For Academy Awards night, the pagan festival I have devoutly celebrated at home for over 40 years, I choose a special Babylonian outfit — my red-and-black “Absolutely Fabulous” T-shirt, which shows chicly decadent Patsy Stone accessorized with sunglasses, cigarette and bottle of vodka.
I am in a mad movie mood tonight, as I worship the genius of Alfred Hitchcock. Until the Oscar program begins, I am laboring over the page proofs of my book on “The Birds,” to be published by the British Film Institute in June. “Who among this tatty flock of starlets,” I mutter as the limousines roll up, “can match the divine Tippi Hedren?”
Kate Winslet of “Titanic” is truly titanic in her magnificent green dress, which makes her look like the Grand Duchess Anastasia at a medieval tournament. She should get the Oscar for best bust. Anyone with those floaters doesn’t need a lifeboat.
I thought we’d gotten rid of Meg Ryan, but no, there she is bounding chirpily down the red carpet with her new face tucks and a skin sheen as blinding as a Maine lighthouse. God, she revolts me. Cher hoves into sight wearing what seems to be a beige lampshade cut like a tornado eggbeater on her head. Not exactly widow’s weeds. She sure got over Sonny’s death fast.
Sigourney Weaver (whose mother was a British actress who worked with Hitchcock) always looks so poised and stylized. Of course, it helps to have the height of a basketball player and positively tower over the huddled masses. There’s Madonna with a man! Hooray, she’s ditched anorexic Ingrid Casares for the night. But it looks like it’s only for her brother. Madonna’s got a revolving door in her love life — or else it’s a greased laundry chute that propels her boy toys into orbit over Mulholland Drive.
Sharon Stone is fabulous! As usual, she is uniquely dressed and makes everyone else look like lemmings. She’s doing a Jean Seberg this year — the gorgeous garçon haircut, the white beachwear blouse with raffishly turned-up collar, wittily set off by a mauve satin sheath skirt. La Stone always has it. But that saturnine new hubby: hmmm. He reminds me of the looming, big-pockets, dissipated voyeur in Manet’s “Girl at the Bar of the Folies-Bergère.”
The ceremony is about to begin. The stage set is a disaster: The two giant Oscars look like bathroom deodorizers, and the glitzy gold-brick proscenium looks like a broken ruin, Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall. Of course, as Neal Gabler told us in his wonderful book “An Empire of Their Own” (and in the recent Arts and Entertainment television special based on it), the Jews did invent Hollywood.
Here comes tonight’s host, Billy Crystal, who year after year is given an insane amount of Oscar time to do his tedious shtick. There are a few amusing moments in his taped opening skit, where he appears in drag as a film noir vamp or as the voluptuously nude Winslet posing for her artist.
Kim Basinger, giving her thanks for the best supporting actress award, is far too breathy and cringing. Get her off! Every time the camera rests on the gloriously blooming, Rubenesque Winslet, touchingly seated next to her frail co-star, the elderly Gloria Stuart (how nice to see real wrinkles for once in android L.A.), it’s a shock to have to look at anyone else. Mira Sorvino, for example, who normally passes for sexy, seems to be frumpily unkempt and too snub-nosed tonight. Speak of ruins — was there once a noble Italian schnozz there?
“The exciting Michael Bolton” comes onstage to sing, or rather to caterwaul. The unappealing mass of webby locks is now shorn, but we’re still stuck with those pleading eyes, puny, pouty mouth and lantern jaw. Hook! Celine Dion in the audience is politely applauding him but seems vaguely aghast. Robin Williams gets the Oscar for best supporting actor. Phooey: Once a comedic original, he’s now a heavy-handed ham, servile to the audience and without an authentic bone left in his body. Burt Reynolds deserved to get this award, but he’s too much the outsider in his Florida retreat. Williams has been scratching the right backs on the inside track for years. Panderer!
“The beautiful Cameron Diaz” is announced as presenter. So here’s the best the much-touted new Hollywood can do. Diaz has poor posture, a ratty dress, bad makeup and smarmy diction. What a pink, ectoplasmic blob — send her off to the Anne Heche camp for overexposed mini-talents. Crystal, rather rudely hailing Charlton Heston as he appears to be returning to his seat from the toilet, gains points from me by lauding “The Ten Commandments,” one of old Hollywood’s masterpieces. Heston pauses for a dignified moment to accept the acclaim. Who among our present crop of young actors will ever be able to play a Moses, a Ben-Hur or a Michelangelo? We have mice these days, not men.
Helen Hunt has gotten the award for best actress. What an atrocity! Twenty years from now, no one will remember who the hell she was. Hunt is a third-rate Meryl Streep (whom I can’t stand to begin with). Oh, that antiseptic, withered-up WASPy look makes me sick — it’s the cerebral, adenoidal, Jodie Foster, cut-off-at-the-neck style of acting. Winslet hasn’t paid enough dues yet to win, probably, but I was plugging for Julie Christie, whom I’ve adored since “Darling.”
