It’s that Equinox time of year when all eyes are on LA and the Academy Awards ceremony, which, for good or ill, is beamed across the globe and watched by millions, showcasing what is, by the Academy’s own members’ metrics, annually, the best of cinema in the US, and worldwide.
The 96th Academy Awards was not a corker, by any measure, more of a sprawling end-of-empire endeavour, with bad comedy writing, tired quips and tropes, and a bit of fresh individual pizzazz, all in all a show that could not decide if it should present itself as legacy, avant-garde, or vaudeville — so it did it all.
Jimmy Kimmel, otherwise quick on his feet, flopped as MC, as did, frankly, all the scripted presentations, simply due to the weakness of the show’s writing — the lines only coming alive when the talent involved clearly ad-libbed their interactions. Most memorable was Kimmel’s sharp little snap at ex-president Trump’s mean-spirited (albeit sadly correct) assessment of the MC’s performance in his post on Truth Social. “Isn’t it past your jail time?” Kimmel wondered, to thunderous applause.
Ryan Gosling’s flamboyant and charmingly deadpan musical number from Greta Gerwig‘s under-nominated Barbie (2023), “I’m Just Ken” referencing Marlyn Monroe in the famous staging of “Dimonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend”, in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), was a hoot, and Gosling & the dancers pulled it off with aplomb. All this Kenergy had the audience jumping on its feet, and singing along — in the one genuinely (and contagiously) joyful moment of the entire show.
As industry affairs go, the Oscar speech for Best Adapted Screenplay for American Fiction (2023), given by writer/director Cord Jefferson, was honest, spot on and to the point, when addressing film funding, and scripts that are never given a chance at development, calling for the necessity of shaking up Hollywood studios’ blockbuster strategies to the realities of filmmaking today, and the actual tastes and wishes of the audiences. Equally a necessary wake-up call was Kimmel’s praise of the Teamsters for their standing with the writers and actors during the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA strikes of 2023, as he invited a group of the behind-the-scenes crew to the stage.
All of this solo shooting from the hip clearly intended at revealing the difficult professional realities of the notoriously self-aggrandising Tinseltown.
The choice of top-prize winners of the Academy Awards was somewhat anti-climatic, as Christopher Nolan‘s visually impressive but narratively underdeveloped epic Oppenheimer (2023) swept the main awards, as widely predicted — and in Cillian Murphy‘s case, most richly deserved (at least in this writer’s opinion). If I were the Academy (which I definitely am not), I would not have passed Annette Bening in Nyad (2023), or indeed Gosling in Barbie. In the past year, the Academy had plenty excellent filmmaking and performances to choose from, so it did its best to balance-out the prizes — which inevitably led to some misfires.
But that is not why this year’s ceremony will be remembered. In fact, it would have veered towards certain showbiz oblivion, if it not for the unacknowledged massive political protests at the Academy doors — and the severe incongruity of the fantasy of the Oscars with the actual world beyond its gilded gates.
The Oscars never had a particularly astute political radar, more often than not choosing to downplay actual progressive voices, while, at the same time, espousing liberal politics. To be fair, it lacked the international maneuvering ground of a Cannes, Berlinale, or a Toronto — or even its UK counterpart, the BAFTAs. Nevertheless, Oscars’ iconic stature kept its mid-liberal stance safe from too close a scrutiny, and only seldomly did it seem vastly out-of-touch with the times. The incidents indicating the rigidity and the underlying conservative attitude of the Academy and the Hollywood set were noticeable, however, and firmly lodged in our collective memory — such as were the speech of Indigenous American rights activist Sacheen Littlefeather, who walked on stage to refuse to accept Marlon Brando‘s Oscar in absentia due to unfair treatment of Indigenous voices in the motion picture industry, Vanessa Redgrave‘s condemning “Zionist hoodlums” for intimidating her (and her colleagues) due to her vocal support for the Palestinian cause, Michael Moore’s outrage at president George W. Bush for warmongering the nation with a fictitious narrative into the Iraq War, and Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins standing up for HIV-positive Haiti refugees held at Guantanamo Bay (which got the pair temporarily banned from presenting at the Oscars). While there were many other instances of actors championing a political or social cause upon receiving an Oscar, to general appreciation, these speeches received pretty mixed reactions by the luminaries in the audience at the time (with a few loud boos, especially for Moore and Redgrave), and were not beloved by the organisers of the ceremony, either. Yet, they were all incredibly significant, in terms of both internal and international politics, and are talked about to this day.
Only when a local or global issue reached a tipping point of mass condemnation was it essentially incorporated by the Academy as its own position — unless the political agenda at hand was at the very core of US foreign policy — most recently manifested as the prominent support for Ukraine defending itself from Russian aggression [Mstyslav Chernov‘s 20 Days In Mariupol (2023) won Best Documentary this year]. Or the fate of Alexei Navalny, a Russian opposition politician, including him in this years’ In Memoriam section (following his controversial and tragic death in incarceration) — the documentary Navalny (2022) on his life and work winning an Oscar in 2023.
Despite all efforts to the contrary, sometimes a burning issue can be highlighted by its strange near-absence in the proceedings. And at this year’s ceremony we witnessed an almost-silence on the Israeli onslaught on Gaza, as its response to the Oct 7 massacre by Hamas. Despite the tragedy of the Palestinian people being the most extreme form of injustice unfolding in the world today, only a small but honourable number of the talent present wore #artists4ceasefire badges to raise awareness of Gaza’s plight, while the pro-Palestinian peace protests engulfed the streets in the lead-up to the ceremony.
This unspoken and hard truth took centre-stage in Jonathan Glazer‘s deeply humane and incredibly courageous speech upon receiving his Oscar for Best International Feature Film, the brilliant The Zone of Interest (2023) — a chilling perspective on the “banality of evil” behind the diabolical mechanics of the Holocaust. The raw vulnerability and ferocious integrity of that moment truly rendered all the merry scenery an unserious distraction, as a British-Jewish filmmaker, Glazer, visibly shaken, condemned the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the hijacking of the Shoah for political purposes, equally decrying the massacre by Hamas on October 7 and the current terrifying Israeli siege of Gaza as dehumanising — concluding with the question of the importance of small acts of resistance by all people with empathy and a moral compass.
Glazer’s words had their discrete echo in the measured speech of Cillian Murphy, dedicating his Oscar for playing the man who invented the atomic bomb to “peacemakers everywhere.” We live in Oppenheimer’s times, Murphy said — and indeed we do.
It might not be custom for the occasion, but it does show what a person is made of, when given the chance to speak directly to a vast audience of millions, and in dark times, they sacrifice their own personal space of celebration for a genuine service to humanity.
Finally, there might be a limit to which the world-wide audiences can forgive the kind of self-centeredness the Academy Awards and Hollywood establishment historically and continually display (while earning a great chunk of their monies on overseas distribution), before the Oscars paint themselves entirely culturally redundant.
Lola On Film 