The Moaning Show #3
Leslie Jordan and the folly of awards season.
Hello, mes chers! How are you doing? Another of my placeholder e-mails today – I couldn’t think up anything exciting!
But before we begin, let’s pause for a moment of reflection for dear Leslie Jordan.
The Will and Grace star (and much else besides) was tragically killed in a car accident aged sixty-seven. Sixty-seven! That’s no age to die. We all have a favourite movie or TV appearance, but Leslie earned a place in our hearts as the breakout Social Media Star of the pandemic. With extraordinary perspicacity, he could spin a yarn about anything! How wonderful to see someone enjoy that fame later in life (something I set great store by; being “It’s fine, Glenn was 35 before she made a film” years old). Mr. Jordan relished it. According to Twitter, he had just bought his first home and, by all accounts, the best was yet to come. He’s now reunited with his beloved Mama, who predeceased him by five months.
Life’s unfair, isn’t it?
I thought we’d discuss the films vying for Oscar consideration today – although as you well know: all the fun’s gone out of awards season! Whenever I see who the Academy has invited to join, ticking every box but never instigating real change, I think: “Great! There’s another hundred people who won’t vote for Glenn Close!”.
I’m still bitter about What Happened on February 24th 2019. (Well, February 25th – it was four o’clock in the morning here.) I was huddled in bed, praying my illegal stream wouldn’t fail, as Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell strode onstage to present Best Actress. The three hour show that preceded felt interminable! Political posturing, padded with endless montages and standing ovations. (Everything the Oscars are denounced for in grim editorials.) I felt sorry for Glenn, resplendent in gold, having to heave her forty-pound gown up every few moments.
“And the Oscar goes to…”
None of it mattered. Our Number One Lady was about to be crowned, thirty-six years after her first nomination. The icon who I projected all my failures and frustrations on was finally Making Good.
“Olivia Colman.”
The weight of a three-stone gold dress came crashing down. I’m ashamed to say it, but I wept – until a tiny Albert Nobbs-sized voice told me to cop on and stop being a ninny.
In hindsight, Helen Keller could have seen Othiefia Stoleman’s win coming. She’d seized everything else! To add insult to injury, Stoleman, reluctant to be seen as a character player, had gerrymandered both categories. Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz were cited in Supporting for The Hours for Slow Learners.
It’s a curious thing, category fraud. Women’s roles by their nature are largely supporting to begin with, so it is a grey area. But while the Oscar-at-any-cost mentality (popularised by Viola Davis) is mocked; when it works the other way, it’s a great con-trick. And the Academy’s so contrary and capricious about it. Remember 2015? Rejecting Rooney Mara’s exemplary performance in Carol, they only went and gave it to an inferior slummer anyway: Dullicia Vikander of The Danish Girl.
This time around, Michelle Williams (The Fabelmans) turns it on its head. Despite slim screentime, she wants to be recognised as the Single White Female in a male-heavy cast. Rooney follows in kind: as the sole lead in Sarah Polley’s maidenly Women Talking. Carey Mulligan, first billed in the #MeToo drama She Said, has no such qualms. She’s going Featured. Viola’s also in the mix. As The Woman King, Ms. Davis’s next Best Actress nomination could go by the way of the previous two: a close loss to a beloved actress getting her third.
Cate Blanchett in Tár. Naturally, the Snooty Twitter Gays have decided Cake Blanket is the Second Coming of Christ and Katharine Hepburn wrapped up in one. While their usual horse Stoleman is in the race, her crying-on-demand shtick (in Sam Mendes’s Empire of Light) isn’t garnering the same traction as her afterglow nominations in Florian Zeller’s The Father and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Olivia Colmanchester by the Sea.
Of course, there is one name you could engrave on that statue now. A perfect winner that’s both genuinely deserving and satisfies modern expectations. Michelle Yeoh for Everything Everywhere All at Once. After all, if she was a supporting artist (where, sadly, Oscar often shunts genre performances), it would be a forgone conclusion! As it stands, her co-stars Stephanie Hsu and Jamie Lee Curtis hope to coattail there – lest Claire Foy and Jessie Buckley, Rooney’s competition in Women Talking, cancel each other out.
Still, it’s a sad state of affairs when social media forces the Academy’s hand. (“The Oscars Desperately Need to Become Cool Again” pleaded a much-shared headline, this week.) What bigwigs fail to realise is that the Oscars aren’t becoming irrelevant; they already are. And they’ve pulled the membership so out of shape, their choices are beginning to look as crazed and random as the ones of the 1920s and 30s.
When Bette Davis was AMPAS president for two months in 1941, she suggested revoking the right of extras to vote. In what would now be considered political incorrectness, Bette argued that they didn’t have the discernment to make proper picks; most of them “didn’t speak English”. Walter Brennan, journeyman actor in Westerns, was about to win an unprecedented third. (To this day, he’s in the same company as Daniel Day-Lewis, Jack Nicholson, Ingrid Bergman, Meryl Streep and Frances McDormand.)
By the same token, after Green Book and CODA, we could easily see a throwback to the thirties: a Best Picture winner with no other nominations (a feat maintained by 1932’s Grand Hotel). The sequels to Top Gun or Black Panther, perhaps?
Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin will get a few, mind. The Irish press is putting it in a class with Citizen Kane for obvious reasons. But who will Kerry Condon, Barry Keoghan, Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell lose to?
Your guess is as good as mine for the first three, but Brendan Fraser seems the man to beat for the fourth. Again, the Academy’s contrariness rears its ugly head. Despite the comeback narrative, it’s a fatsuit role. Problematic. In The Whale, he plays a 600lb gay man giving English grinds online and–
“But I thought you wanted Andrew Scott to play you in the movie?”
Oh, shut up, Ramón.
To Be Continued…