THB #681: 3 Hours To Oscar - Donning The Cape
I’ve been doing this a long time.
When I first moved to Los Angeles, living in a crappy little apartment on Larrabee, without even owning a car yet, I would put on my tux (which I owned from my years in New York) and wander up the hill, past the Swifty Lazar party at Spago, to Le Dome, kind of play acting the role of having been to the Oscars. I was young and could catch some eyes and had my fun, as I reached for the hem of the garment. It was exciting. Oscar felt important. (Swifty is long gone, Spago moved to Beverly Hills, and Le Dome has become a half dozen things, the last being a Tocaya Organica, which now seems to be closed. Things change.)
I would get the car and the better apartment and after a couple years away from Los Angeles and the Northridge earthquake, I came back to L.A. and eventually started covering the industry as a journalist, eventually becoming a specialist in the Oscar season.
Season after season, I would fight my way through the parade of fun, starting at Telluride and ending on Oscar night. I’ve worked the red carpet, been a TV expert, we (roughcut, Yahoo!, and me) were the first to be backstage at The Oscars live on the internet, etc, etc, etc.
In 1998, I was at the center of the integration of the internet to the marketing of movies. 19 months after roughcut.com was shut down by AOL in the Time-Warner merger, we launch Movie City News, which had Oscar season ads from the very first day we opened.
In that period, putting on the tuxedo on Oscar night was just getting dressed for work.
What happened after the show varied each year. Levels of access varied, depending on my relationship with the studios and the publicists involved. Almost nothing about the post-Oscar activity was reported. Not my thing. What I loved about that experience was the intimacy that I often fell into, sometimes watching from a close distance. I carried those moments with me and still do.
You know, we journalists are not supposed to see any of the real stuff. And as the years have passed, there has been more and more chatter and less and less actually said.
I made my break from going to the awards a bunch of years ago. Some of it coincided with having a baby and then a toddle, etc, etc, But a lot of it was that I fell out of love with The Academy leadership. I had a lot of fingers in a lot of pies back then, so I was hearing things from every side of every argument.
The Academy made a shift from being rigid, but very self-aware and aggressive about its status to being defensive and reactive. This really asserted itself in 2015, with #OscarSoWhite, which started a war inside The Academy, as the initial response was not only to try to bring in more women and people of color, but to get rid of members of long-standing because they represented something that leadership decided was no longer appropriate.
This is when I, basically, broke ties with The Academy.
Ironically, I had more of a direct and cordial relationship with that new Academy leadership than I ever had before. It should have been the beginning of a deeper, richer relationship with the organization for me. But it turned out to be the opposite.
Meanwhile, I had started doing the first long-form video interviews aside from Charlie Rose and was shooting anywhere between 45 and 75 Oscar nominees each year, some multiple times. So I was still spending a lot of time with the talent along the road.
Year after year, I would don the tux during the last part of the Oscar show, heading out for after-parties, charting out which one to head to before leaving for the next, knowing that the winning talent would tend to show up at their own parties 90 minutes to 3 hours after the show ended.
Then, at some point, it felt like I was cosplaying. There would be a few people who I genuinely wanted to give a hug to after their win… and some of those genuinely wanted to hug me back. But on Oscar night, in the insanity of it all, the talent was in a blur. They were celebrating with the people they really worked with, who survived the season and had this achievement.
I was an insider who was really, honestly, an outsider.
It’s a weird feeling. A big part of Oscar season is the fake intimacy.
I’ve written about it before, but no one really knows what the critical pieces of the puzzle of winning Oscar are. As often as not, it is as mysterious as guessing which wave will be what size at the beach. And even though there may be oceanic experts who have some actual insight, no one in the game really knows.
Sometimes, the obvious happens. Sometimes, there is real shock. The consultants know more than anyone. They tend to work harder than anyone. And they don’t really know either. So they cover the waterfront. And when one of the top ones does something new, everyone follows the next season… not because they are copycats, but because Fear of Missing Out dominates this universe. If you win, everything was brilliant. If you lose, not doing something that others were doing means having the finger pointed in your direction… which can simply be avoided by doing everything.
Anyway…
I stopped going to the Oscar show. I don’t want to be anywhere that I am not actually welcome. And I made myself personal non grata… not intentionally, but without fear of being so discarded.
I had a lovely chat with a former Academy leader about the disconnect. We still like one another, aside from that history. We still wish each other the best and I am honestly in mourning with them as they had a major loss in the fires. But my relationship with The Academy is fractured.
Of course, I also still hear from a lot of Academy members on the regular… mostly those with whom opinions are shared.
Eventually I stopped wanting to go to the after parties. Stop spreading the news…
And I should be putting on the tuxedo right now.
But when I came home from my Friday morning group this week, I ran into the showdown in the Oval Office. And that threw me for a loop… a change of perspective.
I spent the weekend not writing about any of it… not even the uniquely wrong-headed/ignorant writing of Belloni & Barnes, perhaps the most read in the industry and the shared owners of the “worst analyst in the game” status. I just couldn’t get to the keyboard to tear down the dumb.
When I woke up this morning, the idea of putting on the tuxedo and pushing into social butterfly mode, for people who I would genuinely be thrilled to see and others for whom it would be completely fake… I just don’t want to. I am so thankful for the invitations. But I know the program… I know what every single person in every room I walk into is actually there to do… what is personal and what is professional and what is work and what is play. I just am not up to faking the sincerity this year. I don’t want to be Debbie Downer. I don’t need to bring down anyone’s high, however fake it might be. It’s not my party and I won’t cry if I don’t want to.
That moment when the winning team starts filtering into their afterparty can be thrilling, the Oscars waving around, everyone looking their best. But for me, its even better about an hour later, when a few drinks have been drunk and dyads and triads start breaking off… who is really friends with whom… how to people handle their pleasure and how do those who don’t actually have statues reflect that.
Oscar night is many, many things… the apex of a 6 month (longer, really) journey. But for me, real life is winning this day.
I will watch the show. I will love some things and hate others. I’ll write a piece about it after the show.
I still love Oscar, in spite of any complaints. I still want The Academy to make the next leap successfully. I wish everyone - especially the nominees - the best. The best of luck… the best of fun… the best feelings about the experience.
Covering it from the couch is a different perspective… same as seeing a movie in a theater or watching it on TV… or spending time with talent before and after an interview and hearing from them during an interview… or really loving someone in one context and finding their choices in another abhorrent.
The tux will be there next year. Each year, we all make choices about how we are going to play the game. And I will spend some time reflecting on what I did and didn’t do this season and how I feel about it. Being deep in and being mostly out is really only a series of choices.
Tonight, I stay in the cave.
Until later tonight…