Oscar Recap

 Well, wasn't that exciting?

We'll get to it, don't you worry.  But first, can we just acknowledge the utter irony of ABC trying desperately to raise ratings by adding stupid audience participation categories and taking out long-established ones when they could have just hired a couple of Real Housewives to mud wrestle?

So Ariana DuBose won Best Supporting Actress, which was nice, and she gave a lovely speech.

Dune won Best Sound, Best Cinematography, Best Visual Effects, Best Original Score, Best Film Editing, and Best Production Design.  Not bad for a plucky little... mainstream box office smash that made over $400 million.  But the Academy doesn't reward popular films!

Encanto won Best Animated Feature.  

The Windshield Wiper won Best Animated Short.  

The Queen of Basketball won Best Documentary Short.

Troy Kotsur won Best Supporting Actor with another stellar speech.

Zach Snyder's Justice League won Most Cheer Worthy and probably Most Likely to Sign Your Yearbook "See You Next Year" Even Though You've Never Spoken to Him.  (They're adding that category next year.)

Drive My Car won Best International Feature.

The Long Goodbye won Best Live Action Short.

Cruella won Best Costume Design.

Kenneth Branagh won Best Original Screenplay for Belfast.

Sîan Heder won Best Adapted Screenplay for Coda.

And here's where it all went off the rails.  To present the award for Best Documentary Feature, Chris Rock came out and told a couple of off-the-cuff jokes.  One was about Jada Pinkett-Smith auditioning for G.I. Jane 2.  Pinkett-Smith had shaved her head (and looked great, btw) because she has alopecia as a result of an autoimmune disorder.  Her husband, Will Smith, walked on stage and open-handed slapped Chris Rock in the face.

Chaos ensued.

(Mostly on Twitter.  The actual audience did not really react.)  Hell, Chris Rock barely reacted.  

I thought it was faked but the lightning reporters of international Twitter posted the uncensored clip where Smith can clearly be heard telling Rock to "keep my wife's name out of your fucking mouth" and film Twitter was just as quick to post stills showing The Slap.  

Summer of Soul won, by the way.  

The broadcast cut to commercial and everything resumed as normal.

Billie Eilish and Finneas won Best Original Song.

Jane Campion won a historic second Best Director Oscar as a female director.  

Probably could have been smoothed over if Will Smith had not subsequently won Best Actor.  He gave a highly emotional speech where he apologized to everyone except Chris Rock, launching a second flurry of tweets.

So, to recap, a 53-year-old multimillionaire actor slapped a 57-year-old multimillionaire comedian on live television, over a lame, ableist joke, then defended himself in a speech awarded by a multibillion dollar industry invoking the chivalric practice of defending his woman with violence.  And they said no one watched The Last Duel!

The Eyes of Tammy Faye won Best Hair and Makeup, Jessica Chastain won Best Actress, and Coda won Best Picture.  All of which were overshadowed by the elephant in the room.

But I would like to also point out that Chris Rock was not the only comedian there playing whack-a-mole with low-hanging fruit.  Host Regina Hall had a gag where she, as a desperate horny lady, "frisked" presenters Josh Brolin and Jason Momoa.  That was probably scripted and I would hope that both actors agreed ahead of time, but I could not help thinking that A) that was a tired, overused joke and B) if it had been a male host feeling up two female presenters, they would have tied him to the bumper of a limo and dragged him down Hollywood Boulevard (but still invited him to the Vanity Fair party after, because you don't want to be rude.)

Anyway, what a total fucking trainwreck.  Can't wait for next year!

Three Songs for Benazir (2021)

Nominated for Best Documentary Short     Hey, remember Afghanistan?  That place we lost a war in?  Yeah, so people still live there and it is not great.  

This short follows young husband Shaista as he tries to find a better life for his wife, Benazir, and their children.  Shaista is 22 and has no education.  He wants to join the National Army but his Taliban-controlled village won't sign sponsorship papers.  The elders want him to harvest poppies instead, a much more lucrative venture, but one with hidden strings.

This is a depressing ass short.  I hope it wins.  Though I think the Academy will vote for Audible.  But this had a complete thought, was edited for brevity without sacrificing clarity, and was structured more solidly than the other two I saw.  

It's streaming on Netflix so that's something.
 

Lead Me Home (2021)

Nominated for Best Documentary Short    This short doc is about the rise of homelessness in Seattle, Los Angeles, and Portland.  There are interviews with people where they discuss some of the issues that led them to become homeless, ranging from abuse and domestic violence to mental health issues, disability, and the high cost of living.  

It's a very short doc and I don't think it does a particularly good job with its message.  I think it was too broad a topic.  They'd have been better served to pick an aspect of homelessness:  its cause, impact on an individual, opposition to social projects designed to get people off the streets, anti-homeless architecture, etc. than just "homelessness sucks and these people should be seen."  People don't want to see the homeless.  They don't want to be reminded that they themselves are probably only two missed paychecks from living under a bridge.  People like stories about billionaires because it feels aspirational.  They want to believe they could make an astronomical fortune.  They don't want to believe they could end up living in a tent in constant fear that cops will come in the middle of the night and force them to move.  

