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This tragic Oscars shows the Golden Age of Hollywood is over
‘The Incident’ which took place between Chris Rock and Will Smith at the 2022 Oscars was a double-edged sword. It brought a bored audience back; between 2014 and 2020, the televised Academy Awards lost almost half their viewers, while in 2023 they were up by 18 million as eager punters tuned in hoping to see a bitch-fight between Olivia Colman and Nicole Kidman. But a couple of years without a dust-up will no doubt make a re-bored audience turn its collective back once more – and judging from last night’s astonishingly enervated showing they’d be totally justified.
Jonathan Ross featured in the cavalcade this year when he presented a ‘companion show’ for we lucky Brits. Ross confirmed the worst when he sniffed of the hosting of the actual Oscars: ‘You don’t want it to be totally anodyne and bland but you don’t want to go full Ricky Gervais and have the actors sitting there panicking thinking ‘What are they going to say about me?’’. But that’s exactly what you do want; the moment when the laughing Thalia mask slips and one sees the sad Melpomene mask beneath it – and then again, even beneath that, the Kaled mutant who drives the Dalek, just a blob with one eye looking out from the big glossy monster, protecting it and allowing it to ride roughshod over mere mortals. Because of this, the best bit is always when the cameras pan in on the hopefuls and we see the rictus grins when the blessed one wins – or rather, we used to. Now that facial fillers are so prevalent, the lack of expression they engender means that we can never truly feel the loser’s pain which, if we’re honest, was always the best bit.
The Oscars are altogether too tidy now that Jennifer Lawrence has embraced motherhood; when one considers the heroic amount of drink and drugs film stars historically ingest, where are the falling-down drunks and the stoners blitzed off their bonces making seven sorts of fool of themselves?
The elephant in the room is always going to be Netflix now, the languorous pachyderm glorying in the fact that it can stay on its sofa to be entertained and save a fortune on cinema tickets and overpriced snacks. Even Jane Campion – the director’s director – said: ‘The really clever people used to do film. Now, the really clever people do television’.
Young people have among the lowest cinema attendance, due to technology that makes the cinema look like a museum, and they are unlikely to change their ways as they mature. We still watch films, of course, but no longer in reverent silence in public places of worship; instead we pause them, talk over them and sexually gratify ourselves to them in the privacy of our homes. Modern film stars know this; it stings to be merely a component of an evening’s entertainment alongside Deliveroo. But as the importance of cinema has dwindled, the self‑importance of the film industry has grown; last year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that from 2024 films will not be nominated for Best Picture unless they meet two out of four rules including featuring more actors from minority ethnic groups, more female lead characters, having visible ‘hard of hearing’ actors and crew – and having LQBTQ interns. Fair enough – no one wants to go to the cinema to watch a bunch of over-privileged white folk indulging themselves. That’s what we have the televised Oscars for.
This year there was a big push to popularise the event with ITV’s head of entertainment commissioning, Katie Rawcliffe, telling Variety: ‘The Oscars is the ultimate in event telly and we’re thrilled to be unlocking an iconic night for U.K. film fans across our free-to-air platforms.’
Variety reported excitably that: ‘There will also be plenty of content for viewers the morning after as the festivities carry over into ITV’s daytime programming, including “Good Morning Britain” and “This Morning” – plus, of course, a chance to re-watch the ceremony itself. ‘If you can’t stay up into the early hours – and we very much hope people will – but if you can’t, then you can catch up on it the following day on ITVX,’ says ITVX managing editor Craig Morris, who added: ‘We feel that the Oscars is a gem that everybody talks about, but because it has been behind a paywall, maybe not as many people have seen it [in the U.K.] that could have done over these last two decades. So we want to play our part in getting it to a bigger audience.’
As it turned out, the issue was not what Jonathan Ross and his guests made of it all but what the audience made of Jonathan Ross and his guests. I never ‘got’ the appeal of Ross, but whatever it was hinged on youth and cheekiness; in his exhausted eyes and tragic mouth, you could see a man irretrievably ground down by life. Not since Lee Harvey Oswald has one man died in front of so many people on live television. The panel seemed like a parody line-up of people no one wants to hear from, their ‘laughter’ like the involuntary reaction on being given a mild electric shock, less to do with actual humour than the utterances of a sex-worker have to do with ecstasy. It was a truly shocking display of mediocrity, and one can only imagine the heads that will roll at ITV when the financial outlay is assessed.
But it was striking that the actual stars interviewed on the red carpet seemed as drab and witless as Ross’s wretched line-up. A lady in red fell over, which was the most amusing thing that took place all night; there wasn’t one witty line from the assembled cream of the motion picture industry. The recent anti-Trump ranting of Robert de Niro and the damp-eyed cliches regarding Gaza on the night added to the feeling that this self-serving, self-righteous bunch really do believe that their opinions are somehow more important than those belonging to the rest of us who can get through life without a script. A Hollywood with confidence in itself would have happily bestowed awards on the sparkling Barbie; a Hollywood which knows it is hollow must pretend to be profound. It’s hard not to think that the cameraman who intercut Messi the dog ‘applauding’ with the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger mug of de Niro didn’t know full well what he was doing.
It’s one thing being a fan of a specific film, but talking about the existence of ‘superfans’ of the Oscars generally is extraordinarily thick; only a fully-fledged crank could ever work themselves up into a state of excitement about these powdered princelings and impotent potentates. We are tired of being lectured by super-privileged individuals who had exactly the same chance as everyone else to become doctors, nurses or firefighters, but chose instead to go into a business which is about dressing up, showing off and reaping vast financial rewards for it.
Unlike the Golden Age of Hollywood, you can’t ever imagine an actual young person watching the Oscars and thinking ‘I want to be one of those magical beings!’ To be crude, the basic appeal of film stars was that you could imagine them having far better sex than the rest of us; you don’t get that feeling anymore. Everyone seemed so empty; it appears that people drawn to entertainment are actually less entertaining than the man in the street, which goes against everything we’ve been taught to believe about the alleged razzamatazz of the industry. As John Cena’s appearance unintentionally highlighted, the little golden guy has no clothes, and his pursuers have no glamour; they only interest us now when they make fools of themselves.
‘Violence is never the answer,’ we were told at school – but it certainly is when it comes to award show viewing figures. These were the 96th Academy Awards; unless someone famous slaps someone else famous soon, it’s hard to imagine that anyone at all will be watching this sad parade of shadow-people congratulating themselves for their elaborate games of Let’s Pretend by the time the 100th Oscars rolls around.
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