Hollywood Turns towards the Cause of Gay Rights on Oscar Night
“12 Years a Slave” won best picture, but for much of the evening, it was gay rights, not race, that held Hollywood’s attention at the Oscars. Jared Leto dragged the real world into Sunday night’s celebration of make-believe. After winning the best supporting actor for portraying a transgender AIDS patient in “Dallas Buyers Club,” Mr. Leto voiced support for protesters in Ukraine and Venezuela. He championed gay people. “To those of you out there who have ever felt injustice because of who you are or who you love, tonight, I stand here in front of the world with you and for you.” Hollywood is so righteous, suddenly, about gay rights, and that’s a little puzzling because for so long, movies were part of the problem. Professional basketball has its first openly gay player, Jason Collins, but it’s still hard to think of romantic leads — male or female — who are A-list Hollywood movie stars and also openly gay.
Think Back: Politics at the Oscars
From Michelle Obama to Michael Moore to Marlon Brando (or not Marlon Brando), the Oscars have a long political history, explains Sam Tanenhaus of The Times.
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When stars talk about their solidarity with gay people, they can sound a little like the French describing the Resistance during World War II — there were some heroes, but the vast majority collaborated.
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“Dallas Buyers Club” was a low-budget indie film that according to its star, Matthew McConaughey, was turned down 137 times. It’s bold, but not even all that daring: the film, which is based on a true story, has as its lead character a straight man with AIDS. (When he accepted the best actor award, Mr. McConaughey praised God, his family and himself, but didn’t mention people with AIDS.) No movie studio wanted to make “Behind the Candelabra,” a biography of Liberace, so HBO took it on. In May, HBO will also show “The Normal Heart,” Larry Kramer’s play about the H.I.V. and AIDS crisis in the 1980s. Hollywood studios passed on it for more than 20 years.
Despite what many conservatives maintain, Hollywood doesn’t set the social agenda. More often it timidly trails the culture, then belatedly buys in and turns up the music.
Ellen DeGeneres is an exception. She came out in 1997 and ABC canceled her sitcom, “Ellen,” in 1998; her career took a nose-dive. (She has since recovered nicely.) As the Oscars M.C., Ms. DeGeneres was more lighthearted about gay issues, perhaps because her conscience is so clear. She alluded to her own orientation playfully, joking that in “The Wolf of Wall Street” Jonah Hill “showed us something in that film that I have not seen in a very, very long time.”
She was expected to be a kinder, gentler host than last year’s, Seth MacFarlane, and she was, but she also had some bite. She marveled over, as she put it, “one of the most amazing Liza Minnelli impersonators that I have ever seen in my entire life.” As the camera panned to the real — and startled — Ms. Minnelli, Ms. DeGeneres told her, “Good job, sir.”
Ms. DeGeneres, who hosted in 2007, once again brought a touch of daytime television to the black-tie event. She wore sneakers with a white tuxedo and clowned in the aisles much the way she does on her talk show, taking selfies with stars like Brad Pitt and Meryl Streep, then tweeting them for real.
At one point, she interrupted the proceedings to order pizzas and distribute slices to the stars, saying she needed cash for the delivery boy. “Where’s Harvey Weinstein?” It says something about pre-ceremony celebrity starvation that quite a few in the front rows, including Jennifer Lawrence, took big bites.
If the Super Bowl is a secular Christmas that everyone can celebrate, the Oscars are Easter: the dress-up parade and those long acceptance speeches are all part of the ritual. But some traditions, notably the Academy’s insistence on handing out technical awards early, are tiresome. It can start to feel like a high school graduation where diplomas are handed out alphabetically, and your child’s last name begins with Z.
It was almost two hours before the best supporting actress was announced. When she took the stage with aplomb, in a lovely pale blue Prada dress, Lupita Nyong’o of “12 Years a Slave” did not disappoint. “It doesn’t escape me for one moment that so much joy in my life is thanks to so much pain in someone else’s,” she said. (She was referring to the slave character she played, not viewers bored by technical awards.)
There was little chance that the producers, Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, who produced a Judy Garland television movie, would let the 75th anniversary of “The Wizard of Oz” go by without a tribute. They asked Pink, who has a huge gay following, to sing “Over the Rainbow,” and she did it with proper deference, without a trapeze but instead in a conventional red evening gown. She got a standing ovation.
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