The Oscars have captivated Western imagination, this reporter is working through the Oscar winners and runners up. The cosmetic team that turned Fifty Shades heartthrob Christian Bale into Dick Cheney, the most powerful Vice President that the White House has known, in VICE surely deserved their Best Hair and Make-up award, Bale was unrecognisable and surely shed his Marquis de Sade stereotype. Bale’s portrayal of Cheyne as a ruthless Democrat operator and man of few words is an interesting contradistinction to today’s Republican VP.
Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper successfully reinvented A Star is Born, the old Judy Garland Hollywood classic now set in a more suburban setting;they captivated fans worldwide with their performance of their duet “Shallow” on Oscar night, which was awarded Best Original Song. Gaga wore a black Alexander McQueen gown with the Tiffany necklace worn by Audrey Hepburn when promoting the legendary Breakfast at Tiffany’s film. The yellow diamond weighs 128.54 carats and the Audrey look was perfected with long black gloves.
The Netflix production Roma won three Best Awards for Foreign Film, Cinematography and Director for Alfonso Cuaron. Roma auto-biographically chronicles the life of a young indigenous Mexican maid, Cleo, to an upper-class family in Mexico City. Cleo works from morning till night, the family love her and she loves them right back, to the extent she did not really want her own baby and risked her life in the ocean to rescue the upper disobedient class children. You are left with the feeling Cleo has few choices in life and is destined to a life a loyal servitude. The interior sets, cars and panoramas in black and white are palpably evocative of Mexico in 1970 and 1971, the period when the director was growing up.
While America continues to appreciate their political history through film and the plight of ