Well, you can’t get more official than that. After asking the movies to lead children to light, the First Lady announced “Argo” as Best Picture from the White House, as close to a benediction as this bizarrely Popeless moment could offer. I like Michelle Obama just fine, but the notion of an officially crowned winner about a C.I.A. rescue operation in Iran makes me just as queasy as the suggestion, in “Zero Dark Thirty,” that torture played a (small) role in the elimination of Osama bin Laden. Yes, yes, I know: the Obamas are waving a genial hand as fans-in-chief. No more than that. Still. Entertainment and the national government should certainly acknowledge one another, bowing politely—or merrily or satirically or angrily—but they should also be kept separate, like animals of two rival species. The First Lady could not have known what was in the envelope, but, the way it went down last night, solemn national purpose and the desire to entertain with a highly fictionalized C.I.A. operation became one. Not good, Academy. Please don’t do it again. We don’t need the White House imprimatur in a democracy. Let Jack Nicholson, the survivor of a less earnest time, announce the winner.
Everyone said that “Argo “ was going to win—it had swept the Guild awards, whose members are probably all in the Academy—and everyone was right. But “Lincoln” and “Zero Dark Thirty” are much greater movies. They are each obsessional narratives—one devoted to pushing a law through the turbulent, compromising democratic process, the other a barbed account of the uneasy vengeance-work of intelligence after an attack on American soil—and each was made with high excellence. They are, respectively, the best historical drama and the best thriller of recent decades.
Yet “Argo” is fun, and only a prig would begrudge its triumph. It has a merry spirit, a happy shrewdness, and a celebration of people who know what they’re doing—celebration that never passes into cynicism. At the end, after their preposterous concoction has carried the day, the two Hollywood pros, played by Alan Arkin and John Goodman, double over laughing; the nonsense they have perpetrated successfully sprung six people from captivity. The movie is, of course, Hollywood’s affectionate satire of itself—satire in the form of a love letter to the fantasies that are Hollywood’s business. All movies are illusions, from the great works to the mock “Star Wars” rip-off in “Argo”; junk and the sublime are all engaged in the enterprise of illusion. Those production drawings for the non-existent space epic wind up entrancing the Revolutionary Guards at the Tehran airport, and at that point the Guards become us, the audience, hoping to be fooled.
In many ways, “Argo” is a conventionally structured movie with many fabricated elements (the Canadian Ambassador who played a central role in the actual events is not happy) and insistent crosscutting that mechanically keeps the suspense high. “Zero Dark Thirty” is a no-bullshit vector of force, while “Argo” uses editing strategies from ninety-five years ago. But Chris Terrio’s screenplay is full of smart little bits—the C.I.A. badinage, which is improbably profane and witty; the terse meetings; the hilarious Hollywood stuff. The audience knows that it is watching history refashioned as a movie—reality is never this swift and funny. It’s the convention that life is like this that we find entertaining. Taking “Argo” any more seriously than that would be a mistake.
It was an enormous relief, at the end of the rhythmless, redundant, two-hundred-and-fifteen-minute grab bag of an evening, to discover that Kristin Chenoweth can actually sing, because her helium-gulping chirp during the red-carpet interviews was unendurable. Selling clothes on the red carpet is a perfectly sensible business, but why not get someone who actually knows something about fashion to do the interviews? Men might find some of this stuff interesting, too: I was fascinated, for instance, when Amanda Seyfried, shifting around, began to discuss the mechanics of her corset. But Chenoweth gushed pointlessly over the ladies, who, incidentally, mostly towered over the surrounding men. Tall and straight, that was the female body of the evening. Jennifer Lawrence, Jennifer Garner, Sandra Bullock, and Charlize Theron were skyscrapers compared to George Clooney, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Dustin Hoffman. Then, near the end of the show, Jane Fonda advanced to the front of the stage like a ship of the line in full sail after much repair work had been done on the mast and the rigging. Fonda was a great actress forty years ago, and her death-defying obsession with fitness is one of the strangest wastes of talent I can think of.
