The first prize at Sunday night’s Academy Awards was announced before the evening began. As we gazed down at the Dolby Theatre from on high,
enjoying what was officially described as “a really dope view” of the
proceedings, Giuliana Rancic, hosting on E!, revealed that “aerial
coverage was provided by Goodyear, award-winning tires recognized by
experts for superior performance.” Hey, what awards? Best Tread? Least
Likely to Blow? Why can’t we watch that ceremony on TV?
As the years crawl by (and Oscar, as we were constantly reminded on Sunday, has now hit ninety), the pre-match warmup, out on the red
carpet, grows stranger and more transfixing, while the game itself—the
ceremony within—becomes ever more of a drag. There is an honesty and a freshness, in the fashion commentary, that you just don’t get with
the speeches delivered, or stumbled over, by announcers and winners
alike. When somebody exclaims, as happened Sunday night, “She is
Zoolandering it! She is owning that Glambot,” you have the thrilling
and privileged sense of being right at the heart of the crucible in
which our language is forged and reborn. Heedless of the usual rules,
Jason Bolden and his fellow truth-tellers on E! say what they think and
say it so crisply, sometimes, that it emerges as an iambic heptameter:
“It’s hot, it’s hot, it’s hot, it’s hot, it’s cool, it’s modern, it’s
new.”
No, not a plug for “Darkest Hour,” which is so darned hot that it
appears to have been made in 1955, but an accurate hymn of praise to the
outfit sported by Chadwick Boseman: a long black coat bedecked with
mystic runes of silver, such as Merlin might have worn for early-evening
drinks at Camelot, plus boots that zipped up the front. As a look, it
was hipper than anything donned by Boseman in “Black Panther,” and it was a handsome runner-up in the night’s style awards. The victor, we must all agree, was Shane Vieau, who, as he strode to the podium to
collect his statuette for “The Shape of Water,” was clad in the
following: white wing-collared shirt, black collar stud. No tie. Tux and
pants, with a turquoise silk square tucked into the breast pocket.
Sleeves of the jacket cropped short, stopping at the elbow but allowing
the shirt to continue down to the wrists. White sneakers. Oh, and a
large pair of shades. It’s as if Vieau couldn’t decide whether to come
as a tennis player, a croupier, or an eight-year-old boy, so he chose to
come as all three. And why not? If you’re a set designer by trade, as he
is, you might as well begin by designing yourself.
As for the set, in front of which Jimmy Kimmel had to master
the ceremonies, who built that? Was Shane Vieau not available? Is that
why the stagehands were forced to break into the storeroom at the back
of the MGM lot and raid the toy box? Nothing else could explain the
ritzy heap of Versailles knockoffs, broken bits of palace left over from
“The Thief of Baghdad,” and an arch of Swarovski crystals that looked
like what remains of your windshield after a thief has smashed it in to
get at your purse on the dashboard. Four hours of staring at that thing
and my eyes were starting to tear like Daniel Kaluuya’s in “Get Out.”
Jane Fonda, walking out hand in hand with Helen Mirren to present an
award, had a nice dig at the sets. “They’re just like the Orgasmatron in
‘Barbarella’,” she said. This was both a fond glance at a highlight of
her youth and a careful sleight of hand, since the pleasure-enhancing
device in that movie was in fact called the Excessive Machine. The
Orgasmatron, on the other hand, did much the same job in “Sleeper,” but
that very funny film was directed by Woody Allen, who also starred as
the guy who got to fondle the device in question, and whose name did
not, let us say, figure heavily in last night’s entertainment. Nor did
Kevin Spacey’s. There was a brief mention of Mel Gibson, though only
as the punchline of a joke, courtesy of Kimmel. This is known as playing
it safe.
The odd thing about concerted action, when a number of people close
ranks and link up to defend a cause, or to utter a cry for change, is
how often one voice, for all the force of that communal intent, stands
out from the hubbub. So it was with Oprah Winfrey, at the Golden Globes,
and so it was on Sunday, as Frances McDormand took control. “I’ve got
some things to say,” she declared. Boy, did we sit up and listen. It was
clear how serious she was from the moment that she put her Oscar down on
the floor. James Ivory had done the same, but, at the age of
eighty-nine, he needed one hand free for the script of his speech and
another for his walking stick, whereas McDormand, displaying a touch of
the verve with which her character, in “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing,
Missouri,” hurls Molotov cocktails into a police station, went
hands-free to make an important point. You had to love the boldness of
her sign-off, which saw her proclaiming the words “inclusion rider” and
caused half a billion people to reach for their cell phones. Say what?
