Forget the big smiles, the absurd necklines, the faces smeared with emotion: the 94th Oscar ceremony was a matter of hands. The one who invited herself on stage for an impromptu slap (we’ll come back to this). The trembling ones of Liza Minnelli unsealing the envelope which contained the title of the big winner of the evening. Those, finally, whirling in the air, of all the assistance standing up to applaud in sign language the coronation of Coda, the improbable – and barely watchable – champion: a New England remake of cocori-cardboard the Aries Family, d’Eric Lartigau.
Directed by the American Sian Heder, co-produced by French companies including Pathé and interpreted mainly by unknown and deaf actors whose hour of glory was there, the film transposes to fishermen from Gloucester, Massachusetts, the same intrigue to familialism feel good and syrupy, made up of the difficulties of a clan in which all the members are deaf except for the youngest daughter and her emancipation through singing. The prizes for Best Actor in a Supporting Role (for born deaf comedian Troy Kotsur) and Best Adaptation Screenplay complete the evening’s fishing.
Above all, the consecration of the film in front of the Hollywood elite seals another success story : that of a new kid with big arms by the name of Apple Studios, founded in 2019 in the bosom of the titan Apple, who offered himself Coda with flair at the last Sundance Festival in exchange for 25 million dollars (22.8 million euros), and then spent lavishly to market his colt in the home stretch of theawards seasontraditionally concluded by the Oscars.
Billie Eilish whispers
Netflix, Amazon and others, who have spent a hundred times more over the past decade, but without ever managing to climb to the top of the list, must skim: after two years of pandemic which, accelerating the change in practices , have almost finished imposing streaming platforms as masters of the Hollywood game, Apple+ becomes the first to claim the Oscar for best film – which, in view of both the sums committed by its rivals and the inexhaustible means of its parent company, will not even have cost it very much.
This changeover, which marks the change of era for the benefit of the new digital operators, will undoubtedly remain the essential of what history will retain of an evening devoid of a raid of a film rising clearly above the melee, and speedy in its bill until it loses all rhythm and relief. Led not by one or two but three actresses (Amy Schumer, Wanda Sykes and Regina Hall) who unfortunately didn’t have half of an honest punchline to share, and punctuated with musical interludes smelling of good soup (Beyoncé and his orchestra disguised as tennis balls, the whispers of Billie Eilish crowned for her singing tour in the latest James Bond, and no less than two numbers taken from Charm, Disney porridge rewarded with the Oscar for best animated film), the show will have given birth to a single and unique moment of amazement, in time suddenly suspended – because it was not scripted. When Will Smith appears on stage to slap Chris Rock, then agonize with insults, obviously stung by a joke not to his liking about the alopecia of his wife Jada Pinkett Smith.
In the midst of such a regulated ballet of sketches and speeches whose inspiration for the authors clearly had the long Covid, this episode – partly censored by the American broadcaster – left the entire audience speechless and seized by its stridency. But it also found its ideal continuation, in a mode of weird redemptive melodrama that Hollywood loves, when the same Will Smith went back on stage forty minutes later, in tears, to receive the Oscar for best actor. His first, for his role in the Williams Method, where he plays the obsessive patriarch of tenniswomen Serena and Venus Williams. “Love will make you do crazy things”, he let go in the middle of a speech imbued with contrition and uncertain coherence. Later that night, LAPD released a statement saying between the lines that the victim, Chris Rock, had declined to press charges, but that law enforcement, aware of the aggression, were at his disposal.
General public disaffection
Main herald of Netflix and favorite with twelve nominations, the very beautiful neo-western Power of the Dog won only one statuette, but not the least, since New Zealander Jane Campion was named best director (the first filmmaker – and for a long time the only one – to have ever won the Palme d’Or, thus becoming the third to be distinguished at the Oscars, after Kathryn Bigelow then Chloé Zhao in 2021). Likewise, despite four nominations and an international enthusiasm that has continued to swell since the Cannes Film Festival, the magnificent Drive My Car Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi is content with the Oscar for best foreign language film.