Seth MacFarlane got off to a rocky start and never really recovered. Who thought that having William Shatner review MacFarlane’s performance from the future was a witty idea? That colloquy went on for almost ten minutes. Shatner, as always, looked like a muscular dentist, and was about as funny as a muscular dentist. MacFarlane has the clean jawline and dazzling smile of an all-American boy, a mid-nineteen-fifties way of delivering a song, and a dirty mind. He got in a few nasty zingers, but he has a primitive idea of humor: find a tender spot (Clooney’s sex life, Hollywood Jews, gays, Rihanna) and poke a stick in it. Sometimes, he missed wildly. The “We Saw Your Boobs” patter song wasn’t a parody of adolescent humor—it was, simply, adolescent humor, and getting the Los Angeles Gay Men’s Chorus to join in was a “wild” idea that made no particular sense. MacFarlane hit rock bottom with the “The actor who really got inside Lincoln’s head was John Wilkes Booth.” That may have been the stupidest joke in the history of the Oscars. And MacFarlane’s joke about his own movie “Ted”—that bums would urinate on the posters—suggests an infinity of self-loathing underneath the mean-boy sallies.
The big early surprise was Christoph Waltz’s win for Best Supporting Actor, but that Oscar should have tipped us off to Tarantino winning, hours later, for Best Original Screenplay. Tarantino can certainly write vicious mock suavity for Waltz; he did it before, in “Inglourious Basterds.” The Austrian Waltz speaks English with such musical precision and vulpine insinuation that he delivers our own language fresh to our ears. I was rooting for Alan Arkin or Tommy Lee Jones, but at least Waltz deserved his statue. I can’t say the same for Ang Lee. What in the world? Best Director ? “Life of Pi” is a great technical achievement, and I admire the boy and the digital tiger out at sea as much as everyone else. But the long framing device at the beginning and end of the movie is lame. Lee didn’t bring much to his direction of actual human beings. Also in the dubious category: Anne Hathaway as Best Supporting Actress? How much screen time did she have? Twenty minutes, at most. Her Fantine is unaccountably thrown out of a factory, reviled, and assaulted; she has a tooth extracted and her hair chopped off for money; she’s violated in a coffin box; and she dies after singing—well, you know what she sings. The Hathaway episode is a mini snuff film, fuelled by the highest piety about the downtrodden. I can’t give up my feeling that people are approving of their own tears when they respond to “Les Misérables.” After all, Michael Gerson, George Bush’s principal speechwriter, wrote an entire column in the Washington Post about how much he cried at “Les Mis.” But how much did the Bush Administration do for the downtrodden? I can’t think of a better definition of sentimentality—an emotion disconnected from what one actually is and does—than effusions like Gerson’s.
Jennifer Lawrence, on the other hand, has a fierce, let’s-cut-through-the-crap directness that marks all her performances and public appearances. The voice is husky, the stare direct, the body like an arched bow. For me, she was the best thing in “Silver Linings Playbook,” an everyone-talks-at-once family movie that skirted all the mental-illness issues it brought up. Sorry, but mental illness is mostly unbearable for families; it tears them apart. Here, it’s a form of noisy but lovable eccentricity that can be cured by love. If only. As Karina Longworth put it in the Voice: “It’s a film about the alienated that makes sure to alienate no one, a movie depicting wild mood extremes that never rises or falls above a dull hum of diversion, never exploding into riotous comedy or daring to be devastatingly sad.” Exactly. David O. Russell and the star Bradley Cooper met with Vice-President Biden in February to discuss mental-health policy. What in the world did they say? Looking at Bradley Cooper, some of us saw an ambitious young actor, manic but uninteresting, running through shtick.
The evening was dedicated to film musicals, but I was puzzled by why so much attention was paid to the 2002 “Chicago,” until Tim Molloy, at the movie Web site The Wrap, pointed out that the producers of the Oscar broadcast, Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, were also the producers of “Chicago.” C’mon fellas. Your moment is over. On the other hand, Zadan and Meron were right to feature solo performances by four women who can sing—Jennifer Hudson; Shirley Bassey, still doing it (“Gold-fingÂuh”) at seventy-five; Adele; and Barbra Streisand, whose phrasing was once praised by Glenn Gould, managing with great skill what was left of a good voice.
The presenters mostly thanked everyone. Very few people actually said anything, which is not always true. At one time, the Oscars were a definite platform for blurted-out remarks on the state of the nation or, at least, the state of Hollywood. I miss the controversies: the Oscars have become a bland, boring show, a sodden moneymaking event that enriches everyone from the Academy to the New York Times. At least the acceptance speeches got better late in the evening as the quality stepped to the stage. Daniel Day-Lewis got off his deadpan suggestion that he and Meryl almost swapped roles, with him playing Margaret Thatcher and Streep playing Abraham Lincoln, and Ben Affleck, exuberant and a little wild, put his know-nothing youth behind him and accepted homage as the smartest guy in the room. The confidence in native shrewdness that animated “Argo” emerged again in the final speech of an endless evening.
