Picture courtesy: nydailynews.com
A MORNING TO REMEMBER
Snippets from the Oscars, and from a sleep-deprived soul who sat (and smirked) through it all…
MAR 14, 2010 – THE GROGGY EYE, ALARM-AWAKENED at a wincingly rude 6:30 on a Monday morning, lights on the red carpet… Breathless fans in the background, amateur astronomers all, scream from endless orgasms triggered by the sight of the biggest stars on the planet, including that supernova named George Clooney who breaks into an impromptu trot in front of the steel-link fence, the railway-track equivalent in this Hollywood version of the social divide… A gushing, giddy host thrusts a microphone into Morgan Freeman’s face, thanking the actor for his “incredible philanthropy,” and the Voice of God in the Movies replies in the only possible way, by chewing on gum… Matt Damon, meanwhile, masticates on the question about what was more difficult while filming Invictus, mastering rugby or ministering a new accent… And by Jove, has Christopher Plummer still got it, a magisterial figure despite the ravages of age and the rotten luck of forever being identified, well into his everlasting afterlife, as Captain von Trapp…
The overly Precious Gabourey Sidibe observes, “It’s like prom night for Hollywood,” and on cue, the cameras usher us inside the main hall where boys and girls in tuxedos and rippling dresses are seating themselves before the dance… The dance by Neil Patrick Harris, of course, which sets the tone for the evening, lots of trying but incommensurate achieving… Though someone deserves special marks for lyrics that went “Why wouldn’t Crosby give up Hope? Why does Harold call Kumar when he scores dope? And why does a prisoner drop the soap? ‘Cause no one wants to do it alone”… Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin settle into depressingly tired shtick right from the get go, as if on a night such as this (or a morning such as this, over here) they could simply slap on a clown nose and the primed-for-prime-time audience would collapse with laughter regardless… One zinger does ricochet off the marble walls, though, the one about Christoph Waltz (who played a notorious Jew-hunting Nazi in the criminally overlooked Inglourious Basterds) having to merely look around, for this significantly Semitic showbiz syndicate was the “mother lode”…
No Jack Nicholson in front, and no reaction-shot rictus for the cameras to periodically pan to… Meryl Streep, however, fills in as grande dame, the gracious recipient of ceaseless (and wondrous) acknowledgement, especially from eventual vanquisher Sandra Bullock, whose eyes outsparkle the glitter of her gown upon recalling osculating the older actress in an earlier awards event… Up wins Best Animated Feature to the astounded astonishment of exactly zero people on the planet… The screenwriting awards carry a touch of class, with the words on page, along with stage/screen directions appearing alongside the visuals that resulted… That wasn’t a distant stampede of elephants you heard, merely a million grateful and glistening-eyed writers trumpeting into their handkerchieves… The first signs of an upset emerge as The Hurt Locker trounces Quentin Tarantino’s glouriously goofy ode to WWII in the Best Original Screenplay category…
A gajillion kids who came of age in the eighties rub their eyes in disbelief when Molly Ringwald walks up, accompanied by Ferris Bueller himself, to pay tribute to John Hughes (and we tremble, “If this is what the erstwhile Teen Queen looks like today, what do we look like!”)… The eyes mist over mildly as the tribute clips begin to unspool, to the accompaniment of the comfortingly fat synth loops from Simple Minds’ Don’t You (Forget About Me), and don’t even bother arguing with me that the eighties weren’t the bestest pop-music years ever… But the other music cues are either creepy (Thank Heaven for Little Girls as wispy waifs Zoe Saldana and Carey Mulligan walk up to present?) or clichéd (the E.T. theme for the clip about sci-tech awards? Amarcord riffs for the foreign film category?) or just off-the-chart outré (Moon River during the announcement of Best Actress?)… A group of overenthusiastic, over-elastic dancers commandeers the stage to vivify snatches of music from the Best Score nominees, and while their exertions are eye-bogglingly embarrassing, they at least allow the spotlight to shine on Hans Zimmer’s plucky employment of strings for Sherlock Holmes, alongside Alexandre Desplat’s wonderfully whimsical themes for Fantastic Mr. Fox, perfectly encapsulating the music-box preciousness of Wes Anderson’s oeuvre…
