Gone Gold – The 86th Academy Awards
Was 12 Years A Slave really the best picture? Of course not. It wasn’t even the best of the nominated films.

The Academy didn’t really get anything wrong this year, but maybe there were some things they could have got more right.  Was 12 Years A Slave really the best picture? Of course not. It wasn’t even the best of the nominated films. Nebraska was a black and white paean to normal Americans losing, and made us realize how little life has changed for the disenfranchised majority—and how sadly far we’ve come cinematically—from the golden years of film in the bleak 1970s. But I suppose 12 Years A Slave was no surprise; ah, that inevitable, annual Oscar night disappointing feeling of surprise.  You can’t really bet against slavery on the Left Coast, any more than you can against the Holocaust (Best Documentary Short: The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life).  The best picture of the year was in another category, and it didn’t win there, either.

It was an eerily informal affair this year, sort of like the Golden Globes. It’s usually daunting and important, like a place full of tuxes always is with earnest speeches (Greer Garson’s speech when she won for Mrs. Miniver [1942] was five and half minutes long, though some claim it was more like an hour an half). Like the Nobels. No one said ‘sucks’ or got drunk.  That was the Golden Globes.  In fact, the rare indecorous misdemeanor was so momentous as to become historical, like Marlon Brando sending a fake Indian up to accept his award for The Godfather (1972) or when a streaker upstaged David Niven , who upstaged him back. They used to cut away to clips when someone was embarrassing themselves. This relaxed informality was in large part due to Ellen Degeneres, who’s like a next door neighbor from Tales In the City or some James L. Brooks film: funny, friendly, ordering pizza, taking selfies, hanging out in the crowd like it was a talk show.  Everyone used to be more reverent, or petrified of incurring the wrath of the Academy. This year they were mugging, photobombing, and rolling their eyes when their nomination clips played. The Oscars are not supposed to be treated lightly. That’s the Golden Globes.

Stand and Deliver

Were there some pharmaceuticals in the backstage goodie bags? It was a weird energy. They were antsy, couldn’t keep in their seats. I’m not sure what the record is for standing ovations, but surely tonight beat it.  Sidney Poitier got one. Good. Spike Jonze got one when he won Best Screenplay for Her (the man who gave us Being John Malkovich is an Oscar winner; this is suddenly a much nicer planet to live on).  Cate Blanchett, Matthew McConaughey, John Ridley as writer, 12 Years A Slave as film all got one.  Pink got one, when she sang ‘Over the Rainbow’. Karen O. got one when she sang ‘Moon Song’. Bette Midler got when she sang ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’. You didn’t even have to win anything, or even be nominated, all you had to do was sing. Even if you weren’t supposed to: Darlene Love got one for singing a gospel number when 20 Feet From Stardom won Best Documentary.

Nonsense and Sensibility

There was no sweep for any one film, which was nice, but surprisingly nothing for American Hustle, which cost me a few pounds, and no Nebraska, which cost me my good mood.

Was it wrong to give 20 Feet From Stardom Best Documentary?  No.

Would it have been more right to give it to Act of Killing? Act of Killing was the best film of the year, documentary or narrative, short or feature.

Was it right that the adjectively incorrect The Great Gatsby won Costume and Production Design?  It was. Gatsby, like all Baz Luhrman films, had production design ejaculate all over every 40-foot-high frame, sheer energy and inventiveness. You can like Volkswagens without liking the Third Reich.  It was nice to see a meritocracy instead of an oligarchy. Dallas Buyer’s Club for Hair and Make-up was another example of this sort of good sense.

Gravity won seven Oscars. Was this right? Sometimes. For Visual Effects, beyond a doubt. For Cinematography, not so much so. Yes, they had to invent new stuff, create new ways to see things, but the machinery seemed more in aid of the industry-changing special effects. The old notion of cinematography was of painting with light (through an entire movie), capturing it instead of coloring it in, or creating it, in post. Should have been Nebraska.  For Sound Mixing and Sound Editing? Absolutely.  What was even more impressive than just imagining and then making sounds no one ever heard before, like a solar panel being sheared off by space debris, Gravity made us experience a vacuum. The visuals couldn’t have done that, not without the excellent sound design. Alfonso Cuaron himself won two, for Editing (ironic, being the King of Long Takes) and Director. Great. I’ll just pretend it was for Children of Men.

Was Frozen winning Best Animated Feature just? A lot of recent animated films are rife with tween references and clichés, and will not become classics because they’re not timeless. But Frozen was a proper film, a proper musical, where the music and story were perfectly integrated, no slapped-on pop songs or mall lingo. Best Animated Feature, yes, but the song, ‘Let It Go,’ was a traditional choice. ‘The Moon Song’ from Her or ‘Happy’ from Despicable Me 2 would have been more imaginative. Or ‘Please Mr. Kennedy’ from Inside Llewyn Davis would have been really imaginative, since it wasn’t nominated. But the acceptance speech from Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez (husband and wife?  Brother and sister?  Just a coincidence?) was exceedingly charming, a rhyming tandem that actually made a list of people we don’t know enjoyable. Congratulations.

