Opening of the show at the theater formerly known as Kodak
What’s a feminist spectator to make of an awards
show that honors films that have so little to do with women behind the camera
or as central to their stories? Other writers have detailed the appalling lack of women nominated for Best Director this year, after Kathryn Bigelow’s historic win for The Hurt Locker in 2011. God
forbid a pattern should emerge of even nominating, let alone awarding, work by
women directors. In my alternate reality
version of the Oscars, Dee Rees (Pariah)
and Maryam Keshavarz (Circumstance)
would both be on that list.
Instead, Academy voters nominated nine films for
Best Picture, only one of which has anything remotely to do with women. And that’s The Help, a movie whose racial politics are so compromised that it’s
difficult to applaud its nomination, though its actors were uniformly excellent.
Frankly, Viola Davis was robbed by her friend Meryl
Streep, who won her third Oscar for Best Actress. That Streep should win for playing Maggie
Thatcher as some sort of pseudo-feminist heroine, instead of Davis winning for bringing
dignity and empathy to Aibileen, an entirely oppressed African American maid
working in the heart of the pre-Civil Rights racist South . . . that’s just cruel
and unusual.
Viola Davis, whose Oscar show hair style prompted a surprising amount of comment
Streep was right when she anticipated that people
watching Sunday’s telecast would say, “Aw, no!
Not her again!” But when she won
a Golden Globe for her role this year, Streep named her fellow nominees with admiration. She even mentioned actresses whose glorious
work wasn’t nominated (including Pariah’s Adepero Oduye).
A not particularly gracious Streep
Instead of repeating that generous gesture at the
Oscars, Streep smugly brushed off imagined objections to her win and didn’t
even nod at the pack of excellent actresses she bested for the award. She did embrace Davis on her way to the
podium, but some more sincere public recognition of her steal would have gone a
long way. Even her pithy and earnest
speech about the importance of friendship was too oblique to acknowledge the
surprise of her win over Davis. When
will Davis, even with her talent and stature in the industry, again be cast in
an Oscar-worthy role? We can only hope
soon.
Also robbed last night were Annie Mumolo and
Kristin Wiig, whose biting, knowing, hysterical screenplay for Bridesmaids deserved recognition. Sure, Midnight
in Paris, which did win, was clever and even heart-felt for the typically
more cynical Woody Allen. But how
predictable for him to write still another movie about a younger version of his
anxious and conflicted self. And how
predictable for the Academy to acknowledge him again (even though he never
attends the show, nominated or not).
Kristin Wiig, robbed of a Best Original Screenplay Award by Woody Allen
When have we ever seen characters like those Mumolo
and Wiig wrote for their comrades in Bridesmaids? When have we seen a woman conflicted about
losing her best friend to the bridal industry and social prerogatives of
marriage? When have we seen a story
about women so invested in being “the best friend” that they practically
fist-fight to speak into a microphone at an engagement party? When have we seen a stocky, pearl-and-bowling-shirt
wearing woman seduce a man pretending he’s not an air marshal on a plane? Or seen women getting sick every which way in
the bathroom of a bridal shop? So much
of Bridesmaids was refreshing because
it was told from a smart, talented, desiring, and ambivalent woman’s point of view. Why wasn’t that story honored by the Academy?
Perhaps because it turns out that most Academy
voters are white men whose median age is 62.
A recent Los Angeles Times study found that 94% of voters are white and 77% are male. Of course that crowd will nod instead to
Woody Allen. Of course they’ll honor other
stories about boys and men, like Hugo
(however sweet), Extremely Loud and
Incredibly Close (however sad), War
Horse (however wrenching), The Artist
(however quiet), Moneyball (however
smart), The Descendants (however
noble), and Tree of Life (however
oblique). Even in the Oscar show’s
montage curated to demonstrate how much we love the movies, all the clips showed
either heterosexual love scenes or men racing to get themselves out of trouble.
The only girls or women in evidence outside of
those embracing men in the montage were Linda Blair, layered in her extreme exorcism make-up, and
Meg Ryan, doing her extremely fake public orgasm in When Harry Met Sally (a rather self-serving scene for host Billy
Crystal). This, then, is how we love
women in the movies? Only if they’re in love
with men, possessed by demons or by sex, or completely absent? Please.
I liked the interstitial interviews with actors
and filmmakers on the Oscar show, in which they described when they began to
love the movies. But only Reese
Witherspoon seemed to get any screen time there, among a host of men telling anecdotes. At least a few women got to speak to their
work during the production clips, for which short quotes from interviews with
nominated artists played alongside images from their films. Those moments brought dignity and respect to
the profession, in stark contrast to the ubiquitous, mindless prattle between presenters
who can only seem vacuous in that context, regardless of their intelligence.
(But even those short clips elide the fact of women's lack of advancement in the film industry. Martha Lauzen's recent study about women and the "celluloid ceiling" reports the dismal percentages of women producers, editors, and cinematographers working on the top 250 films of the year.)
(But even those short clips elide the fact of women's lack of advancement in the film industry. Martha Lauzen's recent study about women and the "celluloid ceiling" reports the dismal percentages of women producers, editors, and cinematographers working on the top 250 films of the year.)
The Christopher Guest crew’s funny spoof about
focus groups, in which the assembled tweaked The Wizard of Oz out of its Dorothy, offered the best writing (and
some of the best performances) of the Oscar show evening.
The standing ovation for Octavia Spencer, winning for her performance as
The Help’s stalwart Minnie, was
moving, but I wish she’d won for better material than the stereotypically sassy
maid who’s redeemed by the socially mobile white woman who tells her story.
Spencer embraced by Davis after her award was announced
Watching Beginners’
Christopher Plummer accept his award for his fine performance as a gay man
coming out late in his life was heart-warming. But his win for playing gay didn’t make up for
the fact that no one awarded this year thanked same-sex partners or referred in
any way to queer lives. Along with
women, LGBT folks were invisible in the show (unless you count the vaguely
homoerotic flying men in suits in Cirque du Soleil’s strangely out-of-place
spectacle).
I’m glad The
Separation was the first Iranian movie ever to win a Best Foreign Film
award. But the film’s wife/mother in the story is
demonized for wanting a better life for her daughter, and for precipitating
another woman’s tragedy by “abandoning” her own family.
Finally, here’s Billy Crystal, trotted back out to
host the show for the ninth time. How
self-congratulatory of him to structure his entire opening monologue about
whether or not he should accept the invitation to host? His shtick all evening seemed to me like Jewish
minstrelsy. We won’t even mention his
blackface routine as Sammy Davis Jr. alongside Justin Bieber in that silly,
manufactured scene from Midnight in Paris. Crystal shrugged his shoulders like a
low-rent Bob Hope and tried to raise eyebrows that looked paralyzed by Botox. Crystal seemed a parody of himself, a canned,
predictable, self-immolating copy of the quick-witted, genial host of shows
past.
I’ll just keep hoping that next year, things will
change. Maybe Tina Fey and Kristin Wiig
will write and host the show. Or maybe
they’ll write and Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer will host. Or maybe Janet McTeer and Glenn Close will do
the honors, dressed in matching tuxes.
And maybe the nominated material will be rich
examinations of the lives of women, people of color, and LGBT people, as well
as straight, white, male people. Wouldn’t
it be nice to hear and see stories that say something we haven’t heard before?
Eternally optimistic,
The Feminist Spectator