UNTIL the just-concluded Oscars, Lady Gaga has always been under the shadow of Madonna.
Paying tribute to The Sound of Music, the artist known for the most outrageous of costumes transformed herself into a princess amid birth trees and sang in an unexpectedly sweet soprano the song about hills being alive with the sound of music. Bloggers talk of how Lady Gaga silenced her detractors with the performance. I thought everybody just went silent, in awe at how this odd creature became not only Maria, but the fairytale princess who has gotten tired of kissing frogs. Princes were all ready to fight for her hand. And, yes, the princess is getting married indeed.
It was the most fitting tribute to the 50th anniversary of the beloved musical that remains one of the most, if not the most popular movie of the genre. When Julie Andrews stepped out of the wings to the Oscar stage, the cinematic musical art form delivered a double whammy at the audience. The tight embrace from Andrews sealed the fate of that moment. Meaning: Andrews is always the princess of any musical in our mind. She is a presence, an imprimatur to any act that tries to revive remembrances of which person and her voice and the zest for life the camera never fails to deliver to us.
What was the secret of that performance? At the core of Lady Gaga’s metamorphosis is, however, the fact that she is a novelty artist in the grand sense of it. This is not to diminish her performance, but the reason it worked is that it was the most unexpected of novelty acts, at the core of which was an artist who has not yet reached the bottom of her bag of tricks. For those who follow the career of Lady Gaga, try catching her duet with Tony Bennett on this year’s Grammy night and marvel at her jazz tone, her style.
There were more acts that followed and preceded the Sound of Music tribute. Strangely enough, the show’s coverage on cable TV was preceded by a red-carpet spectacle. Of course, this was not the first time that the gate to Oscar night had been transformed into a red runway. It was odd, nonetheless, to see actors and actresses posing as if unknowns making first impressions. Commerce and couture are really bedfellows, but when persons with egos as big as logos on buildings are made to endorse the names of this designer and that, one wonders whether the age of the screen idol worshipped by fans is gone.
What will never go away is the politics of the Oscars. Where in the late 1960s and 1970s the flag-waving crusades of Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave were made fun of and regarded as outrageous and un-Hollywood, geopolitical and racial concerns were almost part of the elegant fabric of this year’s presentation, and they drew cheers. Patricia Arquette, Best Supporting Actress for Boyhood, received thunderous applause from the crowd for sounding the call on equal pay for women. It was so disarming to witness co-nominee Meryl Streep, her hand stretched out in solidarity with all the women whose cause was getting first-class exposure before millions and millions of viewers all over the world.
Oprah, a producer of Selma, was outright open with her enthusiastic support for the film. Each time racial issues were raised, the camera never failed to focus on her. More than ever, the racial divide became pronounced during this year’s Oscars. With Harry Belafonte being credited for his own kind of activism, we know that the issues of race and ethnicity are still greatly unresolved in the world.
Streep was once more nominated, this time for playing the witch in Rob Marshall’s acclaimed adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim musical Into the Woods. Neil Patrick Harris even made a joke about the actress being nominated again. Streep is so predictably excellent that her name being mentioned as nominee has become almost an annual affair. Each time she loses, we know that the winner is suspect. Each time she wins, the bar for acting performance is raised.
I’m one of those giddy with the win of Julianne Moore for Still Alice. The actress has been in the industry for a long time that her not winning Hollywood’s biggest prize on her fourth try would have been not just sad but outrageous. But win the Oscar, Moore finally did—and she capped her long-overdue triumph with a coolly fluid, perfectly cool acceptance speech. When she told the crowd that there is really no best actress, we believed her.
What is a sentimental favorite? This would be an actor who has given a tour de force performance at a ripe age. The age factor is only reconsidered because in the running for the award are actors infinitely younger than the favored person of our emotion. For this year, that sentimental favorite was Michael Keaton, the lead in Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Birdman: Or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance). Critics of his performance talk of Keaton’s performance as enraged and chilling. I don’t know with you but I wanted Michael Keaton to win. Fate and luck had their eye on another person: Eddie Redmayne of the film Theory of Everything.
When I saw The Theory of Everything, I expected the film to treat more about the science and mind of Stephen Hawking. The love angle it favored was redeemed by the narrative of how love—not time, not the universe—remains the deepest mystery in this life. No cheesy item there, just the truth about what moves cinema. Not the technology and not the style, but the theme of love and its absence or repudiation propel good films. Leave it to Sean Penn to introduce the winner of the Best Director prize. As he opened the envelope, he mutters: Who is the son of a bitch who gave this guy his green card? The actor was referring to Iñárritu, the director of the Best Picture winner, Birdman. The Hollywood Reporter, however, describes Penn’s immigration joke as falling painfully flat. Each to his own pudding.
Iñárritu, a Mexican, asks that the new wave of Mexican migrants be treated with the decency that the earlier wave of migrants were given.
At the end of the day, after all the jokes and puns and gimmicks of Harris, the host of the 67th Academy Awards, the works that won were those that talk of decency or subvert proper manners in order to deliver truths, not lies, in a medium that is about invention, creation and magic.
Image credits: AP