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Finally, and ironically, an immutable law of physics (what goes up, comes down) did not come into force. Since July 2023, when Christopher Nolan’s biographical film, Oppenheimer, was released to critical acclaim and box office bonanzas around the world, it had begun. generating rumors about the Oscars.
Throughout awards season, that hype continued to grow, and the film, a mostly sympathetic portrait of the father of the atomic bomb, ended up taking six of the awards. The big awards from the 96th Academy Awards night: Best Film, Best Director (Nolan), Best Actor (Cillian Murphy), Best Supporting Actor (Robert Downey Jr), as well as Editing, Cinematography and Original Music. Barbie, the movie that premiered the same day, unleashed a wave of pink (viewers posing in fuchsia outfits turned it into their own pre-movie movie) in an attempt to change our notions about the greedy corporations that sell plastic dolls with their heads well cared for, did not have such good results. Well. It won only one (Original Song) of its eight nominations: director Greta Gerwig could not be seen, nor could Margot Robbie, who plays the title character.
Cillian Murphy’s acceptance speech after winning the Best Actor award at the #Oscar
pic.twitter.com/tW2MpfpW5L– Christopher Nolan Art & Updates (@NolanAnalyst) March 11, 2024
The two nominations in the supporting category, Ryan Gosling and America Ferrera, stayed there, even if the former’s repeat of his captivating “I’m Just Ken” act (and a lively dance number) was one of the highlights of the serious show. , which started almost an hour earlier than usual.
In the real world, Barbenheimer’s double bill became a 2023 zeitgeist slogan. It denoted many things: making naysayers skeptical about a film about science and the place of scientists, the importance of women (and some good men) who became a powerful box office force in a movie about a pneumatic doll, and rescued Hollywood and the film world in general from the pandemic-induced stagnation with their powerful global box office collections.
But so strange, inexplicable and opaque are the ways in which Academy voters, who began abandoning their middle-aged, white-American prototype only in the last decade, that the doll didn’t stand a chance against the biopic that It weighed heavily in favor of the theoretical physicist who created the worst or the most effective weapon in the world, depending on which side of the fence you are on.
Host Jimmy Kimmel, who began with a shaky monologue (a couple of jokes about men dating their mothers and the shape of men’s nether regions being in bad taste), promised us surprises. But there really wasn’t one, unless you count a near-nude act by rapper and actor John Cena, who used a large envelope as a fig leaf, saying that “the male body is no joke.” Cue, waves of laughter in the audience. A nod to the David Niven-Elizabeth Taylor moment from 1974 when a man running across the stage, Cena was announcing the best costume design for Poor Things, and it really was a smarter joke than the way it came off: the brilliantly crazy Yargos Lanthimos, wonderfully. The feminist reworking of the Frankenstein myth, which earned Emma Stone a well-deserved Best Actress award, uses nudity in a way that the movies have forgotten, making the female body a clear statement of ownership and liberation.
Watson’s portrayal of Bella Baxter is impressive: with her billowing bell sleeves, baggy pants (well done, costume department), and open hair that falls well below her waist, she uses immaculate physical comic notes, moving from jerky movements to a small child to a complete personality. – To beautify a woman who learns to live on her own terms. While Lily Gladstone, from Martin Scorsese’s epic story of the Osage people, Flowers Of The Killer Moon, would have been the politically correct choice (purely as representation, her inclusion in the cast is a 10 to 10, and it helps that she plays her wealthy Osage heiress Mollie Burkhart, who loses her heart to a scoundrel, hilariously), if Stone hadn’t won the Best Actress Oscar, it would have been an act of betrayal.
Unlike last year, with its strong desi flavor (the Naatu-Naatu dance, MM Kreem brandishing her Oscar for Best Original Song and the beautiful Deepika Padukone on stage), this was not an Indian year. In the Memoriam section, we got a brief glimpse of famous art director Nitin Chandrakant Desai. And in the Documentary Feature category, Nisha Pahuja’s two-hour documentary about the fight of a Jharkhand family against the rapists of a minor was nominated. But this was always going to be the year of 20 days in Mariupol, a moving account of how the current conflict in Ukraine is affecting the people of the city.
Another war, the one being fought in Palestine, simmered and bubbled throughout the evening, but only one attendee made it a topic of conversation. Jonathan Glazer, director of the scathing Nazi revisionist narrative The Zone Of Interest, spoke of the victims of dehumanization in both Israel and Gaza. It was a powerful intervention, necessary, even if momentary, in an evening so full of glitter and sparkle. As Mstyslav Chernov, director of 20 Days in Mariupol, said, “cinema forms memories and memories form stories.” The fact that it received a mention will always be part of both memory and history.
shubhra.gupta@expressindia.com