The green-clad group was there as part of the second annual protest of VFX workers decrying the outsourcing and subsidizing of work elsewhere. In Los Angeles the contradictions were immediate: Money will be spent on perimeters, corridors, cops and traffic management because “Hollywood” (i.e., Los Angeles, and presumably California itself) loves the idea of movies, the symbolism of them. They certainly won’t let Oscar be held anywhere else.
So why does the work flow away so easily?
Or perhaps a near-century of Oscar, and movies, has been so successful that “Hollywood,” as a state of mind, is everywhere now, and there’s no turning back.
Of course Gravity had to wait for lift-off, as the first craft award went to Adruitha Lee and Robin Mathews for makeup and hairstyling on Dallas Buyers Club.
Jerod Leto had already won a supporting actor statue for playing the transgendered Rayon in that film, and talked about his work with his micro-budgeted collaborators. “They had a [makeup] budget of $250. I’m not joking. That’s the truth. And they worked the hardest out of anyone on the entire set. Makeup, hair, they’re always the first to set in the morning. I don’t know if you guys probably know this. They show up at the crack‑ass of dawn, and they leave at the crack‑ass of dawn. They’re there all the time and they were tireless, tireless workers. And essential to the building of these characters and performances.”
But then Gravity kicked in a big way, grabbing its foregone visual effects Oscar, for VFX supervisor Tim Webber and his collaborators.
On stage, Webber & co. also thanked “George Clooney and especially Sandra Bullock for filling our visual effects with life and with emotion,” essentially making the same point as the earlier winners that you finally need actors to fill that make-up, those roaring ’20s clothes, or those spacesuits.
The crew, though, could be anywhere, and if you’re keeping track from an L.A. perspective, the winners thus far were shooting in Louisiana, working in Australia or based in London.
It was probably no accident then that one of the biggest bits of the evening, host-wise, involved Ellen DeGeneres’ use of Tweeted selfies, including her now already-infamous gathering of A-listers near the front of the stage. The idea of movies may have started here, but – as with Tweets, Instagrams, Facebook posts, and more – everything is everywhere now.
Even the images of Hollywood stars escapes the broadcast screen for appropriation by re-Tweeters around the world.
And more of that world kept figuring in the night’s wins. There was a question from a Chinese journalist, for example, to the winning producers of animated film Frozen about when co-productions with China would begin, which was politely dodged.
Cuarón talked about “the reverse engineering of the whole process, because as opposed to a conventional film in which visual effects are part of the postproduction, and cinematography has very little relationship with visual effects, here’s a film in which editing, visual effects and cinematography started pretty much two years before we started shooting in order to be able to integrate all those elements.”
Indeed, it’s probably no accident that once again the VFX and cinematography statues go to the same movie, as they did to last year’s Life of Pi.
It is part of the inexorable change in how movies – especially big Hollywood ones – are made.
Writer/director Spike Jonze talked about that when addressing the near-future likelihoods in his winning script for Her. “I think anything is going to happen and everything is going to happen. I think we’re just at this point in history, and we’re 13 billion years into this universe, and there’s many more billion years after this, so who knows.”
Indeed. Though as Bob Dylan once sang – in those days before he pitched cars on TV – you can tell which way the wind blows, without having to wait another billion years or so.
By the time Cuarón returned to the press room as this year’s best director, he was asked by a BBC correspondent if his win showed the current strength of the British film industry. For Cuarón, currently living in London, he thought it was “very obvious.”
And then he added a need – referencing his home country of Mexico – for “more venues, more support and more incentives, I think.”
Incentives, indeed. Though they seem to mostly flourish everywhere else but Hollywood, as the evening indicated.
And certainly, those looking for that idea of “Hollywood” – or a place where those A-list selfies are the stuff of actual waking life – will come, like they came to that Iowa cornfield in Field of Dreams.
But who knows how much movie making, or how much postproduction they’ll find here when they arrive?
Finally, a couple of quick above-the-line notes: Best supporting actress winner Lupita Nyong’o confirmed in her backstage talk with the press that she is as entirely charming as you already suspect.
And regarding best picture winner 12 Years a Slave (also filmed in Louisiana, though much of it is actually set there), director Steve McQueen said “You know, if we don’t know our past, we’ll never know our future.”
And there’s a lot of future out there, as Jonze had noted earlier.
It’s just that no one knows what that future holds, really, for the town where Oscar was hatched.
And the winners of the 86th Annual Academy Awards are:
Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role
Jared Leto
Dallas Buyers Club
Achievement in Costume Design
The Great Gatsby
Catherine Martin
Achievement In Makeup and Hairstyling
Dallas Buyers Club
Adruitha Lee and Robin Mathews
Best Animated Short Film
Mr. Hublot
Laurent Witz and Alexandre Espigares
Best Animated Feature Film of the Year
Frozen
Chris Buck, Jennifer Lee and Peter Del Vecho
Achievement in Visual Effects
Gravity
Tim Webber, Chris Lawrence, Dave Shirk and Neil Corbould
Best Live Action Short Film
Helium
Anders Walter and Kim Magnusson
Best Documentary Short Subject
The Lady In Number 6: Music Saved My Life
Malcolm Clarke and Nicholas Reed
Best Documentary Feature
20 Feet From Stardom
Morgan Neville, Gil Friesen and Caitrin Rogers
Best Foreign Language Film of the Year
The Great Beauty
Italy
Achievement in Sound Mixing
Gravity
Skip Lievsay, Niv Adiri, Christopher Benstead and Chris Munro
Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role
Lupita Nyong’o
12 Years A Slave
Achievement in Cinematography
Gravity
Emmanuel Lubezki
Achievement in Film Editing
Gravity
Alfonso Cuarón and Mark Sanger
Achievement in Production Design
The Great Gatsby
Production Design: Catherine Martin
Set Decoration: Beverley Dunn
Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Score)
Gravity
Steven Price
Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Song)
“Let It Go”
Frozen
Music and Lyric By Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez
Adapted Screenplay
12 Years A Slave
Screenplay by John Ridley
Original Screenplay
Her
Written by Spike Jonze
Achievement in Directing
Gravity
Alfonso Cuarón
Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role
Cate Blanchett
Blue Jasmine
Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role
Matthew McConaughey
Dallas Buyers Club
Best Motion Picture of the Year
12 Years A Slave
Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, Steve Mcqueen and Anthony Katagas, Producers