The compilation of Hollywood special effects footage is super — monsters, wraiths and train wrecks. There’s a Blockbuster Video ad with the loathsome Dancing Baby: what a testament to America’s degenerate infantilism! The creepy-cutesy Dancing Baby is a self-portrait of Generation X, self-absorbed yet self-pitying, orphaned, desexed and dead-end. Yes, back to the womb! — before the hired nannies git ya.
Crystal introduces Drew Barrymore as “the only member of a royal family on the program tonight.” After that flourish, she’d best be on her mettle. No, she shuffles out with arms flapping and shoulders pinched, glitter all over her skin and blowsy daisies in her hair. Once, that louche quality had charm; now it just looks like perpetual meltdown. She’s like an apple turnover that got crushed in a grocery bag on a hot day. Barrymore is presenting the award for best makeup. Unfortunately, the “Titanic” crew does not win for the frozen faces of the floating corpses — who look a lot better than Cameron Diaz!
Ashley Judd strides out with a giraffe gait that flashes open her thigh-cut white dress to bare her Naughty Scanties. “Basic Instinct” anyone? The award for lifetime achievement goes to director Stanley Donen, and there is a spectacular montage of clips from his brilliant films. At the sight of the elegant Audrey Hepburn in “Funny Face,” I sigh and offer prayers to the Olympian gods: May such Hollywood beauty come again!
Madonna clunks along the stage to present the award for best song. What in Dante’s Inferno is she wearing? “It looks like Carol Burnett’s dress made out of curtains in her sketch of ‘Gone with the Wind’!” exclaims my companion, Alison. Madonna’s hairstyle lately is taffy, daffy Shirley Temple with egg-roll ringlets: Is she hiding some jaw resculpting problem? (The liner notes to her new CD find a thousand ways to flap flying hair over that area.) Her biceps are back (how passé!), and they sure don’t go with that tent-sized evening dress. Haven’t I always warned you people about post-pregnancy estrogen poisoning? On to the next costume phase, Madonna! She hasn’t tried suits of armor yet. And when will she figure out what to do with her hands when she’s in an evening dress? All that awkward fiddling and faddling. She should consult a state-of-the-art drag queen immediately.
Celine Dion is singing her hit single from the “Titanic” score. With her genuine vocal warmth, she’s actually a welcome relief. She’s certainly learning how to moderate her shrieking volume. Shrewdly, she’s subdued her hair color from blonde to brown to show off the specially made, heart-shaped, blue Titanic jewel, hung like a pectoral over her turtlenecked Morticia Addams dress, with its sweeping train. I believe I recognize the source of that dress: It’s what the rich-bitch, lesbo psychiatric student, played by Lauren Bacall, wears in “Young Man with a Horn” — starring Kirk Douglas. I feel fortunate to have grown up when Douglas was a star: He was my idea of a hunka hunka burning love!
Jack Nicholson wins the best actor award. He deserves it: He’s a real pro who’s also kept his bad-boy attitude intact. Stone, like the gorgeous, crazy teacher she wittily played in “Diabolique,” is standing by a gold-framed, blackboard-like screen and seems ready to give us a lecture, with pop quiz afterward. Oh, it’s all about foreign films. But who can pay attention when Stone’s there to stare at? Alison remarks, “She’s the only one who’s a carry-over from the past history of the Oscars. She carries herself so well!” Star quality: You can’t bottle it, but you sure can bathe in it.
The grinning Geena Davis galumphs to the podium. She is wearing what appear to be fur bandages wrapped around her upper arms. Classic Hollywood this ain’t. The comedown after Stone is painful. We’re getting to the end of this epic-length show. A football bleacher of aging stars is now revealed to us, as 70 years of the Academy Awards are reviewed. The applause-o-meter kicks into gear.
There’s Anne Bancroft still looking great. Michael Caine has turned into a plumpish dowager. Faye Dunaway radiates. Lou Gossett Jr. is a knockout in black-on-black: what intensity! Rita Moreno bubbles. Gregory Peck and Sidney Poitier are regal. Vanessa Redgrave is braving it out, after her famous anti-Zionist Oscar brouhaha that derailed her career. Eva Marie Saint surprisingly surfaces. The indomitable Shelley Winters gets a huge cheer from the crowd: She’s had such a long, fruitful career since she ran around with her chum, Marilyn Monroe, as young gals turning heads in Hollywood.
At last the finale. I’m bitterly disappointed we haven’t had a chance to see Winslet’s dramatic green dress up on stage, but at least “Titanic” sweeps the major awards for best director and best picture. Alison is peeved at Leonardo DiCaprio: “He’s a little dick for not showing up!” she says. Yeah, sore loser! And as far as I’m concerned, he looks like a 13-year-old lesbian anyway. Porridge puss.
James Cameron, who wrote, produced and directed the now staggeringly successful “Titanic,” deserves every laurel for his vision and sheer persistence over the long haul. But as a personality, he is amazingly flat: Never since Daryl Hall (the blond one in Hall and Oates) has any major figure in the performing arts had so little charisma or basic pizazz. Cameron reminds me of George Harrison, the most recessive of the Beatles. But Cameron’s creativity is genuine and clearly runs deep. Let’s hope he’ll keep in tune with the masses. The tearjerking “Titanic” shows that postmodernist irony is over.
