J Jagannath: Oscars so radical

Speak of Hollywood endings and it doesn’t get better than Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty erroneously giving a shout out to La La Land instead of Moonlight for Best Picture at the just concluded Oscars.

Those 120 seconds of madness apart, I still can’t stomach Isabelle Huppert being overlooked for her performance in Elle as someone who pines for her abuser, while Emma Stone gets the Best Actress gong for a blandly winsome role in La La Land that is frankly a walk along the Adriatic for any actress of that mettle. It’s high time the Academy started appreciating edgy, provocative performances instead of Stone’s portrayal as an object of the bourgeois delight. Huppert’s inventive character of a Parisian lady who yearns for the fetishised sex of an intruder should have been endorsed by the Academy.

Equally baffling was Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann, a supreme indictment of corporate culture, getting pipped by Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s decent-but-nowhere-near-his-best The Salesman in the Best Foreign Film category. Farhadi joins the rarefied ranks of Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman and Carlos Saura by winning two Oscars for Best Foreign Film. In its quest to pander to the liberals at the time of Trump when the American exceptionalism is on a decline, the Academy took the PC route.

Toni Erdmann is that rare German arthouse movie, which transcends the stoicness that is usually seen in that strain of cinema. Peter Simonischek is amazing as the old father who decides to imbue some meaning into the life of his corporate slave of a daughter Sandra Hüller. The 166-minute-long movie is leavened with moments of such tender beauty that it reminds me of that lofty German word Wunderkammer (cabinet of curiosities).

However, it was heartwarming to see Moonlight winning three important awards: Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor for Mahershala Ali. These awards are a big deal for a $1.5-million indie about a poor inner city gay black man in Miami. While Twitter was going abuzz about quite possibly the biggest gaffe in the ceremony’s 88-year history, Alonso Duralde tried to keep the record straight, “Let’s take a moment to appreciate a low-budget black gay movie inspired by Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Wong Kar-Wai just won Best Picture.”

Despite his nomination shrouded in sexual allegations, the Academy was clearly compelled by Casey Affleck’s character, Lee Chandler, a mopey handyman in outskirts of Boston who is forced to look after his nephew in the event of his elder brother’s death. Each scene involving him and Lucas Hedges as his nephew is downright hilarious and Kenneth Lonergan deserves every bit of the Best Original Screenplay award.

Lonergan, who makes intensely personal movies, revelled in his two principal characters and came out with a study of modern-day human condition, which is thought provoking. Here’s an uncle trying to give his brother a good funeral and he has to grapple with a personal tragedy, a divorce and his nephew’s tantrums and complicated romantic situation.

Sample this exchange:

Patrick: What happened to your hand?

Lee: I cut it.

Patrick: Oh, thanks. For a minute there, I didn’t know what happened.

This kind of Altmanesque dialogue was conspicuously absent from Hollywood fare in the recent past.

Seven-and-a-half-hour-long OJ: Made in America was the longest film ever nominated for an Oscar, let alone to win one (Best Documentary). Among the other fun facts is that Casey Affleck and Ben Affleck are the only two brothers in history to win Oscars in two different categories. Also, Viola Davis is the first black actress to win an Emmy, Tony and Oscar. Her evocative performance as the woman who has to endure her husband’s bitterness about colour barrier in the 1950s’ America is splendid.

This year has also been huge for streaming internet services like Amazon Studios and Netflix that look hell bent on disrupting the movie business and giving serious competition to major movie studios. While Amazon won big with Manchester By The Sea and The Salesman, Netflix grabbed an Oscar for documentary short-subject, The White Helmets, a wrenching short about civilian first responders in Syria.

These awards beg the inevitable question, “What will happen when Apple and Google enter the fray?” Onward ho, Oscars 2018.

jagannath.jamma@bsmail.in