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Ervell E. Menezes
gets nostalgic as he recalls the first time he saw the Oscars live in 1978 IT was one more Oscars’ night under the belt, replete with glitz and glamour, song and dance and visual razzle-dazzlery and the fare was lapped up by all, as it generally has been over the years. There were a good many new faces and the old suspects were more in the background. Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman director to get an Oscar with her scathing anti-war drama The Hurt Locker, which also won the Best Picture Oscar, scoring over mega-blockbuster space odyssey Avatar directed by James Cameron. Ironically, there was a twist in the tale because Bigelow is the former wife of Cameron, whose Titanic won the top Oscar over a decade back. The Hurt Locker richly deserved the coveted award because it is a real blood-and-guts human drama in which the "story is the thing," as novelist E. M. Foster has always told us. Avatar is surely a landmark in filmmaking, with its breathtaking visuals and gala sets, but when all is said and done, it is the narrative that lingers much after the curtain falls. Isn’t it? Sandra Bullock won the Best Actress Oscar for The Blind Side, a first-time winner, who surprisingly a day earlier won the booby prize for the comedy flop All About Steve. The original "girl next door" has decided to place them side by side as one must learn to take the good with the not-so-good. Sound logic.
Golden oldie Lauren Becall was still around, remembered most for pairing with the immortal Humphry Bogart, and so were others of her ilk or nearly so, Robert Duvall, Shirley MacLaine, Barbra Streisand, Kathy Bates and others down the line. Some of the young guns one is not too familiar with. But comperes Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin did a good job exchanging barbs and living up to the old high standards set up by predecessors like Bob Hope, Billy Crystal and Whoopi Goldberg to name just a few. The first time I saw the Oscars live was in April 1978, remember it was the 50th such event and I was on the other coast, New York. Bob Hope did the compering that was when he monopolised the event for years. Remember some of his wisecracks. "This year, they say the women have the best parts, but I always felt so" was just one of them. Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, an outsider, won the Best Picture Oscar with Diane Keaton as the Best Actress and Richard Dreyfuss won the Best Actor Oscar for The Goodbye Girl. A young, long-haired, fresh from Saturday Night Fever fame John Travolta gave the Best Supporting Actress Oscar to vivacious Vanessa Redgrave for her role in Julia. This political activist did not resist nailing the Zionists by thanking the Academy for resisting pressures from a "small bunch of Zionist hoodlums." But scriptwriter Paddy Chavesky retaliated when he gave away the Best Screenplay Oscar by saying he was "sick and tired of people exploiting the awards function for "their own political vendetta" and that he would tell Miss Redgrave that a plain "thank you" would have sufficed. When Jason Robards didn’t turn up for his Best Supporting Actor Oscar in Julia, Bob Hope quipped that "he must be playing bridge with Marlon Brando and George C. Scott, who, in protest, refused to pick the top Oscars they had won earlier. It was a glittering, glamorous event with a plethora of dances, excellent choreography and awesome visuals, which we have continued to witness annually ever since. The British came in their Rolls Royces, the Germans in their Mercedes, the Italians in their Ferraris and the Americans in their Toyotas — a night to remember — with apologies to Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr. So much for my actual initiation with the Oscars but later in 1984 I did visit the home of the Oscars, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at Wilshire Boulevard in Hollywood and was shown around by the then administrator one Davies, who was still at his post till the late 1990s, who wondered what the "Sciences" had to do with it. We saw age-old posters of John Wayne and Monty Cliff in John Ford’s Red River and Humphry Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca and lesser-known oldies like Dolores del Rio and that perennial blonde Marlene Dietrich. And many more. We visited the Kodak theatre and sat on those plush seats, let our feet sink in the red carpet and other such niceties that went with that dream company called Hollywood. And when I was invited
to lunch by the immortal Robert Wise of Sound of Music fame to
the Brown Derby, the last remaining vestiges of that glorious past, it
was again something to remember. Running into Clint Eastwood, then
Mayor of Carmel, and actress Marsha Mason was more or less accidental
but they surely all contributed to form that amalgam of Hollywood
nostalgia — like the Oscars.
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