Read Amy Davidson on Seth MacFarlane’s hostile hosting, Sasha Weiss on Oscar fashion, John Cassidy on rational reasons to watch the ceremony, and more Academy Awards coverage.
Illustration by Jordan Awan.
Everyone said that “Argo “ was going to win—it had swept the Guild awards, whose members are probably all in the Academy—and everyone was right. But “Lincoln” and “Zero Dark Thirty” are much greater movies. They are each obsessional narratives—one devoted to pushing a law through the turbulent, compromising democratic process, the other a barbed account of the uneasy vengeance-work of intelligence after an attack on American soil—and each was made with high excellence. They are, respectively, the best historical drama and the best thriller of recent decades.
Yet “Argo” is fun, and only a prig would begrudge its triumph. It has a merry spirit, a happy shrewdness, and a celebration of people who know what they’re doing—celebration that never passes into cynicism. At the end, after their preposterous concoction has carried the day, the two Hollywood pros, played by Alan Arkin and John Goodman, double over laughing; the nonsense they have perpetrated successfully sprung six people from captivity. The movie is, of course, Hollywood’s affectionate satire of itself—satire in the form of a love letter to the fantasies that are Hollywood’s business. All movies are illusions, from the great works to the mock “Star Wars” rip-off in “Argo”; junk and the sublime are all engaged in the enterprise of illusion. Those production drawings for the non-existent space epic wind up entrancing the Revolutionary Guards at the Tehran airport, and at that point the Guards become us, the audience, hoping to be fooled.
In many ways, “Argo” is a conventionally structured movie with many fabricated elements (the Canadian Ambassador who played a central role in the actual events is not happy) and insistent crosscutting that mechanically keeps the suspense high. “Zero Dark Thirty” is a no-bullshit vector of force, while “Argo” uses editing strategies from ninety-five years ago. But Chris Terrio’s screenplay is full of smart little bits—the C.I.A. badinage, which is improbably profane and witty; the terse meetings; the hilarious Hollywood stuff. The audience knows that it is watching history refashioned as a movie—reality is never this swift and funny. It’s the convention that life is like this that we find entertaining. Taking “Argo” any more seriously than that would be a mistake.
It was an enormous relief, at the end of the rhythmless, redundant, two-hundred-and-fifteen-minute grab bag of an evening, to discover that Kristin Chenoweth can actually sing, because her helium-gulping chirp during the red-carpet interviews was unendurable. Selling clothes on the red carpet is a perfectly sensible business, but why not get someone who actually knows something about fashion to do the interviews? Men might find some of this stuff interesting, too: I was fascinated, for instance, when Amanda Seyfried, shifting around, began to discuss the mechanics of her corset. But Chenoweth gushed pointlessly over the ladies, who, incidentally, mostly towered over the surrounding men. Tall and straight, that was the female body of the evening. Jennifer Lawrence, Jennifer Garner, Sandra Bullock, and Charlize Theron were skyscrapers compared to George Clooney, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Dustin Hoffman. Then, near the end of the show, Jane Fonda advanced to the front of the stage like a ship of the line in full sail after much repair work had been done on the mast and the rigging. Fonda was a great actress forty years ago, and her death-defying obsession with fitness is one of the strangest wastes of talent I can think of.
Seth MacFarlane got off to a rocky start and never really recovered. Who thought that having William Shatner review MacFarlane’s performance from the future was a witty idea? That colloquy went on for almost ten minutes. Shatner, as always, looked like a muscular dentist, and was about as funny as a muscular dentist. MacFarlane has the clean jawline and dazzling smile of an all-American boy, a mid-nineteen-fifties way of delivering a song, and a dirty mind. He got in a few nasty zingers, but he has a primitive idea of humor: find a tender spot (Clooney’s sex life, Hollywood Jews, gays, Rihanna) and poke a stick in it. Sometimes, he missed wildly. The “We Saw Your Boobs” patter song wasn’t a parody of adolescent humor—it was, simply, adolescent humor, and getting the Los Angeles Gay Men’s Chorus to join in was a “wild” idea that made no particular sense. MacFarlane hit rock bottom with the “The actor who really got inside Lincoln’s head was John Wilkes Booth.” That may have been the stupidest joke in the history of the Oscars. And MacFarlane’s joke about his own movie “Ted”—that bums would urinate on the posters—suggests an infinity of self-loathing underneath the mean-boy sallies.
