Oscar benefit gala a winning tradition
May Meryl forgive me, but I’m not that excited about the Oscars this year.
There are a few nominated films I’m pulling for (“Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” “Little Women” “Pain and Glory”), but I’m generally underwhelmed by the nominees. The mediocre Scarlett Johansson gets two nominations? We can’t be that desperate.
Maybe it’s the return of the nohost format, which sucked a lot of the fun out of the ceremony last year. Or maybe it’s because with disease outbreaks, an impeachment trial and other calamitous events in the world right now, the stakes for who wins best cinematography don’t feel quite as high.
That said, I would never miss an Academy Awards broadcast, and I don’t plan to start this year.
My relationship with the award show is a product of growing up in San Francisco, where many people take the awards very seriously. Some people have the Super Bowl as their yearly mandatory viewing; in my communities, the Oscars are our Super Bowl (minus the head trauma). And it’s not just the show itself my friends and I love, it’s the entire ritual of Oscar season. We try and see as many of the best picture nominees as possible, we start watching the red carpet arrivals hours before the awards are handed out, and we love live tweeting reactions to everything from the fashion choices to the presenters and winners.
Kile Ozier has a similar relationship to the Oscars. Forty years ago, Ozier had just moved to San Francisco from Denver and decided to throw a viewing party for 30 of his friends. A year later, the party doubled in size, and by the late 1980s it had become a benefit for HIV/AIDS organizations during the worst years of the crisis. Since then, the annual Academy of Friends gala has become a San Francisco institution and raised $8 million for HIV/AIDS charities — no small feat for an event that started with some friends and an Oscar pool.
“I watch for the glamour of it and the surprises,” says Ozier, who is now an emeritus board member of the Academy of Friends organization. “I even love the mistakes, like the year Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway announced ‘La La Land’ as the best picture winner when it was really ‘Moonlight.’ ”
Like that notorious 2017 best picture fiasco, there are events connected to the Oscars that are so memorable my friends and I reference them years later. Remember the shows where Debbie Allen would choreograph interpretive dances to the best film score nominees? We do, and we still talk about how surreal it was to watch dancers frolic to the theme from “Saving Private Ryan” in 1999.
Thinking about the awards in 2002 when Halle Berry became the first African American to win best actress, for “Monster’s Ball,” and thanked the generations of black actresses who came before her is still moving, as is the memory of watching Dustin Lance Black’s original screenplay win for “Milk” in 2009 when he thanked God for Harvey Milk.
And even though it happened a decade before I was born, every year I pray for a repeat of 1973 when activist Sacheen Littlefeather turned down the Oscar on Marlon Brando’s behalf to protest the misrepresentation of Native Americans in the film industry. There was as much drama in that moment as there was in the entire “Godfather” trilogy.
Ozier thinks part of the success of the Academy of Friends event is that people get invested in the movies they love. If the Oscars are the film lover’s Super Bowl, the movies become teams you root for. In the weeks leading up to the show, people make predictions about the awards and many have formulas they use to try to determine the winners. Adam Sandel, an entertainment journalist and a founding board member of this year’s Academy of Friends beneficiary, the LGBT Asylum Project, believes several factors assist actors in the competition.
“It helps if you’re a beautiful woman to play ugly,” he says, naming Nicole Kidman and Charlize Theron, who won Oscars for their roles in “The Hours” and “Monster,” respectively.
If you’re a man, gaining or losing a great deal of weight is an Oscar boost as it was for Robert De Niro in “Raging Bull” (gained 60 pounds) and Christian Bale in “The Fighter” (lost 30 pounds), Sandel says.
Also helpful for a win: “You must have an emotional breakdown scene.”
Sometimes, the viewers get so invested they have emotional breakdown scenes themselves, although maybe I’m just speaking for myself from the years Julia Roberts beat Ellen Burstyn for best actress (2001) and when “Crash” beat “Brokeback Mountain” for best picture (2006).
Whether you watch the Oscars with friends at a party or by yourself with just the company of the Twittersphere, the Oscarviewing experience ends up being about community. Some of us are bonded by rooting for the same team; others are rivals rooting against you. At the very least, the awards, like sports, give us all something to talk about that takes us away from realworld crises.
Unless, of course, the acceptance speeches get political. A little controversy at the podium is always the best surprise on Oscar night, so here’s hoping the winners have strong opinions this year.
Maybe we’ll get really lucky and Sacheen Littlefeather will make a return appearance. That would be something to get excited about.