r>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night (March 12) I watched the 95th annual Academy Awards show on ABC, and my husband Charles arrived back from work in the middle of it – he got home at 6:45 p.m. and he was thus to be able to get home while it was still daylight, thanks to the time change. The show itself was the usual lumbering beast, slotted for three hours but actually lasting three hours and 40 minutes – though host Jimmy Kimmel joked that the awards show would last so long that at its end he’d say, “We now join ‘Good Morning, America,’ already in progress.” Speaking of Jimmy Kimmel, it was nice to see the Academy Awards telecast having one host. The concept of a host-less show, forced on the Academy the year Chris Rock was set to host but was thrown off at the last minute after some homophobic tweets of his were discovered online and the Academy couldn’t find a replacement in time, has really never worked. Kimmel did this impossible job as well as anyone other than Bob Hope or Billy Crystal ever has. His jow-keyed approach worked well and he was able to insert sly jokes about current events – like when he introduced the presenters for the best editing award by acknowledging Fox news host Tucker Carlson’s skill in editing down 41,000 hours of surveillance footage of the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol to four minutes of a tour group getting lost – without being too in-your-face about it.
The awards were an old-fashioned “sweep” for the film Everything Everywhere All at Once, which got 11 nominations (more than any other film) and won seven Oscars (also more than any other), including Best Picture, Best Director (for Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, nicknamed “The Daniels” by just about everybody connected with the film), Best Original Screenplay, Best Editing and three of he four acting awards. Michelle Yeoh won Best Actress, after a bizarre publicity tour for the movie that emphasized how important it would be for Asian audiences everywhere to have an Academy Award winner “who looks like me.” The Supporting Actor categories also went to Everything Everywhere All at Once, with Ke Huy Quan winning for Best Supporting Actor and Jamie Lee Curtis taking home the Best Supporting actress award over, among other people, an Asian cast-mate for the same movie, Stephanie Hsu (whose last name is pronounced “shoe” by the way). Curtis broadly hinted that her Oscar was a first-ever for her family in that her parents,Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, were both nominated but never won. The big losers last night were The Fabelmans – Steven Speilbrg’s biopic of himself (he called his family by another Jewish-sounding name but it was really The Spielbergs) and Elvis, which I was sure would win Best Actor for Austin Butler’s amazing performance in the title role.
Instead the Best Actor award went to Brendan Fraser for his performance in a movie I hadn’t heard of before, The Whale, ni which he plays a morbidly obese English professor who’s teaching his classes online but never shows his face to his students. The Whale was directed by Darren Aronofsky and written by Samuel D. Hunter based on his play from 2012, and I wonder just how they did this story on stage On film they used CGI technology to expand Fraser from his already stocky build (he’s no longer the drop-dead gorgeous hunk he was in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s in films like Gods and Monsters and the Universal reboots of The Mummy franchise, but maybe, as with Errol Flynn, Robert Taylor and Tom Selleck, he’s grown in acting chops what he’s lost in looks as he’s aged). The other winners for The Whale, makeup and hairstyling artists Judy Chin, Adrien Morot and Annemarie Bradley (though the film’s idmb.com page lists eight other makeup and hair people besides those three), admitted that most of Fraser’s belated appearance was created digitally so the prosthetics wouldn’t affect his face and he could therefore still act. My husband Charles said he was glad to see Fraser win because apparently he’d been the victim of a Gay version of Harvey Weinstein who went out of his way to destroy Fraser’s career once the actor wouldn’t “put out” for him.
I dug up an article from the December 5, 2022 issue of People that quoted Fraser in an interview on CBS Mornings to promote The Whale in which he discussed the alleged incident, which involved then-Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) president Philip Berk groping him at an HFPA function, Fraser was asked if the incident had “derailed” his career. Fraser repied, “Well, yes, because there's a system in place that is about power. And I had played by the rules up until that point. And I felt like, okay, now, suddenly, I've been violated. And it has gone too far. And I will no longer abide this." Fraser said this was why he did not attend this year’s Golden Globe Awards because the HFPA sponsors that show, though he attended the Oscars and gave a gracious acceptance speech. (The People story is at https://people.com/movies/brendan-fraser-says-2003-groping-incident-caused-him-emotional-and-personal-distress/.)
