So, another opportunity missed. If Lady Gaga can appear in a shimmering silver gown and sing “Climb Ev’ry Mountain,” playing it absolutely straight, why can’t Julie Andrews come out dressed in lamb chops and raw steak? Didn’t Sister Maria have a single tattoo of a trumpet on her underarm? Even a lonely little goatherd, inked on the summit of her butt? That was the story of last night’s Oscar ceremony: nice try, but could have been so much sweeter.
In a way, the whole evening misfired before it began, with the omission of “Selma” from many of the nominations. I happen to think that we should wipe the word “snub” from any discussion of awards; it comes loaded with ludicrous hints of conspiracy and cabal, as if folks in the movie industry—or in any industry that likes to pat itself on the back—have the time, the willpower, and the logistical clout to call around and organize a shutout. How can you get fired up about wicked whispers in a smoke-filled room when there aren’t enough rooms left in Los Angeles where you can actually smoke? Nonetheless, there remains a grim and galling possibility: Might not some Academy voters be under the vague illusion that, having so lavishly handed out the prizes to “12 Years a Slave” in 2014, they have, you know, done that? Whatever the case, their semi-dismissal of “Selma” is an embarrassment (would anyone have objected, in all honesty, if Ava DuVernay had quietly taken the spot from the guy who directed “The Imitation Game”?), and somehow the shame of it was deepened, not mollified, by the eager atonements of last night. The more that poor David Oyelowo, who played Martin Luther King, Jr., was ogled by the wandering cameras—we were privileged, at one moment, to keep track of his tears—the more egregious his absence from the list of nominees became.
We didn’t stop there. Indeed, although Neil Patrick Harris wore the increasingly sombre look of a man who wished he had stayed home and mended that leak behind the dishwasher, the crack in his opening speech, about “the best and whitest,” had done its work. Slowly but unstoppably, a breeze of mild radicalization wafted across the audience, blowing through the jasmine of their minds. Some of this was preordained by the producers, but not all of it. They knew that Common would cry, “That’s why we walk through Ferguson with our hands up,” as he belted out the Oscar-winning song “Glory”—the line is there in the “Selma” soundtrack—but nobody could have predicted his win for sure, nor foreseen that his fellow-composer, John Legend, would seize the moment with this, in the midst of his acceptance: “There are more black men under correctional control today than there were under slavery in 1850.” Whether any of yesterday’s guests were sufficiently moved by this startling fact to skip the Vanity Fair party, or whether any of the nominees, in the top categories, pledged at once to donate their gift bags, each worth a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, to the cause of prison reform, has not yet been established. We at home were still trying to get our heads around “John Stephens and Lonnie Lynn,” as Legend and Common were referred to as they strode up to accept their statuettes. Since when must performers be reminded, before a global public, of their discarded birth names? Did the Best Actor award in 1936, for “The Story of Louis Pasteur,” go to Frederich Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund, rather than plain Paul Muni? I think not.
The “Selma” effect was contagious—probably more so, by a pleasing irony, than if it had earned a higher number of nods. Winners of all kinds struck a campaigning note: Julianne Moore, rightly, spoke of Alzheimer’s, and Eddie Redmayne of motor-neuron disease; there were two references to teen-age suicide; Alejandro González Iñárritu, the big victor of the night, praised “this incredible immigrant nation,” in tones of which Barack Obama will have approved; and Paweł Pawlikowski, who collected the Best Foreign Film award, for “Ida,” earnestly exhorted his friends back home in Poland to get drunk, if they weren’t already. By far the fiercest impact, however, was made by Patricia Arquette, the winner for her supporting role in “Boyhood,” whose demand for female wage equality—“It’s our time”—was rendered all the stronger by her decision to come dressed as a five-foot pint of Guinness. It was this unambiguous call to arms, I think, that brought Meryl Streep to her feet, rather than Arquette’s no less heartfelt endorsement—complete with Web site—of “ecological sanitation.” As John Belushi would have said, if he were around today, Man, that is some good shit.
What’s important is how this went down, not at the home of Ted Cruz—I imagine that he sent his daughters out of the room at the first mention of the words “Edward Snowden,” thus saving them from the sight of Sean Penn—but at the headquarters of ABC. The network’s business is ratings, not sanitation or correctional control, and the signs for yesterday’s broadcast, from early Nielsen estimates, are not looking healthy—down by ten per cent from last year. For every viewer who perked up when Streep, onstage, quoted Joan Didion, or when Iñárritu name-checked Raymond Carver, there will be a hundred who asked plaintively why “American Sniper”—perhaps the only Best Picture nominee that they caught this year—appeared to be locked in a cupboard for the night. How come somebody put all the guns away? Of the six hundred and twenty million dollars made, in total, by the eight movies up for Best Picture, Clint Eastwood’s film racked up more than half. The triumphant “Birdman” has earned less than thirty-eight million. None of this matters, I guess, if you care for the movies that were touted and lauded at the Dolby Theatre, but it’s nevertheless hard not to be saddened by the near-complete sundering between two branches of film. Only down among the technical awards did we stumble across the titles that crowds of Americans paid and surged to see; the five films, for instance, that jockeyed for Best Visual Effects, (“Guardians of the Galaxy,” “Captain America: the Winter Soldier,” “X-Men: Days of Future Past,” “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes,” and the winner, “Interstellar”), clawed in a cool one billion two hundred and twenty-three million bucks. That’s an awful lot of Birdmen.
