the oscars music criticism hour

Another awards show dead and buried.

Honestly, what are we even supposed to say about it, besides the fact that everyone seems to have forgotten their history: Straight Outta Compton's only nomination was for its two white screenwriters, which happened to the (vastly superior) Spike Lee film Do The Right Thing in 1989. Of the entire movie, only Danny Aiello was nominated for best supporting, and Public Enemy's seminal track Fight The Power, which was played at the 2016 show, lost to -- of all god-forsaken things -- Under the Sea from The Little Mermaid.

Quickly: I am glad that Spotlight won best picture. It was an underdog production from start to finish. The state of investigative journalism in the U.S. and, hell, around the world, is patently pathetic. Even the much-lauded war journalist is labeled by the official Defense Department as an "unprivileged belligerent" -- basically a thin notch above "enemy combatant." Even former actor and "Great Communicator" Ronnie Reagan hot-mic'd himself back in 1986 by calling the media "sons of bitches." Much like the troops themselves and to a similar extend police, journalists are the heroic risk-takers of American legend ... just as long as we don't have to see them, know them, deal with them or think about any of the things they say.

Additionally, while I was rooting for Mad Max: Fury Road all the way through (which cleaned up with six creepy gold statues of Klaatu), I'm glad all of the recognition was for crew, design and stunts -- the non-glamours parts of film making we slobbering media-whore consumers rarely see. The fire coming out of that guitar was real and Sunday it got it's due.

You've seen this before but I reiterate that it's a goddamned guitar that shoots fire and you will see it again and enjoy it!

And there's not a whole lot one can say about Chris Rock's admirable but supremely awkward attempts at addressing the everyday racism of Hollywood, except that somehow Asians ended up as the ass of the joke? I guess there's a valid criticism there but some more focus would've helped, particularly that there were no Asians* up for anything this year, with the exception The Look of Silence, a second-half of the documentary The Act of Killing that approximately nobody saw (but really you should see both). This comes soon after word that Scarlett Johansson will take the lead in an American live-action reboot of the seminal cyber-punk anime Ghost in the Shell. I'm not trying to put people in boxes or anything, but I don't know many Jewish women native to NYC who go by Motoko Kusangi.

[UPDATE: I started this post several days ago and it seems her entry for the movie has been removed from IMDB. This is what listening to the internet gets you.]

* * * * *

If there was a high point -- or low point? -- of the night, it was Lady Gaga losing the best song award to Sam Smith. Let's be clear: Gaga is effectively the most overrated** musician working today. Depending on what side of spectrum you come from, she's either Amy Winehouse without the deeply tragic personal demons and far better adapted to fame, or Tori Amos on bath salts. Her performance was great comparatively, but without her patented Gaga-ness -- the ever present need to charge her fans a few hundred a ticket so she can light a baby grand on fire or something -- it didn't exactly stand out.

But this was the "issues" Oscars and issues it brought. Until It Happens To You was written for the documentary film The Hunting Ground. It tracks the many, many failures many different social and legal systems as they pertain to the epidemic of college campus rape, and her performance brought dozens of rape and sexual assault survivors out on stage. That Brie Larson won for Room, a movie that heavily features the dis-empowerment of women, doesn't exactly seem like an accident (like Spotlight, it was an underdog movie that came out of nowhere, adapted from a best-selling novel that came out of nowhere).

The other two songs paled in comparison. The Weekend's Earned It is a forgettable little bit of pop/soul/R&B crud that somehow posits that women "earn" their domineering and abusive partners by, being better victims I guess? It was written for 50 Shades of Gray, after all. And given what astute readers who don't forget or block out that the mega-successful PG-13 semi-smut is elaborate Twilight fanfiction, twin Mary-Sue heroines Bella Swan and Ana Steele "earned" something between jack and shit.

But it really sticks in my craw (and I'm a dude so, ya know, use your imagination) that Sam Smith's James Bond crooning of The Writing's on the Wall won. The thing that made Skyfall stand out was that it was also a good movie on top of being a James Bond movie, and the titular Adele theme actually had something to do with the movie itself. Smith's Bond song hammers home the idea that Bond is old and soft and just wants to settle down. Spectre the movie takes absolutely zero of such advice into consideration. And that the risk of crossing into dudebro territory: when one has even an inkling of a shot with Monica Belluci and you aim for a skinny blonde French chick, that is basically worthy of psychotherapy.

The Writing's on the Wall is just a bad song, squeaked out by an equally forgettable singer who I can't tell apart from all of the other equally-forgettable singers blasted out with strobe-light frequency on Q102. And I'd like to imagine, since part of our theme here is forgetting history, that after Sam Smith's acceptance speech, his agent backstage told him with much fluster, "Mr, Smith, Elton's on the phone and he sounds pissed."

* Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, whose film A Girl in the River, won best short-subject documentary, is Pakistani. Chris Rock and Sacha Baron Cohen's jokes were clearly aimed at East Asians. Incidentally, Leo was allowed to go way over his time talking about climate change -- a subject that (as Chris Rock noted early in his routine) that people who don't have to worry about ritual killings get to think about -- way over his time, but Obaid-Chinoy was played off halfway through explaining that her movie actually caused Pakistan to outlaw honor killings.

** You'd think this label would go to Taylor Swift or Beeb but I don't think it applies as nobody actually expects anything of them. Swift's entire persona and music are based around being a really dumb, white chick. Gaga, you know, tries.