What are the Oscars for?
It’s a question you could easily have asked yourself – and I have – as La La Land looked to sweep the board at last night’s Oscars, meaning that, in the six years, the Academy would have given the Best Picture Oscar to four films about Hollywood itself, in the form of Birdman, The Artist, Argo, and now, assuming it won, La-La Land.
The reasons behind this are much fretted over. The Academy voters are 91 per cent white, 76 per cent men, and have an average age of 63. It was, as I put it in a previous piece for GQ, like having our culture ranked by everyone who voted for Brexit.
And, of course, I was proved right. Until, with the entire cast and crew of La La Land on stage accepting their Best Picture prize, having already seen the film sweep five Oscars, including Emma Stone for Best Actress and Damien Chazelle for Best Director, I was proved wrong.
Moonlight had won after all.
It certainly wasn’t the favourite, not many had predicted it, but it had won none the less. And it has, surely, gone some way to putting the Oscars back on track. They’ve finally took a risk.
Why go to the cinema? That, fairly obviously, is the question that any Hollywood producer hopes to answer with any film that they make. And in recent years, that’s become more difficult, because the question becomes this: why go to the cinema when TV is so good?
The answer, up until now, has been spectacle. You do not – yet – have a TV screen that can block out the sun and a sound system and can loosen your fillings. And so Hollywood responds: let’s make the most of that, shall we?
Pauline Kael, writing in The New Yorker in the Sixties and noticing the rise of the action genre, famously called them “kiss kiss, bang bang” films. You could argue, with the mostly sexless superhero films, we’ve managed to simplify this. We’re down to bang bang. Or, with The Fast and the Furious franchise – the last of which made a cool $1.5b worldwide – kiss kiss, crash crash. And let’s, of course, not forget Star Wars: a classic bit of kiss kiss, zap zap.
And so, it would be easy for it to have rewarded a film like La La Land. In a world where it’s harder and harder for the Oscars to give awards to films that people actually watch – unless they want to start giving Vin Diesel an Oscar or giving out an award for Best Death Star – it would have been sorely tempting. It had buzz. It was putting bums on seats. It had the two hottest actors in Hollywood, in Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, as its leads. It had colours that could give you a headache.
But La La Land is, in its own way, another film that specifically – and in fairness, quite brilliantly – sought to answer to the same question: why go to the cinema when TV is so good?
The answer, of course, was to make a decidedly old-school, feel-good, all-singing, all-dancing love story of two people trying to make it in showbiz, but shot in a way – like the director’s previous film Whiplash – that almost made you feel like you were part of the action. Kiss kiss, dance dance.
Do you want to watch that when it comes out on iTunes on your 13” laptop? Or do you want to watch it in your local megaplex? The sheer experience of watching *La La Land *was unique: it was cinema that almost didn’t feel like cinema, a film that didn’t really feel like a film; it had the thrill of watching something live.
Moonlight could hardly have been more different. It is, in many ways, a small film, albeit one that tackles some pretty big issues. It starts with a tight focus, and doesn’t really expand. It proves, as if proof were needed, that small lives are never small to those who live them.
It starts on a kid called Chiron, but known only as Little, being chased into an abandoned house, and never appreciably leaves him. He’s a kid who doesn’t say much – in fact, for almost the first 20 minutes, barely a word passes his lips – and so becomes clear this is a film that wants to show rather than tell.
The plot is not one that bothers itself with too many twists, as it’s far more bothered about being like life. As it shows, one twist is all a life needs to spin it off into an entirely different direction.
We catch up with Chiron at three ages: a fearful kid, bullied and poor, who wonders what it means that other kids call him a “faggot”. Then, later, a high-school teen now truly feeling the effects of having a crack-addicted prostitute (Naomi Harris) for a mother; he shares his first intimate moment with another boy, and a retaliation for a school-ground beating, the latest in a long line of them, sees him as the one arrested. And, finally, in what is little more than two epilogue scenes – one in a restaurant, one in a home – Chiron, now known as Black, now a man, now hardened from jail with jail-iron muscles and a rail of gold teeth, less anyone think of beating him again, visits the boy, now a man, that he once kissed.
That’s not much, you could say. But it’s a life. Or, rather, it’s part of one. And it’s exactly because it wears its themes so lightly that they have so much impact. It doesn’t – as could easily have been done in a film about race and sexuality in America – cheapen them by using Chiron’s story simply as a cypher. It is about serious issues, but it is no heavy-handed issue film.
It doesn’t, in short, try to appeal to the Academy, for whom the only thing more appealing than a film about themselves is an film that makes them feel better about themselves (take your pick from 2015’s Spotlight or 2013’s 12 Year’s A Slave). It wasn’t even shot in the faux-documentary style that has become such a cinematic cliché when it comes to documenting black American lives. It was almost art-house. Surely it couldn’t win, could it?
And yet, both films, in their own ways, are simply about the path not taken. In both, we glimpse – filmed or just in our mind’s eye – how the future could have been different, how one event has now changed everything. And yet while both are somewhat fatalistic, they also manage to end with hope. Nothing certain, and maybe not the way you expected, but hope all the same. The thing with feathers.
I can’t say I felt much of it as La La Land looked to sweep the board. A worthy winner, for sure – but the same old story. If the Oscars couldn’t hope to follow any more, surely it could once, just once, be bold by leading?
And so, when it emerged Moonlight had won after all, after Warren Beatty had been given the wrong card, it gave us the very thing the oh-so-predictable Oscars almost never give us.
It gave us its very own Hollywood ending.
