It’s been a long, long time since I’ve been emotionally invested in the Oscars. But teenage-me lived so entirely for this night that I can never quite shake my Oscar fever, even if it’s just moonlight reflected from the burning sun of those Oscar years from decades ago. I basically conceived of movie stars as actual stars, relying on them to navigate my burgeoning understandings of beauty, of personal history, of talent. In the days before social media we had to get our gossip from unreliable magazines, but I hoarded those magazines, turning them all into mini-packs of posters that were all over my room.
Generally, I had to go to bed before the Best Picture winner was announced, because it’s Sunday night and I had school, but there was one year I was allowed to stay up, because my true North Star was up for all the awards and my family understood that this mattered: Titanic. Up until that point, no film had gripped me quite like that one. It had my entire generation in its thrall, and later that year, when my school held its Winter Formal on a boat, there was a line at the stern, because every couple wanted their chance to stand like this:
Generally, I watched the Oscars less for the award show than for those intoxicating moments that the beacons of my consciousness were acting natural and showing themselves in unusual contexts, like when ANGELINA JOLIE AND JUDE LAW WERE TALKING TO EACH OTHER. We couldn’t hear what they were saying, it was just a few smiles and some privileged words before they cut to commercial, but I was obsessed with these two, who were both in their prime, and I’m still not over that moment. I remember when the musical performances were deeply emotional ballads, like Madonna singing “You Must Love Me” from Evita and making everyone cry. I also tended to tear up when screenwriters accepted Best Screenplay awards, especially Diablo Cody who had grabbed me years before Juno when I read her memoir, Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper. She eschewed the traditional red carpet aesthetic and wore animal prints and Courtney Love-inspired makeup, and I could tell that she more or less cut off her own speech right before she herself was about to cry.
These days, though, the Oscars don’t fill me with awe. Hollywood rarely tends to, and the only film I saw this year that did make me thoroughly explode and say “holy shit I did NOT know Hollywood could do that there is hope!” was The Woman King. Which isn’t on the bill tonight. And that tells me everything I need to know about the Oscars.
Props, though, to Baz Luhrmann. Because even though I haven’t actually seen a new film of his in years, he remains my prince and lover for the rest of time. The worlds he created with Romeo and Juliet (correction, of course: William Shakespeare’s R+J) and Moulin Rouge remain integral to my conception of what life is supposed to be.
My stomach continues to suffer unpleasant bouts of covid-related seasickness sensations and let me tell you, it is not fun. I have not met anyone who shares random nausea as a symptom, so I’m over here feeling quite special. I’ll find somewhere to stream the Oscars and hope that shimmer and glitz will act as a temporary cure, even though I haven’t heard of the vast majority of people who will be lionized tonight. I certainly have thoughts on Avatar’s bloated reception as well as Spielberg getting his childhood home rebuilt on a huge-ass budget as the world burns, but I’ll keep those thoughts to myself, because, unlike my seasickness covid symptom, they are not especially original.