The rest of the dusting will have notably devoted Jessica Chastain for a caricature of a number dripping with cosmetics in the biopic of televangelist Tammy Faye Messner (In the eyes of Tammy Faye) and the revelation of West Side Story Spielberg’s Ariana DeBose Bombed Best Supporting Actress (Freed met her). Probably the victim of sincere autobiography blackmail, the trophy for best original screenplay goes to Kenneth Branagh for the appalling Belfast. And, as expected, gigaproduction Dune, by Denis Villeneuve, won most of the so-called “technical” Oscars (best editing, photography, special effects and sets).
This very clumsy 2022 ceremony had finally redeployed a red carpet at the entrance to the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles to welcome the presence in their Sunday best of stars who had not seen each other in real life for two years. Back to normal, the academy intended to add new momentum after the strange 2021 edition, socially distanced and sanctioned by cataclysmic audiences (10 million American viewers against 23.6 million in 2020 and nearly 40 million there). ten years old). Also following a year in which cinemas saw their turnover ($21.3 billion in 2021) halve compared to pre-pandemic standards ($42.3 billion in 2019), while that the majority of films knew a simultaneous exploitation (or almost) in streaming.
To these data of the problem are added a context of general disaffection of the public vis-à-vis any form of old-fashioned awards ceremonies, and above all the backdrop of international news fairly weighed down by this killjoy of Vladimir Putin. So that the redemption operation of the almost centenary ceremonial of Hollywood self-celebration and its variation in TV show may have appeared a little more ridiculous than usual. What the Oscars will have thought to get out of by appearing to insularize themselves, to make themselves a little more deaf than ever to the din of the rest of the world.
Because the invasion of Ukraine will finally have shaded the party only for a few allusive sentences from Mila Kunis who came to introduce a musical number (but strangely without naming what happens to be her country of birth), a salute flash by a moving Francis Ford Coppola flanked by his old friends De Niro and Pacino, and the thirty seconds of silence where a text was printed on the screen on a black background to enjoin the spectators “to help Ukraine in any way possible” – a fraction of a second before the ad (for a vodka, French, but vodka all the same) resumes its rights.
Eight prices ousted from live
The Ukrainian off-screen had otherwise fueled the few arguments that preceded the evening. In particular that initiated by Sean Penn, who was indignant that the production could not invite Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to intervene during the ceremony, as Amy Schumer would have suggested. As a retaliatory measure, the actor-director, filming a documentary in Ukraine a few weeks ago, promised CNN to publicly destroy his own statuettes won in the past: “If the academy chose not to [accueillir] Ukrainian leaders, who are taking bullets and bombs for us, and the Ukrainian children they are trying to protect, so I think every one of those people, and every component of that decision, will have participated in the most obscene moment of the whole history of Hollywood.” His action is expected at any time, live on TikTok, with a chainsaw or a torch – but we wish Sean to hurt himself less than the spectators of his last film.
In the end, the most noisily controversial decision within the industry was that of ousting the presentation of eight live awards in order to make tenable (if not kept) the promise made by the new producer of a ceremony tightened to three hours – and-not-a-minute-overtime (which didn’t prevent the affair from dragging on for a good half-hour). The trophies for editing, original music, special effects or sets were thus awarded one hour before the broadcast cameras entered the room, and precisely during the time slot when the most famous heads parade in front of the microphones on the red carpet.
The speeches of the laureates judged to be the most plebeian were thus pre-recorded and reassembled in an ultra-collected version for express distribution and as painless as possible, each one in the wake of one of the (countless) advertising cuts. A few weeks earlier, nearly seventy former Oscar winners, such as James Cameron or Guillermo del Toro, had protested against this decision to change certain categories of nominees into “second-class citizens”. Those will however be able to console themselves by saying that they, at least, were not likely to take one by going up on stage.