For Academy Awards night, the pagan festival I have devoutly celebrated at home for over 40 years, I choose a special Babylonian outfit — my red-and-black “Absolutely Fabulous” T-shirt, which shows chicly decadent Patsy Stone accessorized with sunglasses, cigarette and bottle of vodka.
I am in a mad movie mood tonight, as I worship the genius of Alfred Hitchcock. Until the Oscar program begins, I am laboring over the page proofs of my book on “The Birds,” to be published by the British Film Institute in June. “Who among this tatty flock of starlets,” I mutter as the limousines roll up, “can match the divine Tippi Hedren?”
Kate Winslet of “Titanic” is truly titanic in her magnificent green dress, which makes her look like the Grand Duchess Anastasia at a medieval tournament. She should get the Oscar for best bust. Anyone with those floaters doesn’t need a lifeboat.
I thought we’d gotten rid of Meg Ryan, but no, there she is bounding chirpily down the red carpet with her new face tucks and a skin sheen as blinding as a Maine lighthouse. God, she revolts me. Cher hoves into sight wearing what seems to be a beige lampshade cut like a tornado eggbeater on her head. Not exactly widow’s weeds. She sure got over Sonny’s death fast.
Sigourney Weaver (whose mother was a British actress who worked with Hitchcock) always looks so poised and stylized. Of course, it helps to have the height of a basketball player and positively tower over the huddled masses. There’s Madonna with a man! Hooray, she’s ditched anorexic Ingrid Casares for the night. But it looks like it’s only for her brother. Madonna’s got a revolving door in her love life — or else it’s a greased laundry chute that propels her boy toys into orbit over Mulholland Drive.
Sharon Stone is fabulous! As usual, she is uniquely dressed and makes everyone else look like lemmings. She’s doing a Jean Seberg this year — the gorgeous garçon haircut, the white beachwear blouse with raffishly turned-up collar, wittily set off by a mauve satin sheath skirt. La Stone always has it. But that saturnine new hubby: hmmm. He reminds me of the looming, big-pockets, dissipated voyeur in Manet’s “Girl at the Bar of the Folies-Bergère.”
The ceremony is about to begin. The stage set is a disaster: The two giant Oscars look like bathroom deodorizers, and the glitzy gold-brick proscenium looks like a broken ruin, Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall. Of course, as Neal Gabler told us in his wonderful book “An Empire of Their Own” (and in the recent Arts and Entertainment television special based on it), the Jews did invent Hollywood.
Here comes tonight’s host, Billy Crystal, who year after year is given an insane amount of Oscar time to do his tedious shtick. There are a few amusing moments in his taped opening skit, where he appears in drag as a film noir vamp or as the voluptuously nude Winslet posing for her artist.
Kim Basinger, giving her thanks for the best supporting actress award, is far too breathy and cringing. Get her off! Every time the camera rests on the gloriously blooming, Rubenesque Winslet, touchingly seated next to her frail co-star, the elderly Gloria Stuart (how nice to see real wrinkles for once in android L.A.), it’s a shock to have to look at anyone else. Mira Sorvino, for example, who normally passes for sexy, seems to be frumpily unkempt and too snub-nosed tonight. Speak of ruins — was there once a noble Italian schnozz there?
“The exciting Michael Bolton” comes onstage to sing, or rather to caterwaul. The unappealing mass of webby locks is now shorn, but we’re still stuck with those pleading eyes, puny, pouty mouth and lantern jaw. Hook! Celine Dion in the audience is politely applauding him but seems vaguely aghast. Robin Williams gets the Oscar for best supporting actor. Phooey: Once a comedic original, he’s now a heavy-handed ham, servile to the audience and without an authentic bone left in his body. Burt Reynolds deserved to get this award, but he’s too much the outsider in his Florida retreat. Williams has been scratching the right backs on the inside track for years. Panderer!
“The beautiful Cameron Diaz” is announced as presenter. So here’s the best the much-touted new Hollywood can do. Diaz has poor posture, a ratty dress, bad makeup and smarmy diction. What a pink, ectoplasmic blob — send her off to the Anne Heche camp for overexposed mini-talents. Crystal, rather rudely hailing Charlton Heston as he appears to be returning to his seat from the toilet, gains points from me by lauding “The Ten Commandments,” one of old Hollywood’s masterpieces. Heston pauses for a dignified moment to accept the acclaim. Who among our present crop of young actors will ever be able to play a Moses, a Ben-Hur or a Michelangelo? We have mice these days, not men.
Helen Hunt has gotten the award for best actress. What an atrocity! Twenty years from now, no one will remember who the hell she was. Hunt is a third-rate Meryl Streep (whom I can’t stand to begin with). Oh, that antiseptic, withered-up WASPy look makes me sick — it’s the cerebral, adenoidal, Jodie Foster, cut-off-at-the-neck style of acting. Winslet hasn’t paid enough dues yet to win, probably, but I was plugging for Julie Christie, whom I’ve adored since “Darling.”
