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I didn't love the entire Oscars telecast, but I did think there were some lovely grace notes, like Dustin Lance Black's speech (can we all agree it was the high point of the night?) and Kate Winslet's whistling, gap-toothed dad. And who knew Janusz Kaminski was so funny?
But what really made the night for me was the sheer number of foreign accents on display, from Penélope Cruz and her Spanish shout-out, to my dad's beloved A.R. Rahman. ("I chose love, and I'm here." Yes you did, you fillum king! Jai Ho!) Animated short winner Kunio Kato's minimalist and slightly absurd acceptance speech had me giggling all night. There's been a lot of talk about whether the night's big winner, Slumdog Millionaire, can be taken as an authentic portrait of India, or of Bollywood filmmaking in general. (See Dennis Lim's excellent Slate essay here.) I have a lot of conflicted feelings on that topic, but last night, at least, I was basking in Hollywood's internationalism.
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Willa, I wish I had enjoyed last night's Oscars as much as you did! I found Hugh Jackman—sweet and exuberant though he was—totally embarrassing to watch. The first medley was so awkward and triggered such an uncomfortable silence among my Oscar-watching crew that we decided to mute the second song and dance number and rewatch Joaquin on Letterman instead. (Ben Stiller's vaguely amusing parody got us in the mood.)
There were, though, two moments last night I think were award-worthy.
For most pathetic coverage of the red carpet, the winner is E! During the pre-show parade of wedding dress after wedding dress after wedding dress, Ryan Seacrest seemed like he'd never done a celebrity interview in his life ("Uh, have you thought about what you'll say if you win?" he asked Mickey Rourke, as though the answer to that could possibly be interesting). His co-host Giuliana Rancic took the level of professionalism down about 83 notches when she let out a little screech when Brangelina arrived, then sputtered "Oh my god I'm such a freak of nature! How about I scream like a freak when Brad and Angelina arrive?"
Don't worry, I won't do any medleys before I announce the next winner. For most pleasant surprise of the night, the award goes to Milk screenwriter Dustin Lance Black. Not only is he a total stud, but he was well-composed while delivering a powerful speech that struck just the right note. Get that boy in front of the camera more often!
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I'll take the bait, Willa. I found the Oscars as predictable and smarmily self-congratulatory as usual. Unlike Slate's Troy Patterson, who called the presentation of the acting awards by the five previous winners "a welcome development," I found it awkward and forced. The worst was Nicole Kidman, whose love of botox has rendered her face nearly immobile, thus making her tribute to Angelina Jolie in The Changeling seem insincere. The effort Kidman was exerting just to smile was gargantuan. I will admit, though, that I don't really have much of a stomach for this sort of thing. The Oscars comes at the end of awards season, and I don't find Hollywood giving themselves a new set of prizes every weekend especially inspiring. Am I hopelessly cynical, Slate women? Have I lost my sense of wonder? Check out the video of Kidman and Jolie below and see if you agree.
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OK, I'm just going to take the plunge: This was the most entertaining Academy Awards I've ever seen. That is sort of damning with faint praise, since watching the Oscars is usually about as exciting as watching a really slow person run every minute of an entire marathon—kind of thrilling at the beginning and end but mostly endless, and you're just trying to find a way to sneak off to the bathroom the whole time. This, too, felt never-ending at points, especially between the best supporting actor award (how poised was Heath Ledger's family? Unbelievably restrained and touching) and the big awards at the end, but, in general, I thought it was much, much better than usual.
Hugh Jackman's energetic willingness to do even the shlockiest thing with a convincing smile single-handedly put over the opening musical number, which didn't have nearly as good lyrics as it should have but was executed with breathy exuberance and set a fun tone. Changing the order of the awards, so that interesting ones for screenplay and supporting actor and actress were mixed in with the boring stuff, helped the pacing. Even though the musical number was an incoherent mess (just let Beyoncé sing!), it broke the monotony and staved off serious boredom for about 15 minutes. The speeches (even though I'm super bummed we'll never get to hear Mickey's) by Penélope Cruz, Danny Boyle, Dustin Lance Black, and Sean Penn were thoughtful and well-delivered (even Kate Winslet did much better than her usual histrionics). Even some of the presenters, like Tina Fey and Steve Martin, were actually, well, funny. And though having former Oscar winners laud each one of this year's nominees personally got a little awkward and long at points, it was more interesting than usual, very sweet, and an excuse to bring out awesome old-timers like Christopher Walken and his crazy hair, Whoopi and her crazy leopard-print dress, and Sophia Loren and her crazy tan. OK, now you can all tell me whether I'm crazy: What did you think?