The big early surprise was Christoph Waltz’s win for Best Supporting Actor, but that Oscar should have tipped us off to Tarantino winning, hours later, for Best Original Screenplay. Tarantino can certainly write vicious mock suavity for Waltz; he did it before, in “Inglourious Basterds.” The Austrian Waltz speaks English with such musical precision and vulpine insinuation that he delivers our own language fresh to our ears. I was rooting for Alan Arkin or Tommy Lee Jones, but at least Waltz deserved his statue. I can’t say the same for Ang Lee. What in the world? Best Director ? “Life of Pi” is a great technical achievement, and I admire the boy and the digital tiger out at sea as much as everyone else. But the long framing device at the beginning and end of the movie is lame. Lee didn’t bring much to his direction of actual human beings. Also in the dubious category: Anne Hathaway as Best Supporting Actress? How much screen time did she have? Twenty minutes, at most. Her Fantine is unaccountably thrown out of a factory, reviled, and assaulted; she has a tooth extracted and her hair chopped off for money; she’s violated in a coffin box; and she dies after singing—well, you know what she sings. The Hathaway episode is a mini snuff film, fuelled by the highest piety about the downtrodden. I can’t give up my feeling that people are approving of their own tears when they respond to “Les Misérables.” After all, Michael Gerson, George Bush’s principal speechwriter, wrote an entire column in the Washington Post about how much he cried at “Les Mis.” But how much did the Bush Administration do for the downtrodden? I can’t think of a better definition of sentimentality—an emotion disconnected from what one actually is and does—than effusions like Gerson’s.
Jennifer Lawrence, on the other hand, has a fierce, let’s-cut-through-the-crap directness that marks all her performances and public appearances. The voice is husky, the stare direct, the body like an arched bow. For me, she was the best thing in “Silver Linings Playbook,” an everyone-talks-at-once family movie that skirted all the mental-illness issues it brought up. Sorry, but mental illness is mostly unbearable for families; it tears them apart. Here, it’s a form of noisy but lovable eccentricity that can be cured by love. If only. As Karina Longworth put it in the Voice: “It’s a film about the alienated that makes sure to alienate no one, a movie depicting wild mood extremes that never rises or falls above a dull hum of diversion, never exploding into riotous comedy or daring to be devastatingly sad.” Exactly. David O. Russell and the star Bradley Cooper met with Vice-President Biden in February to discuss mental-health policy. What in the world did they say? Looking at Bradley Cooper, some of us saw an ambitious young actor, manic but uninteresting, running through shtick.
The evening was dedicated to film musicals, but I was puzzled by why so much attention was paid to the 2002 “Chicago,” until Tim Molloy, at the movie Web site The Wrap, pointed out that the producers of the Oscar broadcast, Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, were also the producers of “Chicago.” C’mon fellas. Your moment is over. On the other hand, Zadan and Meron were right to feature solo performances by four women who can sing—Jennifer Hudson; Shirley Bassey, still doing it (“Gold-fingÂuh”) at seventy-five; Adele; and Barbra Streisand, whose phrasing was once praised by Glenn Gould, managing with great skill what was left of a good voice.
The presenters mostly thanked everyone. Very few people actually said anything, which is not always true. At one time, the Oscars were a definite platform for blurted-out remarks on the state of the nation or, at least, the state of Hollywood. I miss the controversies: the Oscars have become a bland, boring show, a sodden moneymaking event that enriches everyone from the Academy to the New York Times. At least the acceptance speeches got better late in the evening as the quality stepped to the stage. Daniel Day-Lewis got off his deadpan suggestion that he and Meryl almost swapped roles, with him playing Margaret Thatcher and Streep playing Abraham Lincoln, and Ben Affleck, exuberant and a little wild, put his know-nothing youth behind him and accepted homage as the smartest guy in the room. The confidence in native shrewdness that animated “Argo” emerged again in the final speech of an endless evening.
Read Amy Davidson on Seth MacFarlane’s hostile hosting, Sasha Weiss on Oscar fashion, John Cassidy on rational reasons to watch the ceremony, and more Academy Awards coverage.
Illustration by Jordan Awan.
