The Academy may have called off its lavish nominees’ lunch amid the fires that ravaged Los Angeles last month, but cancelling the Oscars ceremony was never on the cards. Awards season is Hollywood’s biggest advert for itself, and film-makers need it for survival. As financing becomes more and more challenging, the press and networking the Oscars bring grow ever more important for selling cinema tickets (or online streams) and attracting funding for future projects.
And so Hollywood exhibits a bewildering sort of double-vision. Witness Jamie Lee Curtis alternating campaigning for The Last Showgirl (in which she stars opposite Pamela Anderson as an ageing Las Vegas showgirl) with fundraising for her home town. Some of the largest donations to the relief effort have come from Disney and the super-agency CAA. That’s LA: there is space for compassion, but business is business, and the show must go on.
Cinemas have been screening movies for free for those affected by the fires. Big-screen distraction might seem trivial compared with the very real loss of lives, homes and livelihoods, but the respite of being transported to another world has rarely been more needed. It’s comfort food for the city of film.
Mum’s the word
If you are a parent, you’ll probably be well acquainted with the work of the animation legend Chris Sanders (Aladdin, The Lion King, How to Train Your Dragon – I could go on). His latest, The Wild Robot, nominated for three Oscars and three Baftas, is a visually sumptuous story about a set-in-her-ways robot, Roz (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o), who mothers an orphaned gosling. Sanders told me he saw The Wild Robot (which is based on the bestselling books by Peter Brown) as a chance to redress the balance, “because mums are famously missing from animated films… But here’s one movie that’s all about a mum… She is the story.”
Delayed gratification
Another imbalance was redressed this awards season as Demi Moore won a Golden Globe – her first major acting award – for her darkly comic work in the body-horror film The Substance, in which she plays a middle-aged star obsessed with youth. Moore is also up for Best Actress at the Oscars next month. After a memorable acceptance speech in which she reflected on 40 years of being written off as a “popcorn” actress who could sell tickets but not be taken seriously, Moore is the one to beat.
If she wins, Moore would be an outlier at 62. Historically, Best Actresses have won far earlier in their careers than Best Actors. Between 2007 and 2016, the average age for a Best Actress was 39 and for a Best Actor, 50; the latter has not dipped below 40 since 1947. Yet more evidence that Hollywood prefers its leading ladies young. But the gap appears to be closing: among Moore’s competition, alongside the brilliant newcomer Mikey Madison (Anora, 25), are Cynthia Erivo (Wicked, 38), Karla Sofía Gascón (Emilia Pérez, 52) and Fernanda Torres (I’m Still Here, 59).
The Oscars aren’t always kind to older men, either. This year another 62-year-old, Ralph Fiennes, is nominated for Best Actor, for only the second time in his three-decade career, for Conclave. (His first Best Actor nomination was nearly 30 years ago, for The English Patient, in 1997.) Fiennes is certainly not alone in being a lauded actor made to wait, DiCaprio-style, by the Academy. Michael Fassbender (47), Bradley Cooper (50), and Jeremy Renner (54) are among the men whose performances have made Oscar-winning films but are still waiting for their moment.
Notable mentions
Cynthia Erivo’s rendition of “Fly Me to the Moon” was a Grammys highlight this week. Among the Grammy winners was another long-time-coming award: for the first time, Beyoncé won the Album of the Year category, for Cowboy Carter. Happily, not even the near-nude appearance of Kanye West’s wife, the Australian architect and model Bianca Censori, on the red carpet could upstage either of them.
The ceremony, which took place in Los Angeles, was also attended by the city’s heroic firefighters – another surreal moment of double-focus.
LA royalty
Last summer Los Angeles City Council stepped in to save Marilyn Monroe’s Brentwood house – a vital part of Hollywood history – from demolition. In London, a brilliant exhibition in which the actress’s personal effects are presented with a reverence usually reserved for religious relics has been extended until late April. A second chance to study up close the life of the original popcorn actress – who never won an Oscar.
[See also: Long live Amandaland!]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 05 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The New Gods of AI