The compilation of Hollywood special effects footage is super — monsters, wraiths and train wrecks. There’s a Blockbuster Video ad with the loathsome Dancing Baby: what a testament to America’s degenerate infantilism! The creepy-cutesy Dancing Baby is a self-portrait of Generation X, self-absorbed yet self-pitying, orphaned, desexed and dead-end. Yes, back to the womb! — before the hired nannies git ya.
Crystal introduces Drew Barrymore as “the only member of a royal family on the program tonight.” After that flourish, she’d best be on her mettle. No, she shuffles out with arms flapping and shoulders pinched, glitter all over her skin and blowsy daisies in her hair. Once, that louche quality had charm; now it just looks like perpetual meltdown. She’s like an apple turnover that got crushed in a grocery bag on a hot day. Barrymore is presenting the award for best makeup. Unfortunately, the “Titanic” crew does not win for the frozen faces of the floating corpses — who look a lot better than Cameron Diaz!
Ashley Judd strides out with a giraffe gait that flashes open her thigh-cut white dress to bare her Naughty Scanties. “Basic Instinct” anyone? The award for lifetime achievement goes to director Stanley Donen, and there is a spectacular montage of clips from his brilliant films. At the sight of the elegant Audrey Hepburn in “Funny Face,” I sigh and offer prayers to the Olympian gods: May such Hollywood beauty come again!
Madonna clunks along the stage to present the award for best song. What in Dante’s Inferno is she wearing? “It looks like Carol Burnett’s dress made out of curtains in her sketch of ‘Gone with the Wind’!” exclaims my companion, Alison. Madonna’s hairstyle lately is taffy, daffy Shirley Temple with egg-roll ringlets: Is she hiding some jaw resculpting problem? (The liner notes to her new CD find a thousand ways to flap flying hair over that area.) Her biceps are back (how passé!), and they sure don’t go with that tent-sized evening dress. Haven’t I always warned you people about post-pregnancy estrogen poisoning? On to the next costume phase, Madonna! She hasn’t tried suits of armor yet. And when will she figure out what to do with her hands when she’s in an evening dress? All that awkward fiddling and faddling. She should consult a state-of-the-art drag queen immediately.
Celine Dion is singing her hit single from the “Titanic” score. With her genuine vocal warmth, she’s actually a welcome relief. She’s certainly learning how to moderate her shrieking volume. Shrewdly, she’s subdued her hair color from blonde to brown to show off the specially made, heart-shaped, blue Titanic jewel, hung like a pectoral over her turtlenecked Morticia Addams dress, with its sweeping train. I believe I recognize the source of that dress: It’s what the rich-bitch, lesbo psychiatric student, played by Lauren Bacall, wears in “Young Man with a Horn” — starring Kirk Douglas. I feel fortunate to have grown up when Douglas was a star: He was my idea of a hunka hunka burning love!
Jack Nicholson wins the best actor award. He deserves it: He’s a real pro who’s also kept his bad-boy attitude intact. Stone, like the gorgeous, crazy teacher she wittily played in “Diabolique,” is standing by a gold-framed, blackboard-like screen and seems ready to give us a lecture, with pop quiz afterward. Oh, it’s all about foreign films. But who can pay attention when Stone’s there to stare at? Alison remarks, “She’s the only one who’s a carry-over from the past history of the Oscars. She carries herself so well!” Star quality: You can’t bottle it, but you sure can bathe in it.
The grinning Geena Davis galumphs to the podium. She is wearing what appear to be fur bandages wrapped around her upper arms. Classic Hollywood this ain’t. The comedown after Stone is painful. We’re getting to the end of this epic-length show. A football bleacher of aging stars is now revealed to us, as 70 years of the Academy Awards are reviewed. The applause-o-meter kicks into gear.
There’s Anne Bancroft still looking great. Michael Caine has turned into a plumpish dowager. Faye Dunaway radiates. Lou Gossett Jr. is a knockout in black-on-black: what intensity! Rita Moreno bubbles. Gregory Peck and Sidney Poitier are regal. Vanessa Redgrave is braving it out, after her famous anti-Zionist Oscar brouhaha that derailed her career. Eva Marie Saint surprisingly surfaces. The indomitable Shelley Winters gets a huge cheer from the crowd: She’s had such a long, fruitful career since she ran around with her chum, Marilyn Monroe, as young gals turning heads in Hollywood.
At last the finale. I’m bitterly disappointed we haven’t had a chance to see Winslet’s dramatic green dress up on stage, but at least “Titanic” sweeps the major awards for best director and best picture. Alison is peeved at Leonardo DiCaprio: “He’s a little dick for not showing up!” she says. Yeah, sore loser! And as far as I’m concerned, he looks like a 13-year-old lesbian anyway. Porridge puss.
James Cameron, who wrote, produced and directed the now staggeringly successful “Titanic,” deserves every laurel for his vision and sheer persistence over the long haul. But as a personality, he is amazingly flat: Never since Daryl Hall (the blond one in Hall and Oates) has any major figure in the performing arts had so little charisma or basic pizazz. Cameron reminds me of George Harrison, the most recessive of the Beatles. But Cameron’s creativity is genuine and clearly runs deep. Let’s hope he’ll keep in tune with the masses. The tearjerking “Titanic” shows that postmodernist irony is over.
oh memories of Oscar of yore! In my wretched youth in the provincial 1950s,
Academy Awards night was my second favorite pagan high holy day — after
Halloween, when I could indulge in cinematic drag.