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Quote of the night (so far):
"I've had dresses thrown at me, diamonds thrown at me!" from Taraji P. Henson, up for best supporting actress for her role in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Henson is green enough that she talks about such things. I'm with Washington Post fashion writer Robin Givhan. With the fashion industry "hanging by a thread," the least they can do is pay for their own clothes.
Runner-up
"Angelina's like my favorite person in all history!" From Miley Cyrus, of course.
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Despite her courage, Jess, though Marisa Tomei performed her heart out as the pole dancer Mickey Rourke courts in The Wrestler, her (OK, let's call her "feminist") character didn't quite sell me—showing more compassion than passion in the film's fleeting love story. It may be a chick flick, but it ain't no romance. Speaking of, while everybody has a different reason why Millionaire will win the best picture statue tonight, for me, Slumdog's happily ever after fade out puts it solidly ahead. The Bollywood ending wins by a mile in a field where the only other love stories are the doomed courtship of Brad and Cate in Benjamin Button and The Reader's bordering-on-child-molestation sexual trysts between Kate and impossibly young actor David Kross. (Parenthetically, I wonder whether Harvey Weinstein—if Wall-E, the other love conquers all narrative in this year's top films, had been nominated in the BP category, as many fans and critics opined it should have—would have run a whisper campaign charging cartoon-robot exploitation?) Meantime, as we wait for confirmation of the Slumdog sweep, in honor of romance classic It Happened One Night's 1935 Academy Award shut-out of The Thin Man, I heartily recommend reading Slate's Nick and Nora of movie-criticism trash talk, the matchless Dana Stevens and Troy Patterson.
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I came away from The Wrestler feeling exactly as you did, Hanna. This was a movie for women. The common denominator here isn’t just that Rourke and Tomei have allowed themselves to be exploited and objectified. It’s that screaming, frothing men are the reason each has become a busted shell. This is a movie about fantasies. But the female characters long for connection while the males long for action figures. Even the men Rourke serves at the supermarket meat counter (yes MEAT COUNTER ... well, nobody said it was a subtle film, as my friend Liz observed last night) are aggressive and brutal.
I don’t know that the whole men-as-animals subtext turns this into a chick flick. I found the violent bits so unbearable that I spent a lot of the movie deeply involved with my Milk Duds. And as Jessica notes, even if she were played by Dame Judi Dench, that whole stripper-with-a-heart-of-gold character can never be anything but a dreary cliché. Still, The Wrestler lodged itself someplace in my chest after I saw it lost weekend and it’s still sitting there. There was one moment when Rourke looked straight into the camera when he was begging his daughter’s forgiveness, and I’d swear that whatever he let loose in that instant caused me brain damage at the other end. Yes, he deserves the Oscar, and, yes, he’s crazier than a moonbat. But what this movie says about men and their dreams is probably less chick flick that horror movie.
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I find the notion that The Wrestler is a feminist flick intriguing, but ultimately it's problematic. Although Rourke's character is trapped in an endless cycle of bodily abuse and exploitation, the biological women in the film are not particularly shining examples of feminist thinking. Marisa Tomei plays that same old trope, the hooker (or in this case, stripper) with a heart of gold. Since Tomei is such a fine actress, she keeps the role from devolving into that clichéd territory. As our own Dana Stevens put it, "I hope Marisa Tomei won't be overlooked for what I consider the single best female performance of the year, supporting or otherwise. She's smart, earthy, and astonishingly real in a role that could have foundered in cheap sentimentality." But still, Tomei's character is pretty one-dimensional. She lacks flaws either to her earthy personality or her slammin' bod. And what about the other woman in the movie, Rourke's daughter Stephanie, played by Evan Rachel Wood? The wrestler tugs on her vulnerable heart strings, only to let her down as he has throughout her childhood. In a way, every character in The Wrestler is trapped in a larger system beyond his or her control. Mickey Rourke doesn't deserve a special citation for feminist filmmaking for being trapped in this way, but agreed, Hanna: He does deserve that Oscar.
