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Movies & TV

The Oscar Wrap

Well, if Boyhood had to be robbed, at least Clint Eastwood wasn’t the one holding the gun. American Sniper wasn’t the spoiler I feared it would be.

Instead, the bandit was Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu, whose stylish, insufferable Birdman, Or (The Unexpected Virtue Of Ignorance) snatched four Academy Awards – including cinematography, original screenplay, director and ultimately picture – from worthier competitors like Richard Linklater’s brilliant experimental character study or Wes Anderson’s magnificent, melancholy confection The Grand Budapest Hotel.

(Look, I’m a film critic. Of course I have opinions on how it all went down.)

And in a year with absolutely no surprises, the closest thing we had to an Oscar upset was Eddie Redmayne winning best actor for The Theory Of Everything. He’d been considered a lock for the award since his Stephen Hawking impersonation first screened at TIFF – and likely since he first stepped onto the set, because that’s how these things go – but in the last few weeks, as Michael Keaton kept winning prizes and Birdman built up momentum, it started to look like Redmayne might not be such a sure thing after all. Add in the possibility of Cooper as a dark horse, and somehow Redmayne became enough of an underdog that he seemed as surprised as anyone when his name was read.

That was one of only two moments in the very, very long ceremony – three hours 40 minutes, longer than Lawrence Of Arabia – when things felt electric. The other was Patricia Arquette’s stunning supporting-actress acceptance speech, where she spoke eloquently about the need for equal pay for women. For a moment, as the room grew wired things seemed primed to explode, just like J.K. Simmons in Whiplash. And hey, Whiplash won three Oscars too! 

I’d say this is the year the Academy deliberately embraced movies I don’t particularly like, except that The Grand Budapest Hotel also won four Oscars, and I love that movie to death. (Also, Arquette for Boyhood. So.)

Oh, wait. Julianne Moore won her first Oscar – on her fifth nomination – for playing a woman losing herself to early-onset Alzheimer’s in Still Alice. It is a good performance in a shallow, calculated drama that could charitably be described as “that one where Julianne Moore gets Alzheimer’s.” But she made it because she cared about the people involved, and she’s rock-solid in it, and as much as I would have liked to see Rosamund Pike or Reese Witherspoon or Marion Cotillard take it for equally good work in better pictures, I can’t begrudge Moore the recognition. She’s great. She’s earned it. And she gave a nice speech.

Graham Moore gave a moving speech accepting his adapted-screenplay prize for The Imitation Game, talking about a suicide attempt at 16 and his perception of himself as an outsider, ending with “Stay weird. Stay different.” The irony, of course, is that his speech had more honesty, pain and feeling than the movie for which he was holding an Oscar The Imitation Game turns the complicated and tragic story of Alan Turing into calculated, crowd-pleasing awards bait, scrubbing its protagonist of his actual personality and denying him his homosexuality. Here’s hoping the Oscar lets Moore write something that lives up to his speech.

And here’s hoping the Oscars take five after this year’s endless, bloated ceremony to think about whether the Academy Awards need to be the gargantuan self-love machines that they are. And I don’t just mean the crushing tribute to The Sound Of Music – which inexplicably booked the proudly weird/different Lady Gaga for a medley of show tunes – but the awful runner of host Neil Patrick Harris’s magic trick, which felt like it sucked up half an hour of screen time and paid off … well, not at all. Still, it wasn’t as uncomfortable as the forced comedy of Idina Menzel presenting an award with John Travolta, who helped everyone get past his mangling of Menzel’s name last year by doing something even stranger and less adorable: groping her face as if he was trying to feed on her precious youth.

Maybe I’m missing something. Maybe this was the year of the weird, different Oscars it’s just that no one told us in advance. For a few minutes at a time, it was even worth it – those speeches the amazing performances of Everything Is Awesome and Glory Pawel Pawlikowski’s delicate Ida winning foreign-language film over the more imposing Leviathan and the more popular Wild Tales Laura Poitras’s Citizenfour being named best documentary feature despite being urgent, immediate and genuinely important – qualities the Academy usually avoids like the plague.

It’s almost enough to make Birdman’s victories palatable. Almost.

normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner

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