The Academy Awards offered up a night of earnest speeches and jokes about whiteness. But underneath, things are pretty much the same as always.
Meryl Streep, Bradley Cooper, and Clint Eastwood at the 87th Annual Academy Awards
Kevin Winter / Getty Images
The Academy Awards ceremony is a mirror in which Hollywood arranges itself as it would most like to be seen. Every year, the industry sucks its stomach in, sorts out some flattering lighting, tilts its head at its most attractive angle, and pretends — that hilarious killjoy Jack Black number aside ("screens in our jeans!") — that it's all about the art and the craft and not increasingly driven by the giant blockbuster franchises that were left largely unmentioned during the evening.
This year's Academy Awards may have started off with Neil Patrick Harris delivering a starry-eyed musical ode to the magic of motion pictures, but the narrative of the evening wasn't escapism. Instead, again and again, we were reminded of the real-world relevance of the movies being celebrated, of their power to bring attention to social issues, to history, to diseases in need of a cure.
Yes, it made for some great speeches. Patricia Arquette, marvelous in glasses and wispy hair, tested the profanity delay when she won Best Supporting Actress for her role in Boyhood, then declared, "It's our time to have wage equality once and for all and equal rights for women in the United States of America." Common and John Legend, collecting the Best Original Song award for Selma's "Glory" after a searing performance, delivered heartfelt statements on how the spirit and work of the civil rights movement continues, with Legend pointing out, "There are more black men under correctional control today than were under slavery in 1850."
Director Alejandro González Iñárritu accepts the Best Picture award for Birdman
Kevin Winter / Getty Images
Julianne Moore, in an elegant speech after she won Best Actress for her performance in Still Alice, noted the film's potential to "shine a light on Alzheimer's disease." Alejandro González Iñárritu, accepting the fourth and biggest prize of Birdman's night, for Best Picture, dedicated the award to his "fellow Mexicans": "The ones who live in Mexico, I pray that we can find and build the government that we deserve. And the ones that live in this country who are part of the latest generation of immigrants in this country, I just pray that they can be treated with the same dignity and respect of the ones who came before and build this incredible immigrant nation."
These are lovely sentiments, and they'd be even lovelier if the Oscars hadn't, in practice, been basically another standard year. (Iñárritu's Best Director win, the second in a row for a Latino director, was a happy exception, even if it would have been nice to see Boyhood's Richard Linklater honored for his epic work.) When the nominees were first announced, they were blasted for the uniform whiteness of the acting categories in particular — on Twitter, the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag picked up steam and led to the organization of a protest. It took the snubbing of a single movie, Selma, in those categories to achieve that, and while director Ava DuVernay's historical drama is both good and gorgeously made, it was left carrying the burden of being the one black movie that's seemingly allowed, annually, into the awards conversation.
Instead of change, the Academy Awards gave us self-aware jokes — "Tonight, we honor Hollywood's best and whitest... sorry, I mean brightest," Harris announced at the top of the evening. Later, when the audience clapped for Selma star and non-nominee David Oyelowo, whose name Harris mispronounced multiple times, the host said, "Oh, sure, now you like him." The awards themselves might have been lacking in diversity, but the ceremony strived ferociously to compensate with its choice of presenters and reaction shots in the audience.
No comments:
Post a Comment