And the loopiest award show Oscar goes to ...
He’s watching what you’re watching!
AS if last Sunday wasn’t long enough with election coverage running from 9am on RTÉ One, I stayed up until 4.30am watching the Oscars live, rather than waiting for the always-unsatisfactory highlights show broadcast by RTÉ on Monday night.
As always, it was interminable and even more luvvie than ever. Despite drooping eyelids, it was hard to not crack up laughing at the spectacularly earnest Joaquin Phoenix, winner of the Best Actor award, who has used the entire awards season to push a variety of causes. It still came as quite the surprise when he decided his target this time was the dairy industry.
‘We feel entitled to artificially inseminate a cow and steal her baby, even though her cries of anguish are unmistakable,’ he gravely intoned. ‘Then we take her milk that’s intended for her calf and we put it in our coffee and our cereal.’
These are all valid points, but raising them in the middle of the Academy Awards presentation was so spectacularly loopy, it was hard to know if he meant it or if he had returned to that performance art phase in his career when he said he was giving up acting altogether.
As for Renée Zellweger, who won Best Actress, she trotted out the third different accent I’ve heard this year. At the Screen Actors Guild Awards, she was as Texan as an oil gusher, all ‘thanks, y’all’ folksiness. At the Baftas, she was Bridget Jones again, and at the Oscars just plain generic American. Maybe actors really are chameleons who adapt to different circumstances, but it’s been oddly disconcerting to watch, like as if there’s no real Renée at all, just whichever one rocks up on any given night.
There were a couple of highlights, though. Irish conductor Eímear Noone was the first woman ever to get the Oscars gig and she knocked it out of the park, as they say, wielding the baton like Thor’s hammer.
The Oscars
Watching faces always is the best part of awards shows
Prison Breaks
Domini Kemp proved herself a patient and considerate mentor
Being Stan: A Life In Focus
A fascinating look at a woman I have long admired
Best of all, she wore a dress by Irish designer Claire Garvey that looked like a glowing, golden suit of armour and if you thought it somehow seemed familiar, that’s because Claire also dresses Julian Benson every week on Dancing With The Stars.
For the fourth time, there was disappointment for Saoirse Ronan, but she’s young and with so many nominations under her belt already, it surely can’t be long before she ascends those steps too.
The most realistic moment of the night was the look on 1917 director Sam Mendes’s face when Korean Bong Joon-hu won Best Director for Parasite. Watching faces always is the best part of awards show, because that’s where you see truly great acting performances. Mendes, not being an actor, simply gasped in surprise. It was hard not to feel just a little sorry for him.
I felt sorry too for the six men featured in Prison Breaks, a new
Virgin TV series that follows restaurateur Domini Kemp as she tries to instil entrepreneurial values in six inmates in Dublin’s Wheatfield Prison. Prisoners and entrepreneurs, we were told, share some key traits – taking risks, selfbelief, determination and a little madness – and it was Domini’s job to harness those attributes and put them to good rather than nefarious use. She proved a patient and considerate mentor, gently drawing the best out of her pupils even as their commitment to the scheme wavered. When she asked one, imprisoned for selling drugs, if there was anything he liked doing, his answer made me laugh. ‘Not really,’ he said, and smirked before adding, ‘not legit’.
The one thing all the men shared was a strong desire not to re-offend (‘I’m too f***in’ old for this s***,’ said one, bluntly but with genuine world-weariness) and I look forward to the next three episodes to see how they fare. In the TV3 days, there was a tendency in documentaries to sensationalise; this one, produced by the independent Animo Television, was much more measured and while Phelim Drew’s voiceover was just a little on the portentous side, that certainly was a lot better than some of the manic commentaries of old.
At the heart of it all, Domini Kemp proved warm-hearted but no one’s fool either. I hope we see more of her on television. I F Domini is new to helping others, Sister Stanislaus Kennedy has been doing it for decades. The founder of homeless charity Focus Point, now known as Focus Ireland, was the subject of Sister Stan: A Life In Focus on RTÉ. She is an incredible woman, indefatigable in her crusade to get people off the streets and into housing.
The documentary accidentally showed how much has changed. In archive footage from her early years, Sister Stan dressed in conventional nun’s clothing; nowadays, she looks just like any woman of her age, and it was nice to see that rigidity in dress consigned to history.
Along the way, you got the feeling that her spirituality has extended beyond the confines of one religion too as she looked for ‘the still point within us’. It was a fascinating look at a woman I have long admired, and a reminder that after all the guff we have endured on television this week in the wake of the election, one thing above all matters to Irish people. Everyone should have a home to call their own.