In the world of the arts, there are few things simultaneously as revered and reviled as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and its annual awards, the Oscars.
This year’s annual awards gala, televised Sunday evening did not disappoint in that regard. There was plenty to love and plenty to hate during the four-hour affair.
Personally, I thought it was a good year. There was not a bad film among the nine contenders for best picture, although I have not yet seen Fences. Also, the Academy got it right in most categories, something I cannot remember saying for a long time. The possible major exception for me was Emma Stone for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her portrayal of a struggling actress in La La Land. She was great, but I haven’t seen all the other performances.
The worst moment of the night was Viola Davis’s acceptance speech for Best Actress in a supporting role. Immediately the Internet response was that her unhinged, banal and melodramatic navel-gazing was “powerful” and the “Oscars at its best.” What nonsense.
After a decent, but kind of bizarre, start talking about metaphorically exhuming bodies from a graveyard she actually said:
“I became an artist—and thank God I did—because we are the only profession that celebrates what it means to live a life.”
This over-the-top self-aggrandizement is the Oscars at its worst. I’ve got news for you, Viola, telling stories may have an important place in society, but your profession is not the end-all and be-all of everything.
And from there, the speech just disintegrated into tearful, semi-religious rambling.
Fortunately, host Jimmy Kimmel was on hand immediately following to deliver one of the best jokes of the night.
“Viola Davis, she just got nominated for an Emmy for that speech,” he quipped.
Kimmel was one of the best things about the whole show. He was topically, but gently, political and just plain funny.
There were a couple of big surprises. The ending, of course, was a massive screw-up with La La Land being erroneously being announced as Best Picture.
Moonlight, the actual winner of that most prestigious honour, was definitely the correct choice. Every moment of Moonlight is saturated with emotion and meaning, a grand tribute to extraordinary writing, directing, acting and editing. And what is so amazing about this film is that although it is a very specific story about a gay African American youth coming of age in a community hostile to his existence, it feels so universal.
The mix-up and the film’s worthiness notwithstanding, it was still a bit of a surprise. Most pundits had pegged La La Land to walk away with everything. Some cynically cited Hollywood’s love affair with itself, and others mathematically predicted a split vote among the more worthy contenders propelling La La Land to the top.
In the end, La La Land took home a respectable six of the record-tying 14 it was nominated for, and mostly in the right categories, namely music and production.
The other surprise was that the show was not nearly as political as it had the potential to be. It is no secret that there is a great deal of animosity between the arts community and the current political administration in the United States, but the most overt political reference was Kimmel joking that the Academy’s racism, which produced the #oscarssowhite hashtag last year pales in comparison to Donald Trump.
There will undoubtedly be a lot of criticism that not enough of the stars took a strong enough stand, but I think they got the balance about right. It was not an apolitical night, but it did not deviate so far from being a celebration of art that it lost perspective.
In fact, the show overall was just pretty darn good entertainment. Normally I get through a couple of awards before turning it off, or just check in near the end to see who gets the big awards. This year, I watched the whole thing and don’t even regret the time spent.
