I didn't get far with the Oscars tonight, bailed on it well before the end, telling myself I could always watch it on my DVR tomorrow, commercial-free (which I probably won't). I did enjoy Chris Rock's razor-edged swordplay more than I thought I would; we've had far too many wooden or too-predictable hosts (and since when does a movie star know how to work a crowd? Most of these people have never even stood in front of an audience before!), so watching him blow on taboos that were already teetering on the verge of collapse was gratifying.
Blather about fashion usually supercedes - I won't say "trumps" because that word has been ruined forever - blather about Best Picture (which went, unexpectedly, to Spotlight, a glaring expose of a ruthless and rotten crime against humanity which festered underground for decades). More often than not I find myself groaning over the gown. Is Lady Gaga really wearing a dress AND pants? What's that red thing Charlize Theron has on, and how is it staying up there?
But soft - here's a dress, and one somebody put on their WORST-DRESSED list! This is Brie Larson, who won Best Performance by an Actress for a movie called Room. It's one of those ripped-from-the-headlines stories in which someone endures years of confinement at the hands of a demented sadist. The exposure of long-hidden atrocity seems to be a theme this year, unusual for Hollywood with its celebration of the callow and the shallow. Does this mean the motion picture industry is finally growing up?
Anyway, here's Brie Larson on the red carpet in a gown I absolutely love. Those little pleats and flounces, the way the thing drapes, the saturated jewel-tone colour - look, I am anything but a fashion maven and go about in sweaters and cords, but this thing - just look at it! It floats and drapes and just looks perfect. The belt is to die for. I wish I could see it up close. Doesn't seem fair that someone so accomplished could look this beautiful, but there it is.
MY red carpet moment will come when someone finally wants to make The Glass Character into a feature film. Hell, it could happen, couldn't it? When it does, when I'm sitting in the audience waiting for them to announce Best Adapted Screenplay, as they read the winner while Ron Howard gives me the thumbs-up, it won't matter a dingity-dong what I'm wearing because I'll be in such a trance of happy unreality.
Didn't it start out just as an idea in my head? And end up as a book 49 people bought - if that - because I just don't have the magic secret of how to write a bestseller? But never mind. It took Kirk Douglas TEN years to get anyone interested in his screenplay of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (one of my favorite movies: mental patients as fully-realized characters, gutsy, funny, crazy in their woundedness, wounded in their craziness), and by the time Milos Foreman finally signed on, Douglas was too old to play Randle P. McMurphy and they had to bring in Jack Nicholson.
They can bring in anyone they want, as far as I am concerned. Anyone. But I want Joseph Gordon-Levitt, even though he looks nothing like Harold. He has the chops, and the twinkle, and the bust-out energy and impudence and charm, and I know he could pull it off. Being an A-lister, I'll probably have to get Ron Howard on-board first before we can sign him up.
I can see it. . . yes, I can see it now. . .