Perhaps nothing will ever match my electric ecstasy on the night in 1960 when
Elizabeth Taylor, still weak from her emergency tracheotomy at a London
hospital, won the Oscar for her role as a sultry call girl in “Butterfield 8.”
The next day at school, my feet scarcely touched the ground.
Still, year after year, I tune into the Academy Awards and hope for nirvana.
Nowadays, of course, we have our familiar preceptress, Barbara Walters, to
guide us into the evening with her annual pre-Oscar (or post-, depending on your time zone) special. Tonight, clad in
a white hostess gown, she greets us in a peculiar, stagy posture that is
half Loretta Young, half Ann-Margret, with just a touch of Gypsy Rose Lee.
Though I nearly pass out when Barbara confides that theater owners have
dubbed boring, horse-faced Harrison Ford “the star of the century,” I’m
mollified when she labels him “a poor schnook” as a child. Her other guests
have more pizzazz: cross-legged Woody Harrelson, looking like the Rasputin
Mahesh Yogi, gravely endorses “recycling sperm,” while hawk-eyed Lauren
Bacall imperiously oversees salmon-slicing at Zabar’s deli.
At last the Oscars begin, and I go into my usual frenzy of fury at the short
shrift given to the stars’ limousine-and-red-carpet arrival — a traditional,
sacred ritual for which Angelenos begin lining up at dawn. Why the hell
does the Academy think a billion people tune in around the globe?
This year the grand entrances are even more amateurishly treated than
usual — a vile, clichid “Entertainment Tonight” montage of jittery, ugly, cramped
shots of a handful of ill-chosen celebrities. But of course the idiotic
producers of this show want to reserve all possible time for Billy Crystal,
the Host Who Ate Tokyo.
Why in Dietrich’s name must we tolerate these endless shenanigans by smug,
corny hosts? — at the expense of the stars who are the true raison d’jtre of
the evening. I and every drag queen from Rome to Rio want to see gowns,
gowns and glamour! What’s the point of designers and jewelers lavishing all
that luxury on nominees if we can’t see the bloody stuff in all its glory?
After Crystal’s fully 15 minutes of narcissistic shtick, it’s outrageous
that the actual award winners like Cuba Gooding Jr. are rushed off the stage
by the fascist orchestra, which goes into Juan Peron mode after the requisite
30 seconds. I cheer when Gooding refuses to leave the mike and dances
around, shouting and carrying on in rebellion.
My anti-Crystal mood lifts somewhat when he lobs a juicy shot at Gloria
Steinem and provokes a welcoming wave of applause for Larry Flynt in the
audience. Despite the usual humanitarian sentimentality of the Academy
establishment (e.g., a droning, senescent Arthur Hiller), the pornographers
seem to be winning.
Fashion standouts are the royally composed and chiseled-cheek-boned Kristin
Scott Thomas; Nicole Kidman, svelte in elegant Chinese puce; Sigourney
Weaver, stiletto-slim in wine-red; and Lauren Holley, whose pert bosom juts
on display in a very forward manner.
Barbara Hershey, who has gone through more bizarre life changes than Jane
Fonda, has forever forsworn her flower-child roots by appearing in tumbling
Victorian ringlets and a lush, parrot-green gown that encroaches into the
aisle and threatens to swallow a very prim Jodie Foster in the next row.
Nervously clutching the hand of her moist boy toy, Hershey makes the
solitary Foster look more sexless than usual.
This year, the show is experimenting with sending out single presenters,
which does eliminate the usual asinine interplay of tittering duos stumbling over names longer than Anglo-Saxon monosyllables, but which
cruelly exposes a whole series of unprepared girly-girls — Mira Sorvino,
Sandra Bullock, the mealy-mouthed Winona Ryder — to more sacrificial pressure
than they deserve. What is this — Iphigenia at Aulis?
Introducing Madonna, Crystal takes a swipe at a squirming Barbra Streisand by
praising Madonna’s “class” for performing, despite not being nominated
herself. Class, maybe; hara-kiri most definitely. Why did Madonna think she
could carry off a quiet torch song live? Frowning and straining with deadly
earnest and awkwardly waving an errant left arm, she breathlessly quavers
off-key and manages to cast renewed doubt on her singing abilities. When a
relaxed, radiant Celine Dion comes on to pinch-hit for the next song, it’s an
unexpected relief.
Presenter Courtney Love, following Madonna’s shaky screw-up, looks like the
cat that swallowed the canary. Quel oneupsmanship! — as Holly Golightly might
say. More statuesque than Madonna, Love looks chic and confident in silky
white. I’m no fan of Hole, which I think overrated, but Love has sang-froid
and real dignity onstage — in the way the slouching, servile Winona Ryder or
klutzy, tatty Claire Danes do not.
