Opening of the show at the theater formerly known as KodakWhat’s a feminist spectator to make of an awardsshow that honors films that have so little to do with women behind the cameraor as central to their stories? Other writers have detailed the appalling lack of women nominated for Best Director this year, after Kathryn Bigelow’s historic win for The Hurt Locker in 2011. Godforbid a pattern should emerge of even nominating, let alone awarding, work bywomen directors. In my alternate realityversion of the Oscars, Dee Rees (Pariah)and Maryam Keshavarz (Circumstance)would both be on that list.
Instead, Academy voters nominated nine films forBest Picture, only one of which has anything remotely to do with women. And that’s The Help, a movie whose racial politics are so compromised that it’sdifficult to applaud its nomination, though its actors were uniformly excellent.
Frankly, Viola Davis was robbed by her friend MerylStreep, who won her third Oscar for Best Actress. That Streep should win for playing MaggieThatcher as some sort of pseudo-feminist heroine, instead of Davis winning for bringingdignity and empathy to Aibileen, an entirely oppressed African American maidworking in the heart of the pre-Civil Rights racist South . . . that’s just crueland unusual.
Viola Davis, whose Oscar show hair style prompted a surprising amount of commentStreep was right when she anticipated that peoplewatching Sunday’s telecast would say, “Aw, no! Not her again!” But when she wona Golden Globe for her role this year, Streep named her fellow nominees with admiration. She even mentioned actresses whose gloriouswork wasn’t nominated (including Pariah’s Adepero Oduye).
A not particularly gracious StreepInstead of repeating that generous gesture at theOscars, Streep smugly brushed off imagined objections to her win and didn’teven nod at the pack of excellent actresses she bested for the award. She did embrace Davis on her way to thepodium, but some more sincere public recognition of her steal would have gone along way. Even her pithy and earnestspeech about the importance of friendship was too oblique to acknowledge thesurprise of her win over Davis. Whenwill Davis, even with her talent and stature in the industry, again be cast inan Oscar-worthy role? We can only hopesoon.
Also robbed last night were Annie Mumolo andKristin Wiig, whose biting, knowing, hysterical screenplay for Bridesmaids deserved recognition. Sure, Midnightin Paris, which did win, was clever and even heart-felt for the typicallymore cynical Woody Allen. But howpredictable for him to write still another movie about a younger version of hisanxious and conflicted self. And howpredictable for the Academy to acknowledge him again (even though he neverattends the show, nominated or not).
Kristin Wiig, robbed of a Best Original Screenplay Award by Woody AllenWhen have we ever seen characters like those Mumoloand Wiig wrote for their comrades in Bridesmaids? When have we seen a woman conflicted aboutlosing her best friend to the bridal industry and social prerogatives ofmarriage? When have we seen a storyabout women so invested in being “the best friend” that they practicallyfist-fight to speak into a microphone at an engagement party? When have we seen a stocky, pearl-and-bowling-shirtwearing woman seduce a man pretending he’s not an air marshal on a plane? Or seen women getting sick every which way inthe bathroom of a bridal shop? So muchof Bridesmaids was refreshing becauseit was told from a smart, talented, desiring, and ambivalent woman’s point of view. Why wasn’t that story honored by the Academy?
Perhaps because it turns out that most Academyvoters are white men whose median age is 62. A recent Los Angeles Times study found that 94% of voters are white and 77% are male. Of course that crowd will nod instead toWoody Allen. Of course they’ll honor otherstories about boys and men, like Hugo(however sweet), Extremely Loud andIncredibly Close (however sad), WarHorse (however wrenching), The Artist(however quiet), Moneyball (howeversmart), The Descendants (howevernoble), and Tree of Life (howeveroblique). Even in the Oscar show’smontage curated to demonstrate how much we love the movies, all the clips showedeither heterosexual love scenes or men racing to get themselves out of trouble.
The only girls or women in evidence outside ofthose embracing men in the montage were Linda Blair, layered in her extreme exorcism make-up, andMeg Ryan, doing her extremely fake public orgasm in When Harry Met Sally (a rather self-serving scene for host BillyCrystal). This, then, is how we lovewomen in the movies? Only if they’re in lovewith men, possessed by demons or by sex, or completely absent? Please.
I liked the interstitial interviews with actorsand filmmakers on the Oscar show, in which they described when they began tolove the movies. But only ReeseWitherspoon seemed to get any screen time there, among a host of men telling anecdotes. At least a few women got to speak to theirwork during the production clips, for which short quotes from interviews withnominated artists played alongside images from their films. Those moments brought dignity and respect tothe profession, in stark contrast to the ubiquitous, mindless prattle between presenterswho can only seem vacuous in that context, regardless of their intelligence.
(But even those short clips elide the fact of women's lack of advancement in the film industry. Martha Lauzen's recent study about women and the "celluloid ceiling" reports the dismal percentages of women producers, editors, and cinematographers working on the top 250 films of the year.)
The Christopher Guest crew’s funny spoof aboutfocus groups, in which the assembled tweaked The Wizard of Oz out of its Dorothy, offered the best writing (andsome of the best performances) of the Oscar show evening. The standing ovation for Octavia Spencer, winning for her performance asThe Help’s stalwart Minnie, wasmoving, but I wish she’d won for better material than the stereotypically sassymaid who’s redeemed by the socially mobile white woman who tells her story.
Spencer embraced by Davis after her award was announcedWatching Beginners’Christopher Plummer accept his award for his fine performance as a gay mancoming out late in his life was heart-warming. But his win for playing gay didn’t make up forthe fact that no one awarded this year thanked same-sex partners or referred inany way to queer lives. Along withwomen, LGBT folks were invisible in the show (unless you count the vaguelyhomoerotic flying men in suits in Cirque du Soleil’s strangely out-of-placespectacle).
I’m glad TheSeparation was the first Iranian movie ever to win a Best Foreign Filmaward. But the film’s wife/mother in the story isdemonized for wanting a better life for her daughter, and for precipitatinganother woman’s tragedy by “abandoning” her own family.
What kind of message do these awards send aboutwomen?
Billy Crystal's opening numberFinally, here’s Billy Crystal, trotted back out tohost the show for the ninth time. Howself-congratulatory of him to structure his entire opening monologue aboutwhether or not he should accept the invitation to host? His shtick all evening seemed to me like Jewishminstrelsy. We won’t even mention hisblackface routine as Sammy Davis Jr. alongside Justin Bieber in that silly,manufactured scene from Midnight in Paris. Crystal shrugged his shoulders like alow-rent Bob Hope and tried to raise eyebrows that looked paralyzed by Botox. Crystal seemed a parody of himself, a canned,predictable, self-immolating copy of the quick-witted, genial host of showspast.
I’ll just keep hoping that next year, things willchange. Maybe Tina Fey and Kristin Wiigwill write and host the show. Or maybethey’ll write and Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer will host. Or maybe Janet McTeer and Glenn Close will dothe honors, dressed in matching tuxes.
And maybe the nominated material will be richexaminations of the lives of women, people of color, and LGBT people, as wellas straight, white, male people. Wouldn’tit be nice to hear and see stories that say something we haven’t heard before?
Eternally optimistic,
Hiç yorum yok:
Yorum Gönder