More and more love for The Hurt Locker… Sandra Bullock wins and delivers a winning speech worthy of a debutante at cotillion, though the mind wishes she’d hired Lauren Bacall’s speechwriter… The octogenarian, upon being awarded an honorary Oscar earlier, exulted, “The thought that when I get home I’m going to have a two-legged man in my room is so exciting,” thus proving that they don’t make cigarette-throated broads like that anymore, only pink-tutued Barbie dolls… Well, except for third-time winner (costume designer) Sandy Powell, who wears her entitlement ever so easily, with justified pride (“I already have two of these”), gracious acknowledgement of lesser mortals (the costumers who slave away on contemporary films without getting the recognitions bestowed on their colleagues in charge of outfitting “dead monarchs and glittery musicals”), and a cap-off with a delicious cat-got-the-cream purr (“But I’m going to take it home tonight”)…
Gloom descends upon the evening as we stroll into the obituary section of the ceremony… No, not the remembrance montage of the luminaries who left us, but the cokehead idea of having five performers walk up to introduce the Best Actor and Actress nominees, whose accomplishments are embalmed with such waxy elegies (“spirit of generosity,” “humanitarian,” “courage and integrity,”) that the average funeral comes off like Duck Soup… But this is also how you know that the actors at the receiving end of all this nauseatingly fulsome praise are really actors, because they smile graciously through it all, with nary a hint at the image inside their heads of hurling into the diamond-encrusted Cartier barf-bags stashed under their velvet-lined seats… Though it’s probably James Cameron who’s in direst need of stomach-soothing serums, as ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow not only out-stuns his current spouse but also outruns him in the race for Best Director (awarded by Barbra Streisand, cue more clichés, music from Memories)… And also Best Picture… The mind sighs with satisfaction that yet another Oscar year has been successfully Na’vigated.
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Baradwaj Rangan 
Just Another Film Buff
March 13, 2010
Brilliant.
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Rahul Tyagi
March 13, 2010
My favorite award? Up for original score!!! And least favorite…. The Hurt Locker for original screenplay. There were a lot of good things about that movie, but writing surely was not nearly as good as Inglourious Basterds or Up. I would’ve loved for In the Loop to get the adapted award too, but then that surely wasn’t going to happen. sigh!
And what about Avatar’s cinematography? Where exactly does visual effects end and cinematography begins? They might have to think of a new award for things like this soon….
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B o o.
March 14, 2010
“The mind sighs with satisfaction that yet another Oscar year has been successfully Na’vigated.”
Only you Mr.Rangan. Only you! 🙂
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brangan
March 14, 2010
Rahul Tyagi: On one level, yes, Hurt Locker is entirely a director’s movie. But it’s also structured ingeniously — the quote at the beginning alerts us that this is a film about people to whom war is “like a drug” and then the film pushes us into the lives of these “addicts” with scene after scene of junkie-action-nirvana. Even the lines mirror this, like how Will passes his comrade a bottle of juice and asks him to “have a fix.” What I’m trying to say is that the writing here may not be as flashy as in IB (and I’m not saying that IB doesn’t deserve it either, because it’s a dazzling screenplay by QT), but repeated viewings may reveal why this is just as deserving a win. Just saying.= (and I’ve only seen it once).
Boo: You know, the effort to become a “serious writer” has made me a lot less fun than I used to be (as I’ve been endlessly told), but every once in a while, a bad pun will escape from my system, like fizz from a can of soda… or an involuntary fart, take your pick 🙂
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Ramsu
March 14, 2010
You’re right — the Jew Hunter joke was pretty much the only one that Messrs Martin and Baldwin really got right. Why can’t they get Seth Rogen and Ben Stiller to host the show?