Whoops! Lauren Bacall, against every prediction, doesn’t win the Oscar for
best supporting actress. Bacall looks like she’s going to cry. I am
devastated and rush downstairs to get a beer. This past weekend, AMC was
showing one of my favorite Bacall films, “Young Man with a Horn,” so I’m taking
this very hard. She’s in my pantheon of major divas.
A very stylish, sexy someone named Jessica Yu, accepting the Oscar for
documentary short subject, is looking absolutely fabulous and upstaging most
of the show’s official stars. She even gets off one of the best lines: “You
know you’ve entered new territory when your dress costs more than your film!”
Mazel tov to Ms. Yu, and here’s hoping we see more of her!
Despite being done to death on recent, hectoring PBS fund appeals, Michael
Flatley (formerly of “Riverdance”) and his “Lord of the Dance” troupe storm
onstage in a fiery burst of genuine creative energy. The red and black
leather costumes are a bit Pat Benatar (I love her; don’t get me wrong), but
all this sweaty physicality feels real good after Billy Crystal’s smarmy
nattering.
Debbie Reynolds, pushing a ship’s prow of enormous bosoms, sails to the mike
and pronounces her prompter text “drivel.” Out comes the sheepish
writer — her depressive nudge of a daughter, Carrie Fisher, hunchbacked and in
slacks. How remarkable that the postmenopausal mother seems more female and
more vital — the vampire lives!
Bounding onstage are the three indomitable stars of “The First Wives Club”:
Bette Midler, Goldie Hawn and Diane Keaton, bubbling over with infectious
glee. What fun! Their chemistry is so obvious that Hollywood has to be
crazy not to plan a sequel.
Jodie Foster strides purposefully out to give the screenplay awards. She
looks better standing up, her silver lami pants swishily glittering under a
white tunic. But then she opens her mouth, and out comes that horrible,
pinched, snide, nasal accent — Candace Bergen Goes to Yale on a Feminist Visa.
The evening is wearing down. I’m glad that Frances McDormand — an honest,
spunky Carol Burnett type — wins for best actress, but I’m peeved that
Geoffrey Rush gets best actor for mimicking a real-life person with a
disability — Hollywood p.c. with a vengeance. At least Ralph Fiennes didn’t
get it, thank heavens — what an awful, obvious actor. Only in a Harrison Ford
age could anyone think the uptight, antiseptic Fiennes sexy. Bring back Kirk
Douglas! — a dreamboat in his prime.
Well, I’m off. Can’t wait till next year!
oh memories of Oscar of yore! In my wretched youth in the provincial 1950s,
Academy Awards night was my second favorite pagan high holy day — after
Halloween, when I could indulge in cinematic drag.
Perhaps nothing will ever match my electric ecstasy on the night in 1960 when
Elizabeth Taylor, still weak from her emergency tracheotomy at a London
hospital, won the Oscar for her role as a sultry call girl in “Butterfield 8.”
The next day at school, my feet scarcely touched the ground.
Still, year after year, I tune into the Academy Awards and hope for nirvana.
Nowadays, of course, we have our familiar preceptress, Barbara Walters, to
guide us into the evening with her annual pre-Oscar (or post-, depending on your time zone) special. Tonight, clad in
a white hostess gown, she greets us in a peculiar, stagy posture that is
half Loretta Young, half Ann-Margret, with just a touch of Gypsy Rose Lee.
Though I nearly pass out when Barbara confides that theater owners have
dubbed boring, horse-faced Harrison Ford “the star of the century,” I’m
mollified when she labels him “a poor schnook” as a child. Her other guests
have more pizzazz: cross-legged Woody Harrelson, looking like the Rasputin
Mahesh Yogi, gravely endorses “recycling sperm,” while hawk-eyed Lauren
Bacall imperiously oversees salmon-slicing at Zabar’s deli.
At last the Oscars begin, and I go into my usual frenzy of fury at the short
shrift given to the stars’ limousine-and-red-carpet arrival — a traditional,
sacred ritual for which Angelenos begin lining up at dawn. Why the hell
does the Academy think a billion people tune in around the globe?
This year the grand entrances are even more amateurishly treated than
usual — a vile, clichid “Entertainment Tonight” montage of jittery, ugly, cramped
shots of a handful of ill-chosen celebrities. But of course the idiotic
producers of this show want to reserve all possible time for Billy Crystal,
the Host Who Ate Tokyo.
Why in Dietrich’s name must we tolerate these endless shenanigans by smug,
corny hosts? — at the expense of the stars who are the true raison d’jtre of
the evening. I and every drag queen from Rome to Rio want to see gowns,
gowns and glamour! What’s the point of designers and jewelers lavishing all
that luxury on nominees if we can’t see the bloody stuff in all its glory?
After Crystal’s fully 15 minutes of narcissistic shtick, it’s outrageous
that the actual award winners like Cuba Gooding Jr. are rushed off the stage
by the fascist orchestra, which goes into Juan Peron mode after the requisite
30 seconds. I cheer when Gooding refuses to leave the mike and dances
around, shouting and carrying on in rebellion.
