Phoenix sloping
This is how crazy things have gotten. Several times while watching the Academy Awards ceremony, I found myself actually wishing I was re-watching the Golden Globes telecast instead. In fact, in a way it was the Golden Globes—with everybody seated at tables like they were at a swanky nightclub where you have to know the right people to get in. All it was missing was someone like Ricky Gervais to do a Don-Rickles-on-steroids number on all of them and make them squirm in their seats.
I seriously debated whether I would bother watching the entire ceremony in real time this year. To be clear and anally precise, I never watch it exactly in real time because I record it and then wait until maybe a half-hour past the start time to begin viewing so that I can fast-forward through the commercial breaks and local UK panel discussions that fill the gaps. So you can say I watch it in quasi-real time. Except this year I didn’t. This breaks a streak going back to… well, I don’t know when. I’ve pretty much watched the Oscars in real time—if not quasi-real time—since, like, forever. In the end, though, the Irish Health Service Executive pulled the plug on my tradition.
Eleven days ago the HSE instructed all people of my specific age to register on its website for a Covid‑19 vaccination. Three days ago the HSE texted me an appointment for a one-time-only take-it-or-leave-it no-rescheduling appointment for my first jab. (One thing about state-run healthcare systems, they tend to keep things simple.) The time of the appointment was just a few hours after the live Oscar telecast would end. Did I really want to drag myself out of the house at the crack of dawn (slight hyperbole) and drive 32.5 kilometers (precise distance) to a sprawling vaccination center to negotiate the queues and paperwork after having pulled a (possibly drunken) all-nighter? I took this as a sign that I should get a good night’s sleep and watch the ceremony the following evening.
So I watched the somewhat shortened (1 hour and 45 minutes with a few commercial breaks, as opposed to the live version’s 3 hours and 29 minutes with lots of commercial breaks) international version the next night on Irish television. That’s right, I only saw about half of the whole show. What I did see definitely had its creepy aspects, but the most unsettling part for me was the orchestrated hype leading up to the broadcast in US, UK, Irish—and probably most other countries’ (except China’s)—media. It was as though journalistic enterprises the world over decided they had a vested interest in getting people to watch the thing, which as ratings numbers tell us, fewer and fewer people are bothering to watch. (Audience numbers dropped from last year’s already-historically-low 23.6 million down to 9.8 million.) Of course, these media outlets do have a vested interest in hyping the Oscars if for no other reason than to draw in their own viewers/readers but also for reasons of corporate synergy. Movies are big business.
So what did I miss by losing half of the broadcast? Obviously, some of the lower-profile awards but also things like Glenn Close twerking to the band EU’s “Da Butt’’ (from Spike Lee’s School Daze) to which I can only say, thank God. Also, viewers of the abridged version sadly missed a great speech by billionaire filmmaker/actor Tyler Perry upon accepting the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. It is great that Perry finally got this recognition (as if being a billionaire weren’t recognition enough) because he is one of the most popular movie-makers ever, but for reasons that baffle me he has never gotten the respect he deserves. For a long time major newspapers did not even bother reviewing his movies. Was it because they were considered low-brow? Was it because his audience was mainly African-American? Anyway, the Academy definitely got it right this time.
“[W]ith all of the Internet and social media and algorithms and everything that wants us to think a certain way, the 24-hour news cycle,” he said in his speech, “it is my hope that all of us, we teach our kids and I want to remember, just refuse hate. Don’t hate anybody. I refuse to hate someone because they are Mexican or because they are Black or white or LGBTQ. I refuse to hate someone because they are a police officer. I refuse to hate someone because they are Asian.”
His wise words, inspired by his mother who “taught me to refuse hate … taught me to refuse blanket judgment,” are so cleansing and sincere that it inadvertently showed up much of the evening’s de rigueur rhetoric about hot-button issues ripped from cable-news talking points for what it largely was: corporate-sanctioned buzzwords calculated to drive ratings.
Still, in spite of the suits behind the show, the Academy got some things wonderfully right. One of them was giving Best Supporting Actress to the delightful Korean actor Yuh-Jung Youn for playing the grandmother in Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari. I had been hoping she would win, mainly because of the great speech she gave when she won the equivalent award a couple of weeks earlier at the UK’s BAFTAs. After expressing condolences to the British people on the passing of the Duke of Edinburgh, she explained that the BAFTA award was particularly meaningful for her because it meant being “recognized by British people, known as very snobbish people, and they approve me as a good actor. So I’m very, very privileged and happy.” Wow. What would she say about the Americans?
After some flirting with presenter Brad Pitt and her obligatory thank-you’s, she spoke truth to power: “See, I don’t believe in competition. How can I win over Glenn Close? … All the nominees—five nominees—we are the winners for different movies; we play a different role. So we cannot compete with each other.” She really nailed it with her conclusion in which she addressed her two sons while holding up her Oscar statuette: “This is the result, because mommy worked so hard.”
Other highlights were the awards (Best Movie, Best Director, Best Lead Actor) for Nomadland. Now a three-time Best Lead Actress winner, the beloved Frances McDormand finds herself tied with Meryl Streep, who has won two Best Lead Actress awards and a Best Supporting Actress statuette. McDormand, though, still trails her in overall acting nominations, with 6 compared to la Streep’s 21. Why are Streep’s accumulated laurels annoying and McDormand’s are not? Because Frances has such a healthy lack of self-regard and down-to-earth grounded-ness that it is impossible to begrudge her anything.
Chloé Zhao’s acceptance speech for Best Director was absolutely beautiful. She recalled a game she played as a child with her father. It involved memorization of classic Chinese poems and texts. “There’s one that I remember so dearly,” she said, “it’s called the Three Character Classics. The first phrase goes… ‘People at birth are inherently good.’ … Even though sometimes it might seem like the opposite is true, I have always found goodness in the people I met, everywhere I went in the world.”
It is a sentiment that comes through crystal clear in her deservedly lauded movie and, again, a much-need antidote to the pervasive, divisive narratives we keep getting fed. People in China, where she was born and lived until she was 14, are justifiably proud of her. Too bad the Oscars were not broadcast in that country and mentions of her win were suppressed on social media.
So what wonderful human-focused project will she work on next? Apparently, an adaptation of the Marvel comic book Eternals.
Will anybody remember the strange pandemic Oscars? If they are remembered for anything, it will probably be for the most anti-climatic ending of any awards ceremony ever. Who thought it was a good idea to announce the naturally crowning Best Picture award in the third-to-last slot? Presumably someone who believed the conventional wisdom (as I did, cf. my predictions) that the late, lamented Chadwick Boseman was a shoo-in for Best Lead Actor. This year, the thinking must have gone, the Oscars would end on a glorious and emotional tribute to an accomplished artist taken from us well before his time. That is corporate planning at its best.
Of course, it did not turn out that way. As The Times of London recounted, “Boseman didn’t win and Anthony Hopkins did—and he wasn’t even there. Instead, the Oscars of 2021 climaxed with the presenter of the final award, Joaquin Phoenix—never one to bring the razzle dazzle to nights like this—sloping offstage on his own, like a loser at a Las Vegas casino.”
-S.L., 27 April 2021
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