops, Nomadland), they gave it second from last and finished the show with Best Actress and Best Actor. The rumor mill on Twitter is claiming they did that because they were expecting the late Black actor Chadwick Boseman to win Best Actor for his last film, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom – just as a decade ago they gave the award posthumously to Heath Ledger for his role as the Joker in The Dark Knight, in which he was terrible (though at least partly that was a consolation Oscar because he’d been passed over for his genuinely award-worthy performance in Brokeback Mountain).

Instead the Academy, like last year’s Democratic Presidential primary voters, went for safety and gave both top acting awards to old white people – Anthony Hopkins for playing a man with Alzheimer’s in The Father and Frances McDormand for playing an RV nomad in Nomadland. (So far McDormand has won three Oscars, none of them for films directed by her husband, Joel Coen – though he gave her her star-making role in Fargo and had to win an argument with his producer to do it.) I had the Los Angeles Times list of the Oscar nominees out throughout the show and marked off the winners, though at one point with my diminishing eyesight and the decision of the Times to print the category names in nearly unreadable colored type (at least nearly unreadable to my eyes), I marked Tenet as having won for Production Design when it really won for Visual Effects and Mank won for Production Design. I was relieved that Mank – yet another salvo in the long-standing campaign of historical revisionism about the film Citizen Kane, which for some reason has become the cause célèbre in the ongoing campaign to exalt writers, not directors, as the real creators of films – got only two awards, Production Design and Cinematography. I would have gone ballistic if Mank had won the Best Picture Oscar a previous Academy wretchedly denied to Citizen Kane itself (much the way I found it loathsome when the Pulitzer Prize for music, outrageously denied to Duke Ellington in 1965 after the awards committee had voted him what amounted to a lifetime achievement award but the overall board of the Pulitzer Foundation nixed him, gave the music award to the thoroughly disgusting, ugly and evil crap dished out by someone or something named Kendrick Lamar).

The big loser last night was Disney’s blockbuster musical Hamilton, a film the studio was planning to be its big summer theatrical blockbuster of 2020, only it ran afoun not only of the pandemic but also of Disney’s decision to release it exclusively on its “Disney+” streaming channel and charge a $30 payment to watch it. Hamilton wasn’t nominated for anything, presumably because it ran afoul of the Academy rule that a movie must be shown theatrically in order to qualify – a rule they tweaked this year to allow films to be nominated that had been planned for theatrical release or had actually played in one of the U.S. states that reopened them, but apparently not enough to admit Hamilton. Had it been eligible, Hamilton could very likely have done an old-fashioned sweep of a kind we haven’t seen since the last film in the Lord of the Rings cycle in 2004, especially since the reports I’ve heard indicate it’s a good movie and not the disaster of previous attempts to film mega-hit Broadway musicals that turned into mega-flop films, like A Chorus Line and Cats. Instead the Academy followed its modern pattern of awarding movies like a Chinese menu, with one from film A and two from film B.

As for the awards show itself, Charles liked the bare-bones format more than I did – I didn’t miss the bad jokes and “in” references to film history but I did miss the live performances of the Best Song nominees. I happened to catch a marvelous performance of one of the nominees, “Hear My Voice” from The Trial of the Chicago 7, and thought that should have won; instead the award went to another 1960’s-themed song sung by a Black performer, “Fight for You” from Judas and the Black Messiah (a good song but, at least to me, hardly at the level of emotion or beauty of “Hear My Voice”). It seemed yet another sign of my age that the Academy was honoring historical films about events – the Chicago 7 trial and the FBI and Chicago Police Department’s assassination of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, both from 1969 – of which I have vivid memories from when they happened. The one attempt at a “production” that occurred – Questlove playing songs from 1980’s and 1990’s movies and seeing if audience members could recall whether they were nominated for Best Song and, if so, if they won – included Prince’s “Purple Rain” (not nominated, though Prince won for the overall score) and Donna Summer’s “Last Dance” (which did win, though to me it was one of those frustrating Donna Summer records that began with a slow introduction in free tempo that revealed what a beautiful voice she had and how she was a master of phrasing – frankly, she would have been a much better choice for the Billie Holiday biopic than Diana Ross, and an assignment like that would have got her out of the straitjacket of disco; as it was, in “Last Dance” and her cover of “MacArthur Park” she luxuriated in the slow introductions and then the tempo sped up;, the drum machines kicked in and Summer had to spit out the lyrics as fast as possible to keep up with those relentless rhythms).

Speaking of Billie Holiday biopics, one was nominated last night – it was called The United States versus Billie Holiday and was about her 1947 drug bust and nine-month prison term thereafter, and starred Audra Day – who, like Viola Davis as another great Black singer, Ma Rainey, was passed over for Best Actress in favor of McDormand. Davis strode through the hall like a colossus; she’s an actress I’ve admired since I saw her in a minor role in the romantic drama Nights in Rodanthe, which was mostly about an affair between Diane Lane and Richard Gere but took off and flew when Davis’s character was on screen. Davis is better looking than Ma Rainey – the one surviving photo of the blues queen, the one that’s on all her album covers, is of a surprisingly homely woman given how big a star she was in the Black community of the 1920’s – but visually she caught the spirit of a blues queen, and though I haven’t seen Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom I suspect she and Boseman both deserved the acting awards for that film. (In fact I realized during the show that Charles and I had seen only one of the nominees, the live-action version of Disney’s Mulan – and that one mainly because it actually came out on DVD instead of being relegated to “streaming.”)

When they were first televised in the early 1950’s the Academy Awards were actually something that brought the country together culturally – most people had seen the nominated films, or at least heard enough about them they could do a fair amount of judging whether the awards were deserved – and, with the movie studios still maintaining a fierce stand against TV (ironically, they would save themselves as businesses by producing shows for TV!) and embargoing their stars from appearing on it, the Academy Awards telecasts were your only chance to see major movie stars on the home screen. Today the home screen has become so dominant there was a sort of desperate pleading in Frances McDormand’s acceptance speech literally begging people to see her movie and the other nominees in theatres even if they’ve already watched them as home streams. I’m not sure movie theatres will recover as a business from the pandemic (especially not if there are a few more worldwide disease outbreaks of comparable scope), though I could be wrong – much of the progress made in moving people away from centralized institutions like offices and schools is already being undone as the pandemic recedes.