Did I Almost Forget about the Oscars?

I’ve been excited for the announcement of the Oscar nominations every year for more than half a century. I’m not sure exactly when and why it started but my earliest memory is being a really, really happy little boy when I heard Mary Poppins got a ton of nominations AND several months later literally jumping up and down screaming when Julie Andrews walked up to the stage to accept the trophy as best actress.

Thinking about it now I wonder:

How did they not know I was gay?

Well okay, that’s not the only thought I have in my head.

I am also recalling years when I rehearsed my own Oscar speech (in anticipation of a win even though I had yet to ever work on a movie); others when I was a reporter and actually had to get up at 5 in the morning to cover the damn thing live at the Academy (Note: Be careful what you wish for); and still others where I voluntarily woke up at 5 in the morning at home to watch it on TV and not miss a moment of elation or outrage.

And I’m only slightly embarrassed to admit that I was still doing that last one as a recently as, well, ahem, not that long ago.

Why?

I don’t know. Why do you care about the Super Bowl or the World Series; the NBA Playoffs, Wimbledon or Monday Night Football; Paris Fashion Week, the Cannes Film Festival, the Grammys or the winner of Eurovision?

Maybe you don’t or maybe you do but in life it’s nice to look forward to something.

Well, that ended this year. It’s not that I wasn’t tracking potential nominees but on the twice-postponed Oscar nomination announcement day I woke up, did my morning routine (Note: Use your imagination), hung out and, right before leaving the house at 11 suddenly thought, ‘oh right, the Oscars. I better…check?’

It was kind of surreal.

Perhaps it’s age or the movies, but I don’t think so. Maybe it’s the fact that parts of L.A. were on fire several weeks ago hastening the delay (Note: During which I did have to evacuate my house) so I got that and a lot of dates confused. Not likely.

Mostly it was because I was keeping my mind on a bunch of other announcements that didn’t involve a svelte golden statuette but an engorged orange (and profoundly non-statuesque) one.

But these announcements were actually orders for actions that were not democratically voted on. Things like:

Releasing more than 1500 violent criminals from jail who severely beat up cops and broke into and entered the Capitol building, where they hunted down members of Congress (Note: And occasionally stopped to smear feces on the walls and destroy offices) all in order to subvert the peaceful transfer of power to a new president they didn’t vote for four years ago.
Revoking President Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1965 order that guaranteed people of color and women equal opportunity to be hired, trained and employed by any agency in the federal government or any company or person who has a contract with said government, and
A termination to birthright U.S. citizenship even though it is literally written into the 14^th amendment to the U.S. Constitution that anyone born in the U.S. IS a citizen of the U.S.

For further elucidation and analysis of said announcements and their implications you can also check out these articles in Axios and the NY Times. Or simply use the google with the key words: recent executive orders for the source of your choice.

As for the Oscar nominations, anyone who follows these things or longs for a little competitive glamour or excellence in their lives courtesy of the movies, or is simply slightly film obsessed, has their favorites and their inexcusables. For me, it’s Timothée Chalamet’s performance in A Complete Unknown because I’m not sure how anyone can sound and act exactly like Bob Dylan, pretend they’re a young guy in the sixties, croon a tune to a pretend Woody Guthrie and go on to sing with and make love to a fake Joan Baez without making it a complete parody. (Note: Also because his best actor Oscar for Call Me By Your Name got stolen by Gary Oldman seven years ago. And no, I don’t forget).

Was this the most important cinematic moment of the year? Certainly not. But for me it was the most impressive and, anyway, as we all should know by now, that’s not what the Oscars are all about.

Nor should it be.

Also… sorry Timmy but better luck next time

The importance monicker is usually most omni-present in the best picture category, which pretty consistently reserves slots for movies that say something about social issues (Note: Forgetting the fact that ALL movies are social comments on our world), as well as advance the best of technology, execution or contemporary messages to be had from movies during that year.

Personally, I think expanding the best picture category from a limit of five nominations to these days as many as TEN nominations (Note: It works through a weighted scale the Academy concocted that is too cumbersome to explain in anything less than a term paper) is somewhat equivalent to being awarded a yearly participation award in a small, local day camp.

“And you get an Oscar… and you… and you!”

Okay, perhaps that’s a bit much but AMPAS voting to expand the list of possible nominees in 2009 seemed more like a marketing tool for studios due to lagging box-office than anything else.

But in an age where our new 78-year-old POTUS just announced that Mel Gibson, Sylvester Stallone and Jon Voight are to serve as his special ambassadors to Hollywood (Note: News to them, since it was relayed only in a tweet, but fitting since they all reached stardom in those regrettable, greed is good eighties), it’s a welcome relief.

See, unlike MAGA voters the vast majority of all 10 best picture nominees this year focused on stories about diversity, equity and inclusion in regards to immigration, race, trans/LGBT representation, ageism, economic inequality and/or religious persecution. And if you look back in history that tends to happen when political leaders spend their time taking away rights or lashing out at specific communities for power, or profit or simply because they can.

As I tell my students, movies are not life but, on the whole, they tend to absolutely reflect real life and the issues we, as a society are concerned about in that moment.

This is why this year I am thrilled to have as many as TEN, if not more, best picture nominees vying for the Oscar. I might be selling out my long-held views for political gain, but hey, at least it’s not to stay in office.

As for the list of this year’s films, they are: Anora, The Brutalist, A Complete Unknown, Conclave, Dune: Part Two, Emilia Perez, I’m Still Here, Nickel Boys, The Substance, and Wicked.

