The Sunday Mail
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LEAVE it to the Oscars to make the Nama awards look like pure gold!
Over the years, slowly but surely, I have lost all respect for the Academy Awards. The only reason I dedicate some space on the show is purely sentimental.
Despite the torture of our own National Arts Merit Awards, we have never courted controversy as did the 89th edition of the Academy Awards.
As expected, “La La Land” was the night’s biggest winner collecting seven — sorry, six — awards on the night. Yawn.
Casey Affleck and Emma Stone walked away with the best acting gongs for “Manchester by Sea” and “La La Land” respectively. Double yawn.
In the Best Supporting Actor and Actress, “Moonlight’s” Mahershala Ali and the incomparable Viola Davis both walked away with gongs with the latter honoured for her work opposite Mr Washington in “Fences”.
I could go on and on about who won what, and who lost out on what, but that is not what these awards will be remembered for. To be honest, the only winner worth mentioning is Ms Davis. I am a big fan of hers and she gave one of the best acceptance speeches.
Said Davis; “You know, there is one place that all the people with the greatest potential are gathered and that’s the graveyard. People ask me all the time — what kind of stories do you want to tell, Viola? And I say exhume those bodies.
“Exhume those stories — the stories of the people who dreamed big and never saw those dreams to fruition, people who fell in love and lost.”
Did I mention that with her win, Davis became a member of the Triple Crown class? For those not in the know, it is the class of Thespians who have won the three main acting awards. Davis won a Tony (2001 and 2010), Emmy (2015) and now an Academy Award (2017).
As far as the controversy because she was a lead actress and not supporting, I say “don’t hate the player, hate the game”.
Anyway, let me keep this review short — unlike the drag that the Oscar’s show was. First, after Billy Crystal’s Oscar gigs and the duo of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, Jimmy Kimmel is now my fourth favourite host.
The duo of Will Smith and wife Jada Pinkett’s BET routine, and the Wayans brothers at the same event are now a bit stale but I will give them honourable mention. The thing that I loved about Kimmel as host, and the other three people I mentioned, is that he was original. He did not try too hard as was the case with Carl Joshua Ncube at the Nama Awards. He put a little Kimmel into every gag, joke or routine he made.
For those that follow his late night show, like I do on the Internet, you will be familiar with his running battles with Matt Damon, tourists routine and unique sense of humour.
All those things were brought into the show and I do not really care whether or not the “tourists” were real or paid actors, I loved the bit and the fact that everyone in the front row — Mr Washington, Jennifer Aniston and Nicole Kidman — played along.
Just imagine what kind of a disaster the whole skit would have been had it been DJ Khaled, Kim Kardashian and Kanye West in that front row . . .
I think four hours is too long a time for an award show that mostly runs on humour and interaction with minimal musical interludes.
And now for the ugly. I might have not noticed it, but someone did, as during the tribute section of the show, the AMPS put the wrong face to the right name. Apparently, in their attempts to pay tribute to a late Australian costume designer, Janet Patterson, they put up the face of Jan Chapman.
Chapman is an Australian film producer and still walks among the living.
I will not dwell much into the whole “La La Land” and “Moonlight” Best Picture debacle, suffice to say I do not buy into the theories, scapegoats and half-hearted apologies that have dominated the news since. If the envelope in question read “Emma Stone, Best Lead Actress”, then why did Faye Dunaway read out “La La Land” as the winner and not Stone?
PriceWaterhouseCoopers, the accounting firm in charge of vote counting, apparently has an 82-year deal with AMPS and allude to their credibility and near-perfect record as the reason behind the length of the deal. How is the accounting firm to blame if it was a simple matter of handing over the wrong envelope? Now that they have brought the AMPS into disrepute, will the deal stand, and why is it so long a deal? Why did it take so long for the show’s organisers to realise that a wrong name had been called out? I mean, they let the “La La Land” guys get halfway through their acceptance speeches, before notifying them that they had not won.
C’mon man!
