Lion
IT’S OSCAR NIGHT!!!!
When I lived I Portland, an invite to my Oscar party was a hot ticket. As we were West Coasters and as the Oscars started at a civilized cocktail hour on the West Coast, invitees came over straight from work or scooted away from home leaving someone else to feed and bathe the kids. I enforced a strict dress code: you could wear anything you wanted, but you HAD to wear
F – – – Me high heels.
With those as your entry ticket, we enjoyed great drinks, fabo cuisine (sushi, for example, was exotic in those days), and endless desserts. We had tally sheets and there were prizes for those who predicted the most winners. Pre-internet, big-screens and cell-phones, we had side-by-side TVs and a direct open phone line with my friend in Boston who is a fashion designer, so we could all dis the fashions bi-coastally.
Jesse got to see his mother and her friends at their utmost nonsensical-est. It was major ridiculous fun.
This evening, Jesse and his lovely girlfriend Donell are in New Orleans donning hand made Louis XVI costumes and wigs for Mardi Gras; my Portland friends are scattered far and wide; many current friends are – as am I – about 18 years older than we were at my last Oscar party, and also as I will be – sitting in my jammies watching until I fall asleep, sort of interested, but not rabidly. I wonder what’s happened.
In any event, I HAVE seen nearly all the films nominated in the major categories, and some others that are not even mentioned (“20th Century Women” — whaaaa? Why not? And why not Annette Bening? “Queen of Katwe” — what a shame that more people won’t see this feast for the eyes). I am rooting for “Lion” to win as best picture tonight, as it was the most emotionally satisfying movie of the year, and I’m nothing if not a sucker for emotional satisfaction.
It won’t win, for the reason that the best often doesn’t win: because the definition of “the best” in Hollywood has often been “the most” in terms of money earned for the big boys (sounds exactly like DC, doesn’t it?).
“Lion” is not that kind of self-congratulatory vehicle.
What “Lion” is is a TRUE story told with SENSITIVITY, EMPATHY, RESPECT, CRAFT, HEART, ELEGANCE, and blah blah blah. When it doesn’t win, this lion (I AM a Leo, for those of you who might possibly have missed that fact along the way) won’t roar. I will just languidly get up from my spot on the sofa, stretch, swish my tail a few times, and saunter off to my next cozy place to lie down and sleep off the evening. I am certain that visions of both LaLaLand (the place) and “La La Land” (the movie) will be dancing in my head, welcome or not. I guess that’s better than many alternatives that the world could offer up at this moment in time. Better, that is, if one considers vacuousness and cotton candy in primary colors to be panacea, and if one considers Ryan Gosling to be a Prince Charming (yikes) and Emma Stone to be a fully realized female role model, albeit graceful. Fear not, I won’t roar.
I will no doubt sleep well. And I may well dream of other remembered award shows in other times and places when I might not have thought much of the winners. Yet somehow, despite what was going on in moviedom or in the seat of our democracy then, I survived. So tonight, the best I can hope for is for a personal repeat performance after the TV show is over, and for a long run, with or without a golden statue and whatever it is that it acknowledges, symbolizes, honors or ignores.