All those who switched off their TVs just when La La Land won the Best Picture, missed out on a lovely live twist in the tale. La La Land went on to un-win in a first-of-its-kind retraction on the Oscar stage, very much reminiscent of the movie’s own what-might-have-been last scene.
So we saw Warren Beatty peering into the Oscar slip in an “Annette, where are my glasses?” way, and then Faye Dunaway quickly ad-libbing and announcing La La Land as the winner. A stampede on stage followed. Never before had so many people gone from trying to look humble because they had won, to really looking humble because they had lost. And just like that, La La Land came crashing down to earth.
The biggest goof-up of them all at this year’s Oscars though wasn’t La La Land being wrongly announced the Best Picture, but Lion failing to win. Yes, Moonlight won, but that just went with the colour-coordinated theme of things, so we will never know if it was political correctness or actual merit. Last year was the white Oscars, this year the black. If La La Land was a little too white, Lion was not black enough.
This is not so much a hate mail to La La Land, as a love letter to Lion. Bollywood has immunised us to the song-and-dance routine—the pretty girl running around with the handsome boy, to them breaking out into the same steps along with a million extras. That’s what happens in hundreds of Hindi films.
That is the fake India. But Lion was the real India. This was the closest India got to the Oscars without a shimmy and a shake.
The pre-Oscar buzz for Lion was muted, it had the status of an underdog, even though it was leaving a trail of sodden hankies behind. “If this sort of intense, emotional connection isn’t what’s deserving of a little gold statue, then I don’t know what is,” The Guardian had said. The New York Times spelt out the visceral truth of it: “If you have ever been a child, raised a child, lost a child or met a child—or a mother—this movie will wreck you.”
Dev Patel not bagging Best Supporting Actor award was fine; Sunny Pawar as the young Saroo had done the lion’s share of work in breathing life into that role. This little boy from Mumbai looked lost so convincingly that audiences wanted to scoop him out of the screen and keep him safe. The spoon scene—where he imitates a man in a restaurant eating real soup—makes you reach for the tissues in case you hadn’t already.
Nicole Kidman not making
Best Supporting Actress was fine too. Kidman telling Saroo why she went in for adoption and did not have kids herself, brought her this close, but in the end it was just that one scene against Viola Davis’s many scenes in Fences. Plus, Viola and Mahershala Ali were both visibly black.
Best Director going for Damien Chazelle cannot be grudged as juries are allowed to be subjective. But Lion winning nothing at all seems... wrong.
If the Academy was man enough to admit La La Land was erroneously announced as Best Picture, they can correct themselves once again as far as Lion fans are concerned. One more retraction can’t embarrass them more.