Oscars, nostalgia and Trump

Oscars tapped into power of nostalgia as counter to a divisive, racist tide that is sweeping US

But for the envelope malfunction at literally the last moment, nostalgia would have been the defining trait of the 89th edition of the Oscars last Sunday night in Hollywood.  Sure, as expected, there were pointed references — not complimentary — to the new American president, the once and current showman Donald Trump.  It was also a long-overdue acknowledgement of diversity in the world and in its films, but the overarching mood was of an evocation of memories and a search for new meanings, sometimes sweet, but at times melancholy as well.

Let us begin with the biggest winner of the night, La La Land.  A hot flavour of the season, it stumbled in the home stretch (despite “valiant” efforts of an errant PwC accountant) and lost the top prize to the outsider Moonlight, much the way Hillary Clinton lost the presidency to Trump.  This confection has a struggling pretty young girl (in a sunflower yellow dress, no less) in — where else? — Los Angeles (La La Land, get it?) have a run-in with an equally struggling young Adonis (with a now de rigueur facial stubble).  Said boy and girl, with ultra-cute names Mia and Seb, meet again, settle into less than dream jobs as they continue to reach for the stars, share a (platonic?) relationship, visit well-known Hollywood haunts, quarrel, part, succeed. When they meet five years later, she is an established actress, married, he is a proud owner of a jazz club.  They wistfully look into each other’s eyes to see what might have been before the final fade-out.

This frothy concoction comes in the time-honoured musical format. It has a fetching pair of Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling in leads (both nominated, she won, he didn’t), making it a luminescent offering.  Its music, songs, writing and direction (both by Damien Chazelle) won it statuettes not just at the Oscars but also at the earlier Golden Globes. Most critics went into raptures, but not all.  Rex Reed, the doyen of New York critics, called it “overpraised, overrated and disappointingly mediocre,” which is arguably a more accurate assessment.

Mahershala Ali in Moonlight

The film is set in the current epoch, but in honouring it, members of the Motion Picture Academy themselves went into a groundswell of nostalgia.  Musicals are a particularly American entertainment innovation, lighter in musical terms than the classical opera buffa.  They deal in far wider subjects and emotions than the hugely satirical (and literate) Gilbert and Sullivan operettas on the foibles of the high and mighty.

Musicals were the staple of Broadway. Their film adaptations were guaranteed successes in the heyday of Hollywood studios. They could be grand spectacles, handsomely staged under the proscenium arches with great chorus lines and even more handsomely transferred to the silver screen. South Pacific, Oklahoma, Carousel, The King and I, all by the formidable duo of Rodgers and Hammerstein, were monster hits on stage and as films. Jerome Kern’s The Westside Story scaled new heights, with Leonard Bernstein’s classic score.  It won Oscars by the bagful (including the best movie) as did the later My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music and Oliver!.  

The fortunes of musicals waned after the 1970s.  From being a ticket to commercial success, they began to be considered cash-guzzling white elephants with iffy returns.  Cats, The Phantom of the Opera, Les Miserables, all highly successful stage shows, had rather uninspiring film versions.  The mighty movie-moguls inevitably lost control of their studios to multinationals, whose bottom-line conscious bean counters considered musicals dinosaurs, too ungainly to survive the rat race.  

Some sporadic efforts surfaced every so often, but they were dismissed as personal whimsies of their creators.  The Australian Baz Luhrmann’s rather eclectic Moulin Rouge! (2001) was nominated in several categories at the Oscars but won no major ones.  Neither did it exactly set the cash registers on fire.  Bob Fosse’s Chicago (2002), a film adaption after 25 years, was the last musical to win at the Oscars as well as at the box office, but unlike the earlier hits, its songs have been forgotten in the last 15 years.

An older sub-genre of the musicals is a more intimate, less showy one, dependent on the magic of the lead stars’ singing and dancing.  Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds made Top Hat, Shall We Dance, An American in Paris and Singin’ in the Rain immensely pleasing, unforgettable, experiences. This is what the creators of La La Land aspired to do.  Some fans have compared it to Singin’ in the Rain, but that is plain over-the-top.  Winsome as Stone and Gosling are, Reynolds and Kelly they certainly aren’t.

Viola Davis was the hands-down winner of Best Supporting Actress for Fences

The other main winners this year, Moonlight, Fences and Manchester by the Sea, represent anguish and melancholy involved in self-discovery and a search for new meanings.  A young African-American man uses his crack-addict mother’s drug supplier as a father-surrogate to come to terms with his gay existence in the poignant Moonlight.  A down-at-heel runaway to the city returns home after his much-admired brother’s sudden death to take charge of a belligerent nephew and faces existential dilemmas by delving deep into his past in Manchester by the Sea. In Fences, a hard-talking former Negro League baseball player banters with his long-suffering wife to make sense of life on the seamy side of Pittsburgh in the 1960s, in the manner of Wily Loman in The Death of a Salesman.  Moonlight was the best film and Mahershala Ali the best supporting actor as the drug supplier.  Casey Affleck took home the best actor award as the brooding un-prodigal son who returned to Manchester by the Sea. Viola Davis outshone her formidable competition and was the hands-down winner of Best Supporting Actress as Denzel Washington’s wife in Fences.  

These, too, are examples of nostalgia.  The word conjures up homesickness and was once considered a form of melancholia (its happier associations now dominate).  In the 2015 Oscar-nominated Brooklyn, a priest tells his Irish ward who has recently immigrated to the United States that she suffers from nostalgia.  “It’s a kind of sickness, but it will not kill you.  You will get over it.”  Getting over their private hells is precisely what all these diverse characters in this year’s Oscar winners are trying to do.  

The Academy awards this year were a far cry from last year’s Oscars-so-white outrage.  Seven of the 20 nominees for the acting honours were persons of colour and four of the nine contenders for the best picture told tales of people of colour.  This was a reaction not just to the earlier conspicuous omissions and the protests that ensued, but more important, the electoral shock of November 2016.  Jimmy Kimmel, this year’s host, started off the proceedings by admitting that he wanted to thank President Trump.  “Remember last year when it seemed like the Oscars were racist?” and the entire house came down. But seriously, one must note that Oscar nominations and voting started after the election results were known. What better way to demonstrate the inclusiveness of America and its film fraternity in the face of the most divisive and implicitly racist campaign for the presidency than by putting up a slate of films and actors that is as representative of diversity as it is of the immense talent and merit of each individual nominee?

“Nostalgia serves a crucial existential function,” says Clay Routledge, a psychologist who has researched the phenomenon. “It brings to mind cherished experiences that assure us we are valued people who have meaningful lives.” The Oscars show how effective nostalgia is as a strategy to cope with the Trump trauma.