National Post (National Edition)
Giving Oscar the gold shoulder
Streakers, protests and bewildering envelope blunders: Calum Marsh on why the Academy Awards are at their best when things go absolutely haywire.
On the evening of February 27th, 1941, an unfamiliar-looking man with a pencil-thin moustache and a handsome streak of white in his dark brown hair approached the podium at the 13th Academy Awards, gracing the stage, apparently, to receive the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, awarded to Preston Sturges for his marvellous directorial debut The Great McGinty. “Mr. Sturges was so overcome by the mere possibility of winning an Oscar,” the mysterious fellow announced, “that he was unable to come here tonight, and asked me to accept in his stead.” The audience duly applauded, and the gentleman returned to his chair. Nobody knew who he was. It was only later that anyone learned it had in fact been Preston Sturges.
On the evening of February 26th, 2017, more familiarly, a representative from PricewaterhouseCooper – the international accounting firm responsible for tabulating votes, determining award winners, and handling the sealed envelopes containing the names and titles of the honourees – passed an unopened envelope bearing the name of the already-revealed Best Actress in a Leading Role to Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty, on stage to present the final award of the night, for Best Picture. In a moment of televised confusion they declared La La Land the winner. “There’s been a mistake,” Jordan Horowitz, one of La La Land’s producers, announced to the audience once apprised of the blunder. Their cheery acceptance speeches had been delivered too hastily. It transpired that the year’s Best Picture was in fact Moonlight.
What unites these anecdotes, distant from one another by the sprawl of more than 75 years, is that in different respects they find the Oscars going somehow wrong; betraying a capacity for human error and unexpected humour that the Academy Awards as an institution otherwise scrupulously endeavours to resist. What do rare stories of mishap and absurdity, of turmoil and disturbance, suggest about the nature of the Oscars, really? Not, I don’t expect, that we are transfixed by the annual ceremony and remain thoroughly satisfied by its customary motions – the rote-glamour red carpet walks, the polite remarks of dubious inspirational import, the unvarying homogeneity of the high-profile recipients.
No, I think the enthusiasm with which we greet every occasional intrusion into the glittering monotony, the glee we cherish when the wrong prize happens to be announced, simply confirms our boredom with the tradition. We are all desperate for something, anything, to happen.
This urgency invites the question: if the Academy Awards are so fundamentally staid, such a routine stretch of star-studded tedium, how can they change? There are problems with the Oscars so long-standing they seem to most viewers self-evident: the familiarity of the rhythms, the sprawling four-hour running times, the consistent lily- whiteness of the major nominees, and so on. In welcoming leagues of new voters into their membership (and in asking older members without recent contributions to the industry to quietly step down) the Academy has made much-publicized and, based on the constitution of the Best Picture category this year alone, apparently successful changes meant to address common complaints about diversity. There must then be something the Academy can do to fix the Oscar ceremony itself.
“Very few things happen now like that moment when Marlon Brando sent the Indian woman to accept the Oscar and everything went haywire,” Andre Gregory complains to Wallace Shawn in My Dinner with Andre. “Things just very rarely go haywire now.”
Indeed. It was 1973, and Brando had been awarded the prize for Best Actor in a Leading Role for his performance in The Godfather. Brando declined the award, and invited civil rights activist Sacheen Littlefeather to deliver a speech in protest of Hollywood’s treatment of Native Americans on the actor’s behalf. Things really did go haywire, almost right away: you can hear the indignant boos in recordings of the broadcast, and in the news the following day both Brando and Littlefeather were summarily denounced. The Academy could hardly believe the impudence – that one of its most venerated members would not merely decline its honour but would squander minutes of its precious prime-time spotlight on something as ignoble as a cause.
Moments of defiance and provocation are incredibly rare in the Academy’s long history – strange considering the scope of the platform, the latitude ostensibly afforded by the speeches, and the fact that at least some of the membership’s constituents qualify as bona fide artists, possessed of all the rebelliousness one expects of them. Even in 2004, when popular sentiment toward George W. Bush was at its most universally critical, only Michael Moore could muster a few words of remonstration when he took up the microphone – and a generous portion of the audience could of course be heard to boo in galled response. Politics enter the Dolby Theatre very rarely, and in greatly diminished form. Far more commonly are the night’s most memorable episodes the benign stuff of PR vision: celebrity selfies, striking outfits, beloved actresses tripping up stairs. Pretty meagre stuff, all told.
This year one imagines a more serious dimension will manage to sneak its way into the proceedings, thanks of course to the revelations of the last year concerning Harvey Weinstein and others in roles of long-abused power. If the recent Golden Globes are anything to go by, the dissent against harassment and what we tend to now call “sexual misconduct” will manifest as decorative trifles (mass ensemble themes, such as the decision to wear all black, or buttons brandishing a socialmedia-ready hashtag), largely inoffensive speeches calling for changes upon which everybody can agree (perhaps from the mouths of likely winners with their own shady histories and whispered-about transgressions), and the occasional comic riff or ill-advised punchline at the expense of outed harassers whose merit will be debated at interminable length all the following week.
This year’s Oscars ceremony may be unavoidably different, in other words. But it will remain safe and predictable.
What would be better? In an ideal world, celebrities would feel comfortable using the platform afforded them to directly address matters of current significance, matters that might benefit from exposure. How many award-winners would be willing to get on stage and call for drastic reforms to gun control laws in the wake of the Florida shootings? A passing joke at the expense of Donald Trump wouldn’t ruffle many feathers (and one anticipates a few). But what about transgender rights, or intersectionality, or literally any issue whose contentiousness might provoke serious debate and require the courage to take a resolute stand?
It isn’t that the Awards must become a night-long soapbox, exactly. It’s that the self-serving politesse of the evening flatters the attendees and stifles any chance of surprise. What viewers need to see is a willingness to puncture that bubble of tuxedo-clad civility. We need at least the risk that things might go haywire.