Watching the Academy Awards was more emotional this year than I would have expected, and I was very heartened by the overall entertainment community taking this opportunity, given all that is going on in the world, to speak up on specific issues - and to speak up about the importance of not being silenced. There was also something very sentimental and comforting about having one of the most controversial and at times outrageous entertainers of our time, Lady Gaga, reveal herself for the incredible, timeless entertainer that she is in honoring the 50th anniversary of "The Sound of Music" - which is a movie about freedom - about using the arts to express individuality and personal values in the face of oppression and the loss of freedom. The warm embrace between Gaga and Julie Andrews - the mutual respect and awe was breathtaking, as was Andrews subtle reminder that The Sound of Music was special. As Julie Andrews put it, she blinked her eyes and it was 50 years later. And that's just from the moment of that movie, not from the time it represented in the early Nazi years when to take a stand as Captain Von Trapp and his family did, as the nuns who harbored them did - could just as easily have meant death as it did the liberation they eventually achieved. When we first saw the Sound of Music, who focused on what an act of defiance and independence it was for Captain Von Trapp to sing the Austrian folk song "Edelweiss" at the Salzburg festival, his small voice and his single guitar rousing the auditorium to sing along even as the Nazi flags hung threateningly about the place? In the blink of any eye.
And "Selma". It's been 50 years since the March, which came a hundred years after Emancipation and into Jim Crow, and nearly 50 years into the Great Migration. People had been marching out of places within the American south for decades prior to the organization of civil rights groups and The Movement, but they had been doing it a few at a time, most often risking everything they had and having to escape under cover of the night. Throughout the civil rights movement music and the arts helped carry the message forward and bring it into the mainstream, and while the song "Glory" is magnificent, joyous and a strong reminder of the reality that progress is a relative term - how fortunate we are that you can sing that song on the Edmund Pettus Bridge today and not face the consequences so many stared down on that bridge in 1965 and elsewhere throughout the civil rights movement. Harry Belafonte, who was honored is a separate ceremony for his humanitarian work, could certainly have recounted many times when to sing certain songs in public, to gather at all, put lives at risk. So could one of the actors honored during the In Memoriam portion of the program - Ruby Dee. Someone spoke of Belafonte's marvelous voice (a voice that was always in the background of my childhood and that I brought into my children's daily lives), and yet when you heard his speech at the earlier awards show he had the barely audible rasp of a man well into his 80s now. In the blink of an eye.
Patricia Arquette also spoke up last night, about equal pay/rights for women. Two of the faces I noted as they panned the audience were those of Meryl Streep as she leaped to her feet, and Shirley MacLaine. Even in the gilded realm of Big Entertainment, those two women know what it means to not earn the same as a man and not be treated the same as a man in the work environment. Their faces reflected the length of that struggle too - as it is unlikely many in the auditorium were involved in trying to ratify the "ERA" in the 1980s, let alone to remember what it was like before women dared to even push forward with an equal rights amendment. There was no ratification then - maybe there will be now. Streep and especially MacLaine seemed to be so heartened that Arquette, given a platform as she won an award for playing a single mother raising two children (in a movie focused on the son - "Boyhood"), would renew the cry. In the blink of an eye.
And there was the whole specter of Hollywood itself being silenced and threatened. America doesn't think of itself as a country, especially in the 21st century, in which people could be risking their lives just going to a movie theater to see a film. But that became real this year too. And people spoke out about it last night as well, and they celebrated the French - something Americans are not always wont to do. Satire is an art form. It was celebrated too. Hollywood likes to think it has spent years and years helping celebrate brave artistic expression across the globe - awarding and acknowledging films that posed great risk to actors, writers and directors in their home countries. And now that threat is universal. I was reminded last night of that scene in the original "The Producers" in which Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel become gleeful over the outrage and offense so many in the audience take to the opening number of their play "Springtime for Hitler" - and as they watch a couple walk out, offended horribly - they go to a bar to celebrate what they are certain will be the last showing of the play that must fail. But then scene two happens and Dick Shawn is funny - and people start coming back in - because humor is okay, and the idea of Hitler as a beatnik is ironic, satirical, and they want to laugh at him. That movie was over 40 years ago, and for the play within the film the concept of making fun of Nazi Germany 30 years down the road was a risk. Too soon? Too much? No, the audience said, much to the horror of the two men who banked on offending everyone. James Franco and Seth Rogan did not enjoy the same largesse as those fictional producers all these years later. In the blink of an eye.
And now to the personal issues. People spoke out loud about suicide last night. They urged us to embrace individuality, to love and embrace our families and our friends. They asked us to be sensitive to human suffering. As people hugged small gold statuettes, and as tears came to the eyes of some in the audience over the emotion of some of these issues, I think it was all in all a night to take pride in being open, in being free to speak up, in having a voice and not being silenced. We don't have to agree with what is being said all of the time, but we should never stop supporting and standing up for the right to reflect the world as it really is in art, music, film and to also use these art forms and our own voices to highlight the world as it can be. Whether we let the art forms speak for themselves and speak to the individual alone, or we stand up and use platforms like awards shows or press interviews, speaking up is a gift we need to preserve.
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