The Academy Awards

Did I miss the Academy Awards? CBC Radio convened an Oscars post-mortem panel earlier this week, so I guess I did. I didn't catch all of the panel, only enough to gather that the focus was not on the show's "cabaret" concept, but on the Academy's decision to award the Best (male) Actor Oscar at the end, in place of Best Picture, which traditionally closes the show. 

Panelists believed the decision to award the Best (male) Actor Oscar last was intended to honour the life of Chadwick Boseman, who was favoured to receive the award, and who panelists believed the show was structured around. But when the Oscar was awarded to Anthony Hopkins, panelists spoke of how shocked they were, and what a let-down it was that Hopkins was not "there" to accept the award in person. (Would Boseman have been there had his name been called? What was in place in the event that it was? A chorus line grieve-in?) In any case, it has been clear for years now (and certainly to a greater degree with the advent of social media) that the persona of the artist -- be they an actor, writer, director, painter, dancer, musician, etc. -- is greater than the artwork they make and/or contribute to. (On that note, it should be said that Boseman was nominated for his role in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom; Hopkins for his role in The Father.)

If I learned anything from Peter Manso's Brando: a Biography (1994), I learned that acting, for Brando, was greater than plays, films and TV sitcoms. For Brando, a play or a film was not so much a group activity, but a chance to take on a hierarchal -- if not hypocritical -- structure designed to subject the actor to someone else's words, direction, casting couch, etc. Brando applied this same critique to other aspects of his life -- but to none greater than his country's treatment of Indigenous peoples, something he addressed when he asked White Mountain Apache actor and activist Sacheen Littlefeather (above) to represent him at the Academy Awards in 1973. By all accounts, Brando was harsh enough to take delight in the boos and jeers Littlefeather received as she declined the award on his behalf -- evidence, I imagine, of the white supremacist, colonial country he was at odds with, but also of Brando's own hypocrisy, his humiliation of those who did not have access to the power he himself took for granted. (Littlefeather has spoken recently of Brando's abandonment of her after her Academy Awards show appearance.) 

What is an actor without a play or film or a TV sitcom to showcase their talent? I should have an answer to this, given that I am a writer who believes that writing is bigger than books, scripts, journals and online postings. And I suppose I do. Years ago, as a child, I remember watching Jerry Lewis's MDA Labour Day Telethons, where for over 21 hours Lewis would host a cabaret designed not to give out awards but to receive them in the form of donations, of which the MDA (Muscular Dystrophy Association) raised in excess of $2.45 billon between 1966-2010 when Lewis hosted the show. Lewis's performance, if not his endurance, was astounding, even for a kid like me who knew nothing of the world and its many, many injuries. Is the telethon to American acting what blues and jazz are to American music? Is that what everything will come down to, as it did in that very strange, long-forgotten 1979 film Americathon? Whatever. The show must go on. And on. And on ...