How astonishing to me is the amount of attention given —
worldwide and not just in America — to the Oscars. Why on earth
should anyone outside the Motion Picture Academy itself care about
the opinion of a group of people whose own lack of taste is
demonstrated by the steady stream of rubbish, that is the usual
product of the American film industry, as to which bits of these
effluvia shall be judged the most fragrant? This year, it’s true,
there were some pretty good movies up for Best Picture for a
change. Although none of those in this expanded, ten-picture
category got my coveted two-star (must-see) rating, as many as four
of them, including the winner, The
King’s Speech, got one star (worth seeing).
But the hype surrounding the ceremony apparently had no notion of
its being a particularly good year. What co-host Anne Hathaway
called “Hollywood’s biggest night” would have been equally big if
all the Best Picture contenders had been the usual load of
dreck.
If you doubt me, consider that the four movies I (kind of)
liked — besides The King’s Speech they were True
Grit, 127
Hours,and (the one of that lot that I thought
should have won) Winter’s
Bone — were all made for grown-ups. As, indeed, were all
but two — Toy Story 3 and Inception
being the exceptions — of the others. The New York
Times even ran a
piece on the day before the ceremony about how, after ignoring
the over-50s for years, Hollywood had responded to “a startling
reassertion of its multiplex power” by the cohort of old folks in
serving up and then belauding and be-Oscaring the likes of The
King’s Speech. Admittedly, the fact that something is in
the New York Times is no longer any guarantee
of its being news, but it does seem odd in the circumstances that
the Oscar ceremony itself was pitched, to the extent that it was,
at the kiddies. Miss Hathaway herself led off with a joke about it.
After her co-host, James Franco told her that “you look so
beautiful and so hip,” she replied: “Oh, thank you, James. You look
very appealing to a younger demographic as well.”
That was a typical Oscar-style self-referential joke, like
the ensuing discussion of the presenters’ own Best Actor/Actress
nominations or the lack of them. For Mr. Franco had been nominated
(for 127 Hours) and Miss Hathaway had not (for Love
and Other Drugs). She went on to lament: “It used to be, you
got naked, you got nominated. Not anymore.” That is a variation on
a joke so old they even showed a clip of Bob Hope telling a version
of it (Oscar night at his house, he said, was known as Passover) 58
years ago. Not surprisingly, it got more of a laugh in 1953. As
usual, too, the best jokes were the unconscious kind, as when Miss
Hathaway began her cross-talk act with Mr. Franco by greeting the
audience: “Ohmigosh! You’re all real.” Yeah, they’re all real the
way “reality TV” is real.
In fact, this was reality TV. That made it
appropriate, too, that so many of the nominees were movies about
real people — or at least people who were real before Hollywood
got its hands on them. The days when “you got naked, you got
nominated” are now so long agone that you’d think somebody would
have noticed today the maxim would be, you do an impression
(preferably of a historical character, living or dead), you get
nominated. Mr. Franco’s nomination was for doing an impersonation
of Aron Ralston, the climber who had to cut his own arm off when it
was trapped Between a Rock and a Hard Place — the title
of his memoir. As Jasper Rees
wrote in the London Daily Telegraph:
They used to give you an Oscar for playing someone with
some kind of disability. Now you get gonged for impersonating a
famous face: Piaf, Harvey Milk, Truman Capote, June Carter Cash,
Idi Amin, the Queen, the serial killer Aileen Wuornos — they’ve
all won Oscars. This year, it’s a straight fight between the last
king of England and that bloke who invented Facebook.
Now why do you suppose this is? I put it down to
reality-envy. The movie industry, having devoted itself heart and
soul for so many years to fantasy because that was what was
supposed to appeal to the teens who still predominate in the
domestic audience, must at some level be hankering to get back in
touch with reality. Maybe that’s why they didn’t laugh when Anne
Hathaway, with the naiveté of youth, told them that they were “all
real.” They wished! Of course, she didn’t mention that
reality-hunger of a different kind was also what lay behind the fad
for nakedness years ago. You’ve got to wonder if the beautiful
people just haven’t been looking for reality in the right
places.