I’d be happy with any of them winning. And not only because Gibson, Stallone, Voight had absolutely nothing to do with any of them, and they address rights and issues they and the guy they will be ambassador-ing for want to roll back and, preferably, erase.

Though, that helps.

A lot.

Jonathan Bailey – “Dancing Through Life” (from Wicked)

02.21.21

by notesfromachair

History Repeats and… It’s a Sin

HBO Max’s It’s A Sin is a new five-part limited series about a group of gay men and their friends in Great Britain who lived and sometimes died during the HIV/AIDS crisis from 1981-1991. It is a critical hit and a must see.

Nevertheless, as a gay man who lived through it in the US, but didn’t die, it was the last thing I wanted to see or be reminded of during these pandemic days.

And yet…it was the first thing I began watching the very moment it dropped here in the States this week.

Why?

Well, many reasons. But the best that I could come up with is this begrudgingly timeless quote from an author long ago.

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

—William Faulkner, 1940

Writer extraordinaire William Faulkner first gave us those words in a short story he published in Harper’s in 1940.

They have since been quoted many times, most recently by both Barack Obama and Peggy Noonan in an attempt to address the issue of racism in the late aughts, and will no doubt be referred to many more times over.

Perhaps you prefer it in one of these standard internet formats

As a writer for none other than the Hindustan Times explained to us just three years ago, Faulkner’s words remain particularly prophetic because the past inevitably seeps into our present, informs it, even has a bearing on our future. The past cannot be wished away; neither can it be denied.

I would add this is the case no matter how expert we are at pretending and no matter how determined we are to move forward. The past, and its lessons, will ALWAYS resurface, whether you want to recognize them or not, and at times and in places you least expect it.

To not acknowledge it, learn from it, and at times live with it as you go on, is to be doomed – as too many countless others have warned – to repeat it.

How cliché. And yet, how undeniably true.

Take it from someone who is alive and well and just qualified to receive a Covid-19 vaccine.

Denial is a big part of It’s A Sin, but so is celebration and joyousness. Watching it reminded me that despite all my protestations to the contrary, those times were not solely tragic and funereal, colored forever in doom, gloom and sores of every type imaginable.

In fact and to its credit, none of the characters in this series are any ONE thing, and that goes not only for the young friends in their twenties at the prime of their lives but those middle-aged, older and even younger.

They are all a result of how they’ve allowed their experiences to shape them, the ways in which they choose to forge ahead or remain stagnant, and the harshness with which they treat not only others, but themselves.

How they existed and what they did back then is particularly resonant because of the harrowing drama of those times.

But as we all now sit in our homes (Note: Or wander freely), masked or maskless, hopeful, scared or bitter deep into our very cores for the future, it’s hard not to see our times as still yet another variance of their times.

Every decade has its costs and its joys and, if we’re lucky enough, we get to live through each to the next and adjust accordingly.

No one is saying denial doesn’t work in limited doses. I, for one, would have never sat down and written an original screenplay many decades ago that got bought and made had I accepted the true odds of that ever happening to a novice like me writing about the subject matter I chose to write about at that time.

Indeed, sometimes the only way forward is to defiantly block the facts in order to springboard you into defying the odds.

We humans all do this to some success and to some extent. However, experience also tells you (note: okay, ME) that this can’t be your ONLY strategy. Inventing your own reality means you also may be blind to the crumbling of the world around you with the thought your alternative world and your alternative facts will protect you.

Sadly, it’s not so. Not in the AIDS era of the 1980s, not in the latest pandemic era of the 2020s. Not even in the Deep South 1940 of Faulkner’s times.

The key is to be observant enough to acknowledge the cracks and take action before the crumbling starts. Patch it, consult an expert about re-cementing or entirely knock down the walls you think you smartly built before it’s too late.

All this construction has me longing for HGTV

Yeah, right, who wants to do that? But in doing so you might even let in those ideas or persons you banished to the outside and find out for sure if you were right or wrong about them all along. Imagine if you realized you were ignorant, selfish, misguided or had even misjudged while you still had time to do something about it?

This was the story of those five Londoners and their families in It’s A Sin just as it is the story of our survival in the midst of the worldwide pandemic we are now continuing to barely live through.

Any type of pandemic, much like any armed insurrection, is not any one person’s fault. Even if the worst, most xenophobic tropes were true and it was proven that a Chinese lab mistakenly unleashed CoVid-19 to the world and purposefully covered it up, that still couldn’t be blamed for the degree of medical severity we are now experiencing.

The politicization of masks, choosing economics and widely opening back up too soon over quarantining, turning our backs on our most vulnerable (note: essential workers, the poor, the non-Whites) and willingly letting them die early on and perhaps inadvertently become super spreaders through no fault of their own; a decided lack of interest in recent years of top international leaders to operate as a true global community and closely work together to ensure our mutual survival – arguably ALL explain the basic shutdown of the world as we once knew it.

Meaning, a virus, is a virus, is a virus. And people, are people, and continue to be, people.

All the homophobia, limited thinking and personal wall building and/or destroying won’t change the facts or the outcome once the stark realities of life has its way with you. Or us.

History is, at its best, a colorful kaleidoscope. But it isn’t always reliably pretty.

What it is is reliably prescient.

“History Repeating” – Shirley Bassey

Check out the Chair’s newest project, Pod From a Chair , now available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify!

https://open.spotify.com/show/0RZiBJNbiYqRpp8LrzcWkm

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Tag Archives: I'm still here

Did I Almost Forget about the Oscars?

History Repeats and… It’s a Sin