Year of the black Oscars
IT’S high season for red carpets and black dresses. It was black dresses at the Golden Globes, black dresses at the Baftas and presumably it will be black dresses at the Oscars on Sunday, all to say Time’s Up for sexual harassment. Do good and look your best! Whoever decided black should be the uniform for this protest got it dead right. It doesn’t just send a unified message to importunate men, it protects these women from some bad instincts of their own.
Oscar night is so often a nightmarish display of hideous colours dementedly mischosen in the name of “glamour”. Black is more than a statement against harassment, it’s a rampart against embarrassment.
Women can speak for themselves but nobody has put it better than the great Japanese fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto. He said: “Black is modest and arrogant at the same time. Black is lazy and easy – but mysterious. But above all black says this: I don’t bother you – don’t bother me.” And that’s precisely what Time’s Up is about.
If you want one of the moments at the ceremony that captures this year’s theme, it will come with the award of the Oscar for actress in a leading role, traditionally presented by last year’s leading actor. But not this year. Casey Affleck, who won in 2017 for his brilliant performance in Manchester By The Sea, has withdrawn saying he “does not want to become a distraction” (or be dismembered).
In 2010 he settled out of court with two women who accused him of gruesome sexual harassment. Last year Brie Larson (best actress in Room) handed him his award with disdain and without applause. On Sunday he would in all probability have been presenting the statuette to Frances McDormand, the star of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, a woman not to be messed with either in Ebbing or in real life. She will likely be a rare one wearing a colourful dress as she did at the Baftas. “I have a little trouble with compliance,” she said.
Among the nominees for best supporting actor is Christopher Plummer, at 88 the oldest-ever nominated performer of either gender, honoured for a good performance and for erasing Kevin Spacey from All The Money In The World, the film about the Getty kidnapping. Every trace of Spacey, now reviled as an alleged serial harasser of young men, was digitally removed from the film and redone at miracle speed by Plummer.
NEEDLESS to say Harvey Weinstein, the man who over the years has been thanked more often than God in Oscar speeches, will not be there. He has been sacked from the Academy. There have been many hated movie powersthat-be: when Harry Cohn, head of Columbia pictures, died in 1958 and there was a big turnout for his funeral, comedian Red Skelton said: “It proves what Harry always said, give the public what they want and they’ll come out for it.”
The business has always had monsters and bullies. The casting couch was ever an essential part of the set but no mogul has ever equalled Weinstein in infamy. In the global villain stakes what used to take years now takes only minutes.
Oscar night used to be Harvey Weinstein’s night of nights. He didn’t actually change the awards or revolutionise the type of films that won but he certainly transformed the way to set about getting the prize. Of course studios have always campaigned and lobbied for their films and performers but not with Weinstein’s ferocity. Pushing, schmoozing, strong-arming, praising, bad-mouthing, combined with his masterly ability to choose projects with award-winning potential, independent films of manageable scale made him an Oscar emperor.
In 1999 Shakespeare In Love beat Saving Private Ryan for best film. One of his colleagues thanked him “for guts, courage and enthusiasm to make this film and get it done”. Gwyneth Paltrow, best actress, in her tearflooded speech, said: “I would like to thank Harvey Weinstein and everyone at Miramax for their undying support of me.”
Totting up numbers in all departments, films with Weinstein involved have had 341 nominations and won 81 Oscars. In 2012 The Artist, a silent film in black and white, amazingly won the best picture award. It was distributed by the Weinstein company and Harvey’s efforts were crucial in getting it on to the Academy podium.
For the past few years he has been a declining power, no more anything like such a Mr Big. His Oscar-claiming days behind him. No longer was running foul of him a career catastrophe for young actresses or anyone else.
His harassment of women was horrific and not at all new. But would it have emerged publicly if he was still king of the hill? Certainly it only came out when he wasn’t. It is symptomatic that the first really detailed allegations that stuck came from Rose McGowan, a little-known actress in a memoir published last year. Only then did the floodgates open. Suddenly even megastars who had remained silent felt obliged or empowered to speak. In the end his greatest contribution may not be to movies but to the redrawing of sexual boundaries.
This is the 50th anniversary of the ceremony where Alfred Hitchcock was awarded the Academy’s Irving Thalberg Award for a lifetime’s contribution. The little round man walked on to the stage with his famous plonking signature tunes (Gounod’s Dance Of The Marionettes) and made the perfect acceptance speech. He leaned down to the microphone and said “thank you” and started to walk off, then turned back and added “very much indeed”.
Hitchcock would not be welcome on Sunday. His treatment of women, his blonde heroines, was atrocious. He became obsessed with Tippi Hedren, star of The Birds and Marnie. She says he bullied, terrorised, terrified and sexually assaulted her.
The Oscars are always full of emotion. It has hosted some of the most embarrassing speeches imaginable. It has been used as a platform for protest but the glittering backslapping nature of the event usually undercuts the power of the words. There have been declamations against war, against HIV, against Trump.
FORTY-FIVE years ago in 1973 Marlon Brando, winner of the best actor Oscar for The Godfather, did something nobody had ever done. He stayed away (other winners have done that) but in his place sent an Apache woman Sacheen Littlefeather, who came on stage in traditional dress, to say that he could not accept “this very generous award” because of the treatment of American Indians in film and in reruns on television. “I beg that I have not intruded on this evening,” she said, “and I beg that our hearts and our understanding will meet with love and generosity.”
She got a mixed reception. There were boos. She had intruded. This year’s protest will certainly not be an intrusion, it will be an enhancement. It may make its point. Perhaps it should become the dress code. Daily Express Thursday March 1 2018