Could this be a reboot of “Knight Rider,” perhaps, from Netflix, with
the Hoff returning in triumph to play Michael Inclusion?
It turned out to mean something rather more practical: a clause in an
actor’s contract that requires both cast and crew to meet a stipulated
level of diversity. An excellent proposal, and well overdue, although,
on Sunday’s evidence, the crews may be harder to transform than the
casts; most of the folks trotting up to be garlanded for their technical
skills were white guys of a certain age, or beyond. Not that Rachel
Morrison—the first female cinematographer in Oscar history to earn a
nomination, for her work on “Mudbound”—would begrudge the award that
went to her confrère Roger Deakins. He won at the fourteenth time of
asking, for “Blade Runner 2049,” having conjured much of his most
elegant work, over the years, for the Coen brothers. It was he who shot
“Fargo,” which brought a well-deserved Oscar for, yes, Frances
McDormand, back in 1996. She is not just a trailblazer but someone who
knows how long the blazing can take.
So, what will the Oscars guests have pondered, in their hearts, as they
sat down at the Governors Ball, to toy with the black truffle ravioli
dished up by Wolfgang Puck? Were their consciences as tender as what Puck called the
“Miyazaki” beef? One thing’s for sure: if there were any grumps or
grinches in the crowd who hadn’t felt sufficiently woke at the start of
the show, they will have been a damn sight woker by the end. Almost
anything could have done the trick, be it Mira Sorvino’s exhorting us
not merely to aim at “honor and truth and beauty and justice” but to
lionize them, as if they were movie stars, or else the thumping
performance of “This Is Me,” belted out by Keala and a chorus so
rampantly energetic that they spilled off the stage and flowed down into
the aisles. Their song hails from “The Greatest Showman,” the Hugh
Jackman movie that the general public, to the indignation of critics and
the bewilderment of pollsters, keeps insisting on going to see—of its
own volition, would you believe—months after the opening weekend.
Apparently, it’s all to do with something called “word of mouth,”
whatever that is. I guess it must be an app.
Stirring, strengthening, and edifying the ceremony may have been, yet it
was badly short on surprise. When the biggest kick comes from realizing
that Kobe Bryant is precisely twice as tall as Oscar Isaac, and that—get
this—the same goes for Jennifer Lawrence and Jodie Foster, you can’t
really claim that you spent the evening open-mouthed with shock. Frankly, the view was not
so dope. I’ve certainly had doper in my time. As for the grand finale,
the audience seemed largely gratified, though far from staggered, when
the top gong was handed to “The Shape of Water”—or, as it was labelled
at the foot of the screen, “Shape of Water,” which presumably heralds an
industry-wide crackdown on definite articles. Backdate the ruling, and
you’d wind up with the Best Picture Award, in 1974, going to a movie
called “Sting.”
If Guillermo del Toro went on something of a ramble at the close, you
could hardly blame him. First, because the moment of glory is meant to
overwhelm (in truth, a failure to succumb would be deemed almost
insulting by the Academy), and, second, because he had ascended the
dais, earlier on, to pick up the Oscar for Best Director, and had
already said his piece. Movies, he told us, can “erase the lines in the
sand”—as neat an image of supranational harmony as one could hope for,
even if current events, away from Hollywood, have a nasty habit of
gouging the lines deeper still, as he acknowledged. Weirder by far was
his next confession: “The place I like to live most is Fox Searchlight.”
Really? Does he have a room there and everything, with a gas ring and a
TV? Is there a tub where the Aquaman can hang out and soak? I was going
to suggest that del Toro should get out more, but then, I thought, no:
staying in, with the lights down, and with his eyes closed, is probably
where his most ravishing dreams begin.
“The Shape of Water,” I should add, is not the only story, among all
those acclaimed last night, to feature a heroine who cannot speak. “The
Silent Child,” which won for Best Live-Action Short, is a British
production, and its leading actress bears the name—a great movie-star
name—of Maisie Sly. She was born deaf and, in life as onscreen, she
communicates in sign language. Not long ago, I watched her being interviewed on
television. She was asked who her favorite film stars were. After a pensive pause, she signed, “Laurel and Hardy.” Of course. The
perfect answer. Who needs talkies when silent cinema gives you
everything you want? Maisie feels as the whole world did, a hundred years ago, with Chaplin already in the spotlight and Laurel and Hardy, who made more than thirty films without dialogue, waiting in the wings. I bet that nobody in the Dolby Theatre, male or
female—not even the immortal Christopher Plummer, or the jubilant del
Toro—had a grasp of movie history that is as instinctive, or as
heartfelt, as Maisie Sly’s. She is six years old.