My anti-Crystal mood lifts somewhat when he lobs a juicy shot at Gloria
Steinem and provokes a welcoming wave of applause for Larry Flynt in the
audience. Despite the usual humanitarian sentimentality of the Academy
establishment (e.g., a droning, senescent Arthur Hiller), the pornographers
seem to be winning.
Fashion standouts are the royally composed and chiseled-cheek-boned Kristin
Scott Thomas; Nicole Kidman, svelte in elegant Chinese puce; Sigourney
Weaver, stiletto-slim in wine-red; and Lauren Holley, whose pert bosom juts
on display in a very forward manner.
Barbara Hershey, who has gone through more bizarre life changes than Jane
Fonda, has forever forsworn her flower-child roots by appearing in tumbling
Victorian ringlets and a lush, parrot-green gown that encroaches into the
aisle and threatens to swallow a very prim Jodie Foster in the next row.
Nervously clutching the hand of her moist boy toy, Hershey makes the
solitary Foster look more sexless than usual.
This year, the show is experimenting with sending out single presenters,
which does eliminate the usual asinine interplay of tittering duos stumbling over names longer than Anglo-Saxon monosyllables, but which
cruelly exposes a whole series of unprepared girly-girls — Mira Sorvino,
Sandra Bullock, the mealy-mouthed Winona Ryder — to more sacrificial pressure
than they deserve. What is this — Iphigenia at Aulis?
Introducing Madonna, Crystal takes a swipe at a squirming Barbra Streisand by
praising Madonna’s “class” for performing, despite not being nominated
herself. Class, maybe; hara-kiri most definitely. Why did Madonna think she
could carry off a quiet torch song live? Frowning and straining with deadly
earnest and awkwardly waving an errant left arm, she breathlessly quavers
off-key and manages to cast renewed doubt on her singing abilities. When a
relaxed, radiant Celine Dion comes on to pinch-hit for the next song, it’s an
unexpected relief.
Presenter Courtney Love, following Madonna’s shaky screw-up, looks like the
cat that swallowed the canary. Quel oneupsmanship! — as Holly Golightly might
say. More statuesque than Madonna, Love looks chic and confident in silky
white. I’m no fan of Hole, which I think overrated, but Love has sang-froid
and real dignity onstage — in the way the slouching, servile Winona Ryder or
klutzy, tatty Claire Danes do not.
Whoops! Lauren Bacall, against every prediction, doesn’t win the Oscar for
best supporting actress. Bacall looks like she’s going to cry. I am
devastated and rush downstairs to get a beer. This past weekend, AMC was
showing one of my favorite Bacall films, “Young Man with a Horn,” so I’m taking
this very hard. She’s in my pantheon of major divas.
A very stylish, sexy someone named Jessica Yu, accepting the Oscar for
documentary short subject, is looking absolutely fabulous and upstaging most
of the show’s official stars. She even gets off one of the best lines: “You
know you’ve entered new territory when your dress costs more than your film!”
Mazel tov to Ms. Yu, and here’s hoping we see more of her!
Despite being done to death on recent, hectoring PBS fund appeals, Michael
Flatley (formerly of “Riverdance”) and his “Lord of the Dance” troupe storm
onstage in a fiery burst of genuine creative energy. The red and black
leather costumes are a bit Pat Benatar (I love her; don’t get me wrong), but
all this sweaty physicality feels real good after Billy Crystal’s smarmy
nattering.
Debbie Reynolds, pushing a ship’s prow of enormous bosoms, sails to the mike
and pronounces her prompter text “drivel.” Out comes the sheepish
writer — her depressive nudge of a daughter, Carrie Fisher, hunchbacked and in
slacks. How remarkable that the postmenopausal mother seems more female and
more vital — the vampire lives!
Bounding onstage are the three indomitable stars of “The First Wives Club”:
Bette Midler, Goldie Hawn and Diane Keaton, bubbling over with infectious
glee. What fun! Their chemistry is so obvious that Hollywood has to be
crazy not to plan a sequel.
Jodie Foster strides purposefully out to give the screenplay awards. She
looks better standing up, her silver lami pants swishily glittering under a
white tunic. But then she opens her mouth, and out comes that horrible,
pinched, snide, nasal accent — Candace Bergen Goes to Yale on a Feminist Visa.
The evening is wearing down. I’m glad that Frances McDormand — an honest,
spunky Carol Burnett type — wins for best actress, but I’m peeved that
Geoffrey Rush gets best actor for mimicking a real-life person with a
disability — Hollywood p.c. with a vengeance. At least Ralph Fiennes didn’t
get it, thank heavens — what an awful, obvious actor. Only in a Harrison Ford
age could anyone think the uptight, antiseptic Fiennes sexy. Bring back Kirk
Douglas! — a dreamboat in his prime.
Well, I’m off. Can’t wait till next year!
With her appearance under subpoena before a federal grand jury on
January 26, Hillary Rodham Clinton has added another first to the annals of
First Ladies. The postwar “baby boom” generation wanted to blaze new trails
in American politics, but this isn’t exactly what we had in mind. Given the
disarray among the lumpish Republican presidential candidates, Bill Clinton
may be reelected, but recent revelations about Hillary’s shaky sense of
candor may have permanently damaged her reputation.