I was working in an office and I remember overhearing a co-worker (middle-aged white man, for reference) raging about having to see homeless people on his drive in to work.  He said, "Can't they just go somewhere else?" which initially made me furious, because it's such a stupid dick thing to say, but then it made me laugh because that is the literal definition of homelessness.  They have nowhere to go.  Anyway, I hope you will not be like that tone-deaf middle-class asshole.  The film's website https://www.leadmehomefilm.com/learn/ has more information about what causes homelessness and ways to mitigate and even end it, if you're interested.  The doc is streaming on Netflix but there are better ones out there.

Audible (2021)

Nominated for Best Documentary Short    Content warning:  discussion of suicide

Did you know the Maryland School for the Deaf has one of the best high school football teams in the country?  I didn't.  This 30-minute doc follows Amaree, a senior and football player, who grew up the only Deaf person in his family after a childhood bout of meningitis.  His team is trying to bounce back from a loss, breaking their seasons-long winning streak, before homecoming while also still struggling with the loss of one of their teammates, Teddy, who was moved to a hearing school and then bullied until he killed himself.  

Let me repeat that.  A high school sophomore, a child, was bullied by his peers for being Black, gay, and Deaf until he committed suicide.  

The doc glosses over anything more than the briefest of explanations for Teddy, even though he was clearly a huge impact on Amaree.  It has a maybe ten-second clip of an interview with one of the coaches talking about the discrimination Deaf people face in the world outside of protected bubbles, like the School for the Deaf.  Since Deafness is the cause célèbre of the Academy this year (next year it'll be Ukraine again), I would have liked to see a little more of an in-depth treatment.  

It's currently streaming on Netflix.

Ascension (2021)

Nominated for Best Documentary Feature    Presented with no commentary, this documentary acts as a core sample of China's consumer society.  Beginning with factory workers, then moving up through the service industry, corporate cogs, influencer hustlers, and upper class aspirants to professional butlers and bodyguards to the wealthy, the film is a scathing indictment of consumer culture.  

Okay, sure, China but also, any one of these scenes could have been filmed in America.  There's almost no difference in terms of the desperation to have more of everything.  Having it presented like this, however, it's even more of an eye-popping realization.  

It's streaming on Paramount+ and is worth watching if only for the scenes with the assembly of custom sex dolls.  One had elf ears.  I fucking screamed.  And the bodyguards with the random baby goats.  So cute.

Attica (2021)

Nominated for Best Documentary Feature    Content warning:  graphic violence, police brutality, dead bodies, racial slurs

So two years after Summer of Soul, there was the Attica prison riot.  Attica was a maximum security prison in upstate New York and in 1971 for five days in September, the prisoners overthrew the guards and took control.  They had 31 hostages and requested an observation panel comprised of journalists, lawyers, and elected officials to witness negotiations between themselves and the prison commissioner.  Their demands were very simple:  they wanted to be treated like human beings, not animals.  They wanted better food, better conditions, and an end to the violence perpetrated upon them by the guards.  For a while, negotiations seemed to be going well.  Then a guard injured in the initial riot died and everything fell apart.  The police staged an armed recovery of the prison.  In the ensuing firefight against unarmed prisoners, 28 prisoners and 10 hostages were killed.  

The documentary uses actual footage from police surveillance and news reports as well as interviews with first-hand witnesses.  This was a race-motivated massacre and none of the guards were ever held accountable.  The state of New York shelled out $12 million to the families of the dead hostages and another $12 million to the surviving prisoners in 2000 and 2005 as a "please shut up about this" gesture.  

This is a very hard watch.  It is important to see because the more of these instances we drag into the light, the harder they are to run away from and bury.  It's produced by Showtime but it is streaming for free on Amazon Prime.  If you can, please try to watch it.

Summer of Soul (2021)

Nominated for Best Documentary Feature    This is a concert doc of footage from the Harlem Cultural Festival of 1969, interspersed with interviews from attendees and performers.  While televised, it never aired and was left unseen in a basement for fifty years, overshadowed by Woodstock.

1969 was a year of incredible tension in the United States and the Harlem Cultural Festival was intended to provide somewhat of a cooling effect.  Six weekends of performances covering the entire summer were held in Morris Park, the center of Harlem, that featured themes every week of contributions by the Black and Latin community to music.  Gospel, soul, funk, psychedelics, jazz, Motown, the Blues, Latin, Caribbean, African: artists of all types gathered on stage to perform.  

If you're tired of seeing stories that only highlight the struggle of African Americans, this is a great film showcasing Black excellence and joy.  These are never-released performances thankfully saved for posterity finally getting the views they deserved.  It's currently streaming on Hulu and Disney+.