A ceremony literally without Hart
Boy, you really don’t know what you have until it’s gone. As we sat there watching yet another televised Academy Awards ceremony (again? already? man, these things seem to come around almost as often as Christmas), we all felt it. Something was missing. We were used to the guiding presence that got us through the evening. Someone who could be our eyes and ears for the night. It was just so strange that presenters and winners came and went with no unifying presence, no reassuring face to give continuity to the proceedings.
But enough about Meryl Streep.
But seriously, where was she anyway? Didn’t I mention just last year that that, now that Jack Nicholson doesn’t turn up at these things anymore, she is the one we look to in order to know how to react?
Okay, forget Meryl. Let’s talk instead about the whole no-host thing. Has the Academy finally figured out what FM radio stations figured out way back in the 1980s? That it was actually cheaper and more efficient not to have DJs? Just use computers and engineers to keep the songs playing because nobody really wants to hear all the chatter in between anyway. Is this the wave of the future for awards shows? And when will network newscast programs finally wise up to this?
Actually, the host was missed. Imagine what the night would have been with Kevin Hart doing a monolog and quipping during the evening. For one thing, it would have been longer, but it might also have been more entertaining. Was this not the dullest awards show ever? I think it’s official now. The Oscars are now basically an overlong annual infomercial, and to make sure there is no doubt of this, poor Laura Dern was trotted out to do an actual commercial for the Academy’s long-trouble-plagued new museum. Winners were not only “played off” by music brutally in some cases, their mike was cut to keep them from talking over the music. I mean what can you say about an evening where the most-talked-about line seemed to be: “I can’t believe a film about menstruation just won an Oscar!”
In fairness, things got off to a rollicking start with a performance by Queen (with Adam Lambert filling in for the late Freddie Mercury) that actually kind of hit the right tone for the evening. This was later nailed down when Mike Myers and Dana Carvey paid tribute to their own tribute to Queen way back in 1992 in Wayne’s World, thereby reminding us that Saturday Night Live at one time actually earned its cultural cachet. There were other good moments. Olivia Colman’s emodiment of gobsmacked was just as charming here as it was at the BAFTAs. Awkwafina and John Mulaney were so hilarious and appealing as they presented—actually I don’t even remember what awards they presented and it doesn’t matter anyway—that they made everyone else look pretty bad by comparison. Maybe the spirit of the evening was best represented by (who else?) Frances McDormand. Did I mention that I am a huge fan? I love her for refusing to load herself with makeup for these things and for touches like, as she did last night, wearing Birkenstocks with her designer gown. Co-presenter Sam Rockwell invited her to say something and, in an apparently planned gag, she pointedly kept lip zipped as if it were a hand grenade from which she dared not pull the pin. That was it. Boy, talk about the ultimate bait-and-switch. We got to see McDormand but not hear her.
Even the fact that many awards did not go according to the bookmakers’ odds (you can get an indication of this from my even-more-dismal-than-usual awards predictions) did not goose any excitement.
There were a couple of strange teaser moments. When Rami Malek concluded his nicely heartfelt acceptance speech by turning to his co-star and girlfriend Lucy Boynton, everyone thought he was going to propose. Nope. Later when Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper sang the nominated song “Shallow,” their lips came tantalizingly close in what may have been some kind of weird homage to the will-they-or-won’t-they turn by Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy with the song “A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow” from A Mighty Wind. Frankly, it felt kind of creepy to me.
So, if the Oscar telecast is now nothing more than a mere marketing exercise, I suppose the most disappointing thing about it is that it is not even good marketing. At one time it was all about selling the public a world of fantasy and escape. Now it feels like a series of lectures and reproaches. They used to emphasize the billions of people watching worldwide. Now they seem to focus entirely on the beautiful and woke people in the venue—the ones allowed in because they weren’t tripped up by a litmus test.
Maybe we are just being punished because somebody forgot to nominate Meryl Streep for something this year.
-S.L., 25 February 2019
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