Rourke already won best actor honors at last night's Independent Spirit Awards, and his acceptance speech was definitely 10 times more entertaining than whatever bleeped out pleasantries he'll probably have to offer tonight. Check out the rambling six-minute monologue below. This is what he had to say about Marisa Tomei's work: "I wanna thank, uh, who else? Oh! Melissa? Marisa Tomei. Goddamn she had to do all this with a bare ass, and she brought it. Is she here? Not many girls can climb the pole. You understand what I'm saying? She climbed the pole, and she did it well, and it was a very courageous performance."
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Whether or not to see The Wrestler is a common argument among my couple friends these days. But I was surprised to learn that The Wrestler, for which Mickey Rourke is sure to win an Oscar tonight, has a distinctly feminist edge. Or at least it settles an old score. In the movie, Rourke plays an aging wrestler who continues to abuse his body for the pleasure of the crowd. The abuse is both casual (tanning salons, hair dyes) and extreme (staple guns to the chest, falling from heights onto barbed wire). The crucifixion metaphor is always in the background. Usually when the exploitation of the male body is a theme, the context is noble sport, or test of manhood—boxers face off like warriors, quarterbacks take one for the team. But here the context is pure exploitation. What's happening to his body is the exact equivalent of what's happening to the character played by Marisa Tomei—an aging stripper who can't persuade any of her clients to buy a lap dance. The wrestler often refers to himself as an "aging piece of meat," and he is always objectified by the camera—shot from behind or from the chest down. He's not a victim in the straightforward sense—the wrestlers are all very polite and discuss their moves in advance. But he is in the second-wave sense—trapped in a larger system that gives him no other choice. And by the way, he definitely deserves that Oscar.
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The Washington Post's Monica Hesse makes a good case here for killing the best actress and best supporting actress categories, because, after all, an actor is an actor:
Yes, it might seem screwy to compare Angelina Jolie's emotional "Changeling" performance to Richard Jenkins's in "The Visitor." But is it any more sensical to judge Jenkins's minimalist turn as a college professor against Brad Pitt's wide-eyed romp through "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"? Or really, to compare anything about the low-budget "Visitor" with the star-powered, animatronic "Benjamin"? Film is a vast and disparate medium; true apples-to-apples comparisons are almost impossible in any category.
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The Oscars are Sunday night (maybe you heard). When Kate Winslet finally gets awarded the shiny, gold-plated, bald phallus she's been so volubly longing for, I'm going to feel tempted to throw the remote at the television while damning Academy voters for rewarding just an OK performance in a dreadful film. Come on, Academy! Aren't the Oscars about rewarding quality acting? Ha-ha, I kid. Of course not! As this year demonstrates, even better than most, the Oscars are all about rewarding compelling campaign narratives.
Front-runners Kate Winslet, Mickey Rourke, and Heath Ledger (nominated for performances in The Reader, The Wrestler, and The Dark Knight respectively) all have just such a narrative, and you can tell because each of their victories is easy to imagine as a scene in a movie. (Try to do this trick for any of their fellow nominees—it's much harder.) Winslet's win is the moment the heroine's childhood dreams all come true. Rourke's is the instant the hero's comeback is finally complete. Ledger's victory
actually will be a scene in a movie, the inevitable Heath Ledger Story. (Can't you see it? A packed auditorium of the best actors in the world rising to give a bittersweet standing ovation to his immense talent.) If any of this trio wins this weekend, it will have something to do with singular performances and a whole lot more to do with their real-life stories and how those stories have been pitched to the voting public. (A similar logic applies to Slumdog Millionaire, which should win because the field is weak, people dig it, and, as the unheralded, multi-ethnic crowd pleaser, it is the Barack Obama of the best picture category.)
Excellent backstories have propelled many past Oscar winners. To name just a few of those many, think of Jennifer Hudson, Matt and Ben, the coronation of Julia Roberts, or even someone like Al Pacino, who won for Scent of a Woman not because it was his (or the year's) best work but because he had been Oscar-less for too long. Academy voters have proved again and again that they love a great story as much as a great performance—they're movie people after all; great stories are their business. It's about time I stopped being surprised.
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