Aside from Fraser beating out Austil Butler for the Best Actor award, my biggest disapoiontment of the night was seeing Lady Gaga lose for best song after delivering an impassioned performance of her gospel-soul power ballad “Hold My Hand” from Top Gun: Maverick (easily the highest-grossing film of 2022). Both she and Rihanna, who sang a song called “Lift Me Up” from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (and was good, though nowhere near the sheer emotional power and drive of Lady Gaga), lost to a piece of (East) Indian dance music called “Naatu Naatu” from an Indian film called RRR. This was supposedly the first time a song from an Indian film has been nominated, even though Indian movies are notorious for inserting big production numbers at the ends of films whether the rest of the movie had any musical content or not. Though it hardly deserved an award against Lady Gaga’s masterpiece, at least “Naatu, Naatu” was infectious enough (it reminded me of “Soul Makossa,” the African-language hit by Manu Dibango – he was from Cameroon and the song was mostly written in Duala, the native tongue of Cameroon – in 1972 that sold out its first American release in a matter of hours and Atlantic signed with Dibango’s African record company for the U.S. rights; that record is credited with starting the disco craze of the 1970’s and Michael Jackson quoted its hook “Mama-ko, mama-sa, ma-ko-ma-ko-sa” in “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’”) that for a while I was thinking, “Forget K-Pop, here’s I-Pop!” As for Top Gun: Maverick, it won what my late roommate, home-care client and close friend John Primavera used to call “the ultimate consolation category,” Best Sound. (He had a long list of films that had won the award for Best Sound but nothing else.) And I also thought of John when Warner Bros. ran a promotional ad for their studio’s 100th anniversary this year that included not only clips from Warners’ own productions but also ones from The Wizard of Oz, Singin’ in the Rain and 2001: A Space Odyssey, all MGM films Warners has just acquired the rights to after several mergers and consolidations.
I had wondered if “The Daniels” were the first two-director team to win the Best Directing Oscar, but they weren’t; according to an article in Entertainment Weekly (https://ew.com/awards/oscars/2023-oscars-daniels-win-best-director-arent-first-duo/), in 1962 Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise won for the first version of West Side Story (though my understanding was that Robbins walked out of that film after fights with Wise; Robbins had directed West Side Story on stage but Wise was an experienced film professional while Robbins was a cinematic novice) and in 2008 brothers Joel and Ethan Coen won jointly for No Country for Old Men. One of the big surprises of the night was the sheer number of awards that went to the German remake of All Quiet on the Western Front, which not only took the award for “Best International Feature Film" (the latest attempt to find a P.C. name for what used to be the “Best Foreign-Language Film” category) but also for cinematography, production design and original score. (The last two were a bit ironic because the original All Quiet on the Western Front, directed by Lewis Milestone for Universal in 1930, won Best Picture but no other awards. Also Milestoine had just used a harmonica player for his score, since the musician he found was a homeless German immigrant who knew all the soldiers’ songs the Germans had used in World War I, and as for production design, all the winners had to do was look at the many extant World War I photographs in existence.)
There was plenty of evidence that in this bitterly divided country, the Hollywood community which runs the movie industry and hosts the Academy Awards aren at least rhetorically in the side of inclusivity and inclusion; Everything Everywhere all at Once got its sweep largely because it was promoted as a film about inclusion in general and Asian inclusion in particular,and the Best Documentary Feature award went to Navalny, a film about Alexei Navalny, who escaped Russia and the vengeance of Vladimir Putin after he was poisoned, allegedly on Pution’s orders, and taken to Germany – where as soon as he recovered he went back to Russia and was immediately arrested and has been in prison ever since. Navalny’s wife was not dumb enough to go back with him, and she made a predictable but heartfelt speech that she hopes one day to join her husband in afree and democratic Russia. Lots of luck with that: I’ve often written in these pages about how Germany has risen above its authoritarian past and become a fully functioning democracy since 1949, while Russia remains mired in autocratic one-man rule whether under the Czars, the Soviets or Putin.
