Hollywood’s bell curve is inverted—it’s high at the ends of rank commercialism and utter eccentricity, with a deep dip in the middle where the mainstream blend used to be. So it is with the Oscars, as well, where the ceremony went to the far side of blatantly meretricious blandness and made no pretense about its safe and self-protective conservatism. The shticky suffusions of show-biz tradition were replaced by a rigidly plasticized shell of industrial defensiveness that wore its bank-vault-like mentality up front. The order of business allowed spontaneity terribly narrow grooves to rattle in and seemed calculated mainly to avoid the occurrence of anything untoward, anything substantially unforeseen or even unforeseeable. It was planned and managed to yield platitudes. The event was, in several senses, a corporate retreat, a gathering-in away from any edge of new ground—a quest for invulnerability in the age of the instant Internet gotcha, even at the risk of an air of mortal stasis.
With very few exceptions (most notably Christoph Waltz, Whoopi Goldberg, Bill Murray, and the duo of Jamie Foxx and Jessica Biel), the presenters seemed zombified, reading their cue cards with an engagement and an enthusiasm compared to which the nightly reports of an average weatherperson seem Brando-esque. And it’s not because they’re bad actors—on the contrary, some of my favorite contemporary performers were onstage distributing statues—but because the tone, set from on high, was petrified, in both senses. I don’t entirely blame Ellen DeGeneres for the course of the evening. I don’t know enough about the parcelling out of power backstage to know how guided or vetted she was by the producers—whether the writers were hers or imposed upon her. But, having accepted the job, she seems, at the very least, to have accepted the regulations, and she toed the line with a dutiful eagerness in a desperate cause; she worked hard to maintain a show of good cheer and good times while being denied the freewheeling disinhibition that goes with real comedy. It was mainly the undue exertions that came through.
The nadir was the pizza; the synthetic spontaneity of the non-event brought to mind Andy Kaufman, whose genius I miss all the time and whose ability to mesh the nostalgic bathos of a pizza party with the edge of chaos would have made him a formidable, historic Oscar host. And to top off the pizza’s unfunniness came DeGeneres’s passing of the hat to pay for it, about which Emily Gould aptly tweeted, “amounts of money that are consequential to most people mean nothing to us, they are literally a joke! ha ha ha.”
In a brief interview in the backstage shadows, after the red carpet and before the main event, one of the two producers of the festivities (I can’t remember whether it was Craig Zadan or Neil Meron) likened the show to tightrope walking and called himself a good tightrope walker. So he may be, but this event was all net; it started in the safety zone and never got aloft.
Unless, rather, it had already fallen and couldn’t get up. Something frozen like death was in the air throughout the evening. Even the usual outpouring of melodramatic emotion that accompanies the memorial tribute to notables who passed away in the previous year was muted—in fact, its droneful flatline seemed to flow together continuously with the rest of the program. Somehow, Bette Midler’s wildly inappropriate rictus to go with her rendition of “The Wind Beneath My Wings” felt apt to the chilled emotion. Not even a catch of sharp grief seemed in keeping with the mandated decorum; it’s as if Polonius had scripted the show. The showiest, edgiest, most original performance—and sharpest writing of the evening—belonged to a Cadillac commercial, with its pugnacious and swaggering triumphalist boasting of America’s self-denial of leisure as the source of accomplishment and power.
As for the awards themselves, the biggest surprises were in side categories. I admit to the pleasure of going against prudent judgment in looking for the logic of upsets, but they didn’t, for the most part, happen. The biggest loser, in terms of the apparent gap between enthusiasm and awards (zero), was “American Hustle.” Spike Jonze’s win for Best Original Screenplay for “Her” was the biggest major-category jolt. The biggest loser, in terms of goodwill, was Matthew McConaughey, whose weirdly confessional speech started with a taste of old-time religion that had me hoping he’d play a Pentecostal preacher in a movie (a fictionalized version of Marjoe Gortner, from the great documentary “Marjoe,” came to mind); it followed with an evocation of his late father that was a little crude but sincerely loving; but it ended with a tribute to himself, as his own ever-deferred future hero, that had the unintended effect of making him seem trapped in his own superseded adolescent wisdom. In an industry of mentors and master-artists, benevolent influence and tough love, he came off as a vain and boastful self-made man.
Jared Leto’s remarks in the first category that was announced, Best Supporting Actor, got the inconvenience of the evening’s sharpest reference to troubles in the world out of the way quickly. Cate Blanchett’s diplomatic thanks to Woody Allen could serve as a lesson in the political arena (not for nothing did Nietzsche liken diplomats to actors), and it was impossible not to notice that John Ridley, who won for Best Adapted Screenplay, for “12 Years a Slave,” most undiplomatically didn’t thank the movie’s director, Steve McQueen, who, in turn, undiplomatically didn’t mention Ridley while accepting the film’s Best Picture award. Nikki Finke tweeted: “My sources attributing John Ridley-Steve McQueen cold shoulder at Oscars tonight to dispute over screenplay credit.”
There are the movies, and that’s where the far end of the bell curve is served. The fact that the best movies went home empty-handed—“The Wolf of Wall Street” and “Nebraska”—is beside the point. If my own internal audio-meter is to be trusted, two of the biggest rounds of applause and cheers of the night went to Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill, for their performances in Martin Scorsese’s movie. Taking nothing away from the honorable but conventional performances by McConaughey and Leto, the house of peers seemed to know where the magic lay. That its magicians were even on hand for the festivities, watching others collect statues, is itself a source of wonder. The movie has already passed into the future history of the cinema, and it will be watched with admiration and astonishment when the petty personality politics of the ceremony have passed into welcome oblivion. In the meantime, bring on the four-hour director’s cut of “Wolf” (and may it have a little theatrical run to coincide with the DVD release).
Photograph by John Shearer/Invision/AP.