Is it just me, or does Christopher Plummer look more and more like Lee Van Cleef with every passing day?
And what’s with the “generosity” of all the Best Actor/Actress nominees? Even if the presenter has a hard time saying good stuff about the nominee, generosity is always on hand.
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Amrita
March 15, 2010
I love the Oscars and I was so happy when I found out that I could watch it in my hotel room … and then I saw the THING with the interpretive dance routines and Tyler Perry begging for a close up and I really, really wished I hadnt seen it this year.
I guess everyone knew who was going to win what going in and I think it all worked out pretty well, but I will say that The Fantastic Mr. Fox was the best movie I saw last year and it wuz ROBBED! I loved Up but Fox is a whole another level of game.
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arijit
March 15, 2010
rangan,
Good that you liked the score of sherlock holmes…i thought that deserved the oscar…but in hindsight the score was mad, brilliant and sufficiently radical to antagonize the usually conservative oscar jury. 😉 just like qt 😉 what say?
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Sid
March 16, 2010
Hey BR: I somehow missed this piece. But I thought the Oscars ceremony this year was boring (strangely they made some really good choices this year for the wins). No one is going to argue with Mo’Nique and Waltz — and “The Hurt Locker” is a worthy winner, even if I preferred IB and A Serious Man.
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varun
March 16, 2010
I was talking to a cinematographer friend and he argued that Avatar for best cinematography is a brilliant choice. His point: the most diffiult part of cinematography is ‘lighting up the subject’, and doing that in an animated (or computer-generated) feature is much more difficult. More controls available, leading to more work.
And according to him, Avatar cinematographer had to not only light-up, focus-defocus, create-frames for Pandora, but to actually think of and execute a completely new light-ambience for the new planet.
Though i still tend to disagree and i think if we are going to have more such features in coming years, having a separate award for cinematography in animated features may not be a bad idea, but clubbing Avatar with out-there cinematographers is technically wrong.
What are your views?
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brangan
March 16, 2010
varun: This is not an easy question, because we now seem to be saying that animation and visual effects = cinematography. (I’m not knocking this; just wondering why, as in this discussion, Up is considered animation, whereas Avatar is considered cinematographic.)
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varun
March 16, 2010
Baradwaj,
thanks for the link to the discussion. Understandably, the issue has raised serious questions (interesting questions too) in quarters that matter.
You are right, why not have ‘Up’ in the same category then, for the same reasons! (Slight digression: Academy, unlike our national film awards, doesn’t give out citations with ‘reasons’ for choosing the winner. This year’s national award citation for Priyanka Chopra read “For convincing portrayal of a whole range of emotions within a single character.” 🙂 The whole list of citations is fun, and can be read here: http://dff.nic.in/56nfaawards.pdf)
I think an award category like ‘Production Design in a CG feature’ or ‘Visuals Director’ (as opposed to DoP, and in addition to existing category of ‘Visual Effects’) for an animated film may fill in the gap.
Also, if they start calling animation as CG, i think big-ego directors like Cameron won’t mind submitting their films in that category too. ‘Animation’ is too kiddish a term, i think, to aptly cover such ambitions.
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Sid
March 17, 2010
@Varun and BR:
The Academy’s cinematography branch is free to nominate Animated features for the category. For the nominations, cinematographers vote for cinematographers (editors for the editing category and so on…) so it probably means that they are still reluctant to reward animated features with a nomination. As for Avatar, it may have been CG-heavy, but it was completely up their alley in terms of scope — for the Oscars (and most people, I guess), beautiful scenery = Best Cinematography.
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Sid
March 17, 2010
To add to the above post, some Academy branches can be notoriously protective of traditional work — the music branch was notorious for nominating the same composers over and over again until very recently when a lot of new blood has been allowed to enter!
Similarly, Cinematographers have actually shied away from honoring excessively special effects driven films LOTR: Fellowship was the first winner, I believe and the next two parts failed to even get nominated — even when Return of the king swept the Oscars in 2003 — indicating overall love from most branches except cinematographers.
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