Despite reams of commentary from critics as well as supporters over the
past several years, Hillary remains an enigma. After her husband’s 1992
victory, the liberal East Coast media elite instantly canonized her as a
feminist superstar and was willfully blind to the abundant signs that this
governor’s wife did not know how to navigate the treacherous channels of
Washington and was too proud to ask for help. That the Clintons lacked
political judgment and common sense was obvious within a week of the
inauguration, when Bill put Hillary in charge of national health care
reform — the most reckless display of nepotism since John F. Kennedy appointed
his brother Bobby to the ethically critical post of Attorney General.
In her combination of grand idealism and coercive,
ends-justify-the-means tactics, Hillary encapsulates the arrogance and
self-delusion of my generation, with its evangelical sense of social mission.
I identify strongly with her and recognize in her present difficulties an
echo of my own career disasters. She and I were born the same year, and she
was in law school at Yale, while I was in graduate school across the street.
The dowdy, owlish photos of her from that period, showing her as an awkward,
earnest bookworm, dramatize the problem gifted women of great ambition have
had, and still have, in integrating their intelligence with their sexuality.
Discussions of Hillary have prudishly avoided the sexual issue — which
makes no sense in view of her husband’s widely publicized philandering. This
protective gallantry hovering around First Ladies is a relic of the past that
must go. Hillary’s calculating, analytic mind is stone cold — an intimidating
abstract state that women must learn to occupy if they are ever to make major
breakthroughs in science, mathematics, or musical composition.
Hillary — whom her Wellesley College classmates called “Sister
Frigidaire” — was a natural as a lawyer, but she had to learn how to be a
politician, where flexibility and gladhanding cordiality are crucial. Year
by year in Arkansas, especially after Bill was defeated in his first
reelection bid, Hillary, a high-achieving firstborn child with two recessive
brothers, taught herself how to act like a woman. The smoothly efficient
First Lady we see before us, with her chameleonlike blonde hairdos and
charismatic smile, is actually a drag queen, the magnificent final product of
a long process of self-transformation from butch to femme.
Hillary also recalls
Ibsen’s haughty, masculine Hedda Gabler, whose devotion to her
military father made her reject both marital intimacy and her humdrum married
name. Hillary, too, had great trouble relinquishing her maiden name, even when it
cost her husband politically in his traditionalist home state.
The competitive tensions of the Rodham family in suburban Chicago resemble those
of the Ciccone family in suburban Detroit: Madonna too emerged into world
prominence after a bitter struggle with her siblings and mother to be Daddy’s
number one girl. Hillary and Madonna draw their workaholic professional
energy from sharp psychological self-closure, an early defensive shutting
down. In Madonna’s case, the result has been an inability to form lasting
love relationships; in Hillary’s, it’s a sexual chilliness that encouraged
her husband’s promiscuity. Physically, Gennifer Flowers, Bill’s most blatant
bimbo eruption, was simply Hillary revamped as a tramp.
Madonna had the advantage of Italian Catholicism, with its sensual
visual imagery and choreographic ritualism. But Hillary, raised Methodist,
is the ultra-WASP, a Puritan who overvalues the verbal realm and who projects
a lofty rhetoric about herself and her goals that is often out of touch with
the unpleasant reality. She mistakes good intentions for good effects, with
others suffering the consequences. Here Hillary resembles Catharine
MacKinnon, the tunnel-vision anti-porn advocate, or the compulsively
whitebread Gloria Steinem, whom an indulgent, naively credulous media
establishment has similarly sanctified.
That humane principles and the best motives can go badly awry was obvious to such radical defenders of the
working class as William Blake and Charles Dickens, who exposed the smug
authoritarianism in career philanthropists. Even Hillary’s laudable
commitment to children’s welfare has its dark side, for not only does she
endorse legal intrusion by the state into family relationships but she has
come to see the world as a parent-child system where we are all lost souls in
need of her paternalistic supervision.
The child metaphor has also formed Hillary’s love life, for her
attraction to Bill, whom she first heard boasting about fat Arkansas
watermelons in the law school lounge, was based on his boyish Huck Finn
appeal, the very quality that makes the public forgive him again and again
for his failures and peccadilloes. With his hamburgers, horse laughs,
flirtations, schmoozing, and easy tears, Bill symbolizes emotional openness
and enjoyment of life — principles sorely needed in our politics. In their
marriage, Bill is the lush, lusty, disorderly id, while Hillary is the prim,
censorious superego keeping it all in check. As a team, they’re a wonderful
combination, which is why I support Clinton’s reelection.
But thanks to the circuitry of denial, Hillary, addicted to sermonizing and convinced of her
own moral superiority and infallible I.Q., has locked herself into an
untenable position. The urgent messages of her substantive new book, “It
Takes a Village,” have gotten lost in a political fire storm she herself
created. Until she accepts full responsibility for her past behavior,
Hillary Clinton must wear the scarlet letter of distrust and suspicion and
sit in the stocks of public abuse.
