The general verdict amongst my Twitter feed on Sunday’s re-engineered Oscars ceremony is that it was bizarre and unsettling. Having stripped the ceremony of its mini-performances and instead focused on handing out the trophies in an oddly shuffled order, otherwise beloved Hollywood director Steven Soderbergh, and his coproducers Stacey Sher and Jesse Collins, constructed these Academy Awards as something else entirely. Held in Los Angeles’ Union Station, which had to be evacuated of its usual residents—the houseless, whom the city of Los Angeles continually refuses to house—in order to accommodate Hollywood’s glittering stars, the 2021 Oscars may have been fraught from the start. That dark energy was offset at times by an opening strut and stirring speech from Regina King, a quiz show from Lil Rel Howery, and a bit of booty shaking from Glenn Close. But consider that the thing the ceremony is meant to celebrate is movies. And movies, at their brightest and most arresting, are often troubling little affairs. They’re expensive productions that result not merely in entertainment but some kind of audio-visual puzzle you can’t stop playing. And this year, the Oscars ceremony, sitting in the thick of its own mess, might have tried its hand at cinema.
Criterion curatorial director Ashley Clark aptly remarked on Twitter that Hopkins’ win for Best Actor in The Father—which capped off the ceremony instead of the usual Best Picture—was “Truly the most spectacular anti-climax to an awards show of all time. Joaquin Phoenix doesn’t want to be there giving an award to someone who isn’t there. Like the ending of a New Hollywood movie from 1973. Perfect.”
In fact, as the Oscars played live, I sat watching Robert Altman’s 1974 gambling saga California Split starring Elliout Gould and George Segal. The film, like much of Altman’s work, is a mix of the charismatic and uncanny. Each character is very much in this world, but not quite of it. Gould and Segal (the latter of whom died this March) play avid poker players, Charlie and Bill, who are mistaken for associates. After getting beat up by an angry player in a go-go bar parking lot, they become friends. Charlie is an incorrigible and irresistible gambler, living with two friends who are also sex workers. Bill, who has a legit job running a magazine, is both tantalized and disturbed by Charlie’s lifestyle. California Split is a comedy, and extremely funny at that, but it also leaves you shaken. Its structure and performances are both brilliant and baffling; there’s nothing clean about it—Altman even pioneered a way of overlapping dialogue so characters could talk over each other and still be heard by the audience.
Throughout his career, Altman was fired from television projects for refusing to adhere to network demands and insisting on his own ideas. But as a director of movies, he was unstoppable. Like Soderbergh, he directed films he wrote (like McCabe and Mrs. Miller, 3 Women, and A Wedding) and films he didn’t (M*A*S*H, Nashville, Fool for Love, and Gosford Park). He took stories from the page and ran with them, with nary a thought to what was marketable or politically relevant. And with all that said, there’s probably an Altman film (or two or five) for everyone.
It might just be best if the Oscars get weirder and the ratings plummet even further. Really. Award shows ought to be niche affairs that delight a handful of oddballs and nearly alienate the rest. In an industry that easily devolves into cynical appeals to mass marketability, it’s a hoot to have a celebration for it that is so out of step with its values, with heavy royal blue curtains, long speeches, and muted glam (in that way, this year’s Oscars recalled pre-’80s ceremonies). Soderbergh—who, besides winning a Best Director Oscar for Traffic in 2001, directed the extremely popular Ocean’s 11 remake and its sequels, Erin Brockovich, and Out of Sight—might have seemed like an obvious choice to direct the ceremony. But producers may have forgotten that he is also the director of The Girlfriend Experience, Unsane, and Schizopolis. Whatever he was up to, it wasn’t what we were expecting.
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