Ponderables

Why aren’t the Honorary Oscars given airtime anymore?  They stopped awhile back—I think it was just before Jean-Luc Godard won one, which I couldn’t wait to see—a fervently leftist anti-Hollywood provocateur on stage, with an audience of billions. Anyway, this is the kind of stuff we want to see—history, while it’s still breathing. People who watch the Oscars love films, and the legacy. Steve Martin and Angela Lansbury winning this year were fine, but there are others out there, as In Memoriam pointed out, that should be honoured before it’s too late. The strangest one was the Honorary Oscar given to analogue, to celluloid, to perhaps tens of thousands of people who worked in labs for the last 119 years!  Talk about giving one before it’s dead and gone!  And Chris Nolan, ever the atavistic auteur (and thank God for that) presented it, not as a tribute, but as though a call to arms. The managed to stuff in not one but two (or was it three?) Movie Heroes tributes (the arbitrary ‘theme’ of the show), and a Wizard of Oz tribute. They couldn’t find time for actual people to actually get awards?

The atmosphere seemed to get precipitously chillier when John Ridley won Best Adapted Screenplay for 12 Years A Slave. As he walked by Steve McQueen, the director wouldn’t even turn his head to acknowledge the writer of his movie, and clapped in a mockery of applause. And Ridley, in his speech, didn’t thank McQueen. And McQueen, when he won Best Picture, didn’t thank Ridley. A troubling mystery!

The Best of Speeches, the Worst of Speeches

And, dear god, the best of speeches the worst of speeches. The best were the supporting actors, the worst were the leading actors.  Lupito Nyong’o was touching, teary, with none of the embarrassment that that usually entails. It was honest. And Jared Leto’s acceptance was clear and assured, bringing to bear AIDS, tolerance, gratitude, the looming international crisis, and never once seeming overbearing or mawkish, just reasonable and affecting. Shows you the power of words when the delivery is with calm conviction and not bombast. And it was a good win, and not surprising; the Academy loves feverishly straight men playing gays, particularly effeminate ones, or ones with AIDS, or cross-dressing ones—Tom Hanks in Philadelphia, William Hurt in Kiss of the Spider Woman, Sean Penn in Milk, Christopher Plummer in Beginners, Philip Seymour Hoffman for Capote—so this was a hat trick and left no chance for Jonah Hill, who just proved he’s a fine actor (and more than a little responsible for DiCaprio turning in his best, loosest performance in years), or Michael Fassbender, in yet another watertight performance, dangerous, and unbalanced, a victim and emblem of his time (pretty much like all his roles in all of McQueen’s films).

Cate Blanchett, on the other hand…almost makes you regret rooting for her. Especially after her peculiar speech when she won the Golden Globes, and talked about the vodka she’d just drunk, and then made a bitter joke about Judy Garland being plied with barbiturates. Or her acceptance speech at the Baftas, where she didn’t really thank anyone, not by name, but the ‘late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman…buddy, this is for you, you bastard, hope you’re proud.’ It was uncomfortable to watch. I mean, did she just call a beloved, recently deceased actor a bastard? Was it supposed to be humour? Was it unresolved grief; was she stuck in Kubler-Ross’s second stage? It came off as snarly.  But that was only a prelude.  Her Oscar speech was hectoring and nasty. ‘Sandra,’ she said to Bullock, ‘I could have watched that performance until the end of time… and I sort of felt like I had.’  True or not, this was a time to be gracious. Bullying the losers was profoundly unattractive. To Julia Roberts: ‘Julia, hashtag suck it. You know what I mean?’ Ick. The audience for bitchy in-jokes isn’t an anonymous one of several billion. It was like reading the blog of some angry, socially disengaged shut-in.

Thanksgiving to God was mercifully infrequent. I mean, Darlene Love can get away with it, but Matthew McConaughey?  ‘Now, first off, I want to thank God. ‘Cause that’s who I look up to.’  Really?  Was he looking up to God and thanking him for his career resuscitation when he was fellating Gina Gershon with a chicken leg in Killer Joe?  He then went on a byzantine ramble about, I think, his dad in heaven dancing in his underwear, I guess with God, and a lemon meringue pie and a Miller Lite.  Is God having pie, too, or only his dad? And then a long story about how he’s his own hero, but in a time warp Doctor Who way. Again, there were echoes of the Golden Globe, where he said, I think, that he makes his wife call him ‘my king.’

The Best speech of the evening was from Alfonso Cuaron for Editing.  After graciously giving the floor to his co-editor, Mark Sanger, he was cut off by music.  His speech was ‘Bye,’ beating Joe Pesci’s ‘It’s my privilege, thank you’ by four words.