Hence, perhaps, the nostalgia that swept over the auditorium when the hills, all of a sudden, came alive. “The Sound of Music” pulled people back, if only briefly, to the age of pre-sundering—to a prelapsarian time when everybody watching the Oscars on TV could tell you exactly what a resourceful nun could do with unwanted drapes. As I tried to suggest, when writing about my own enslavement to “The Sound of Music” in the pages of this magazine, the film is here to stay in our cultural marrow, whether we like it or not. We didn’t need the montage of clips from it last night; the makers of the show, seeking a trim, could have leaped straight from Scarlett Johansson’s preamble to Lady Gaga, filling her lungs among the silver birches. The mood in the room, which for long stretches of the evening was about as green and rolling as a salt flat, began to bloom, bursting forth when Andrews showed up to the party. The expression on the face of Felicity Jones (who may crave some uncomplicated bliss after the hard, if satisfying, graft of “The Theory of Everything”), as she gazed up from the front row, was identical to that of Disney’s Cinderella, when the Fairy Godmother began to strut her stuff with the pumpkins. Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo!
But why did the guests, arrayed before Andrews, look quite so relieved? Because they were secretly confident that, for the next two minutes, at least, they would be given nothing to feel guilty about? Because Maria, whatever the song says, is not a problem? Or could it be because the two women up there, the Lady and the Dame, being unmistakeable pros, could be relied upon to hold and work the room? (Decades before the former was born, the latter was starring in “Humpty Dumpty,” onstage in London, in 1948. She played the egg.) Their combined ease, before a live audience, offered all too striking a contrast with most of the movie stars, who as a rule, when confronted with a sea of real faces, tend to cling to their autocues and their memorized scripts as if to a passing lifebelt. John Travolta’s inability to cope with a name, even then, was toyed with last night, and the joke—in which he manfully, or uncomprehendingly, joined—looks set to run for many ceremonies to come. Still, from one year to the next, the discomfiture of celebrities, as they trip over the tiny fences of their own words, becomes, for all their physical splendor and their customized grooming, dismayingly difficult to watch. I always stagger to the end of the night feeling like the typist in “The Waste Land,” who, in the wake of her joyless and mechanical seduction—“unreproved, if undesired”—remarks to herself, “Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.”
If you truly can’t stomach the prospect of the Oscars anymore, however, there is an alternative. You can always get your fill of cinema, and of its nourishing history, at the Governors Awards. These take place in November, thus jump-starting the mania for prizes, and we always get a few enticing clips of them during the Oscar ceremony itself; without fail, they are more impressive than the main event, and more crammed with the sorts of names that ardent movie lovers can, without equivocation, revere. Last night, for instance, we got a few, precious moments of Maureen O’Hara, a muse of John Ford, now a resplendent ninety-four; of the Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, who spoke of making movies “with paper, pencil, and film,” furrowing the brows of the folks who made “Big Hero 6”; of Harry Belafonte, seen for a second in historical footage of the walk from Selma to Montgomery; and of Jean-Claude Carrière, who adapted, among other things, “Belle de Jour” and “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” By way of a bonus, we were also granted a quick shot of Carrière standing proudly with a group of older men. You just had time to pick some of them out—Wilder, Buñuel, Cukor, Wyler, Hitchcock—before it was back to the Oscars of now. But that little glimpse of heaven was enough, and it made me wonder: Who will the Governors get together next?
As for the Oscars of 2016, we should be dreading them already; and yet, for once, my hopes are unexpectedly high. And why? Because of those gift bags. The treasures reportedly hidden within are designed to enchant and soothe, and frankly, after her experience in “Wild,” Reese Witherspoon more than deserves that “luxury train ride through the Canadian Rockies.” Millions of women around the world would, one presumes, be happy to join Eddie Redmayne on his “glamping trip worth $12,500,” although his wife might file an objection. But the real draw, available to all acting and directing nominees, is the twenty-thousand-dollar gift certificate, which will—oh, my Lord—pay for Olessia Kantor, the founder of Enigma Life, to fly out in person and meet each of the lucky winners (and grumpy losers) to “discuss their 2015 horoscope, analyze dreams, and teach them mind control techniques.” Good luck controlling the mind of Robert Duvall, Olessia, but still: armed with such helpful strategies, and with freshly analyzed dreams, the luminaries of the motion-picture industry will arrive at next year’s Academy Awards in a place of wholeness, at one with the creed of themselves. Stars will be led by the stars. And the winners will be all of us. Peace.
