Sunday, February 24, 2008
The Academy Awards
Can't say I saw the movies in contention for this year's awards. Movies have lost their magic — they seem to be going the way of pop music, where packaged product replaces individual expressiveness. Indie movies were supposed to cover the gap after major corporations took over Hollywood, but they are often just small conventional movies themselves, with a sad, pallid yearning to be cool. That magic will return, it is such a fun and rousing form.
The real interest in the awards shows are the pre-awards shows. You see the beauteous dressed by the best designers available — if you buy into that sort of status hierarchy — and hear brief shallow answers to brief shallow slightly uncomfortable questions by fawning fan/host/interviewers. It's sickly charming. Then a commentary follows about the just interviewed; about their physical presence, color choices, their appearance, their clothes, and yet the feminist celebrities won't cry foul later at being made a trivial object. Sometimes a celeb will make a mistake with a clunker — usually a default put down of America, as they stand draped for all to behold, posing most decorously, in tens of thousands of dollars of the exquisite tinsel our society produces. This is the best sort of hypocrisy, served up in your face.
With all that said, if you want to know why these people are celebrities it is evident in these brief interviews — a perfect form for them. The hour long interviews with actors and directors on Charlie Rose or Fresh Air are inevitably hollow and deeply embarrassing. This hanging onto the words of exhibitionists doesn't work.
In the short pre-award ceremonies, very like the brief appearances politicians are currently making to their cheering supporters, you get to see the celebs at their best. Graceful, beautiful, the perfect average of their gene pool, transparent, gracious, modest yet aggrandizing their pop culture art form with so little sophistication and child-like grandiosity it almost has its own charm; you can see why politicians are so fascinated by celebrity power — it is an interest that flows well beyond celebrity potential for fund raising. Without having to take positions on issues, with almost no effort, pedestrian in mind and spirit, celebs are likable and warm-seeming and you would vote for them if you could. Politicians must tear their hair out wondering how these pretty babies do it.
Well, it is all over. Lovely Katherine Heigl's nervousness was charming. The cinematography award went to someone who spent all his time giving the credit to others — a refreshing change in the city of the bloated ego. The anti-American award went to a documentary filmmaker who piously advised his country to “turn from the dark side” — my gosh these Hollywood types are space-cadets. So laid back they might still be living in the 1960s, The Coen Brothers could be a comedy act. Daniel Day Lewis has an amazing presence, he exudes a rich human complexity — a true movie star, his talent fully mingled with his nature. Jon Stewart, as usual, was very good — the man has the zeitgeist in his pocket — just the right level of cynical good humor.
The whole enterprise was thin and lifeless. Mostly, the charismatic Hollywood star has become the brimmingly-over-confident TV actor — and that is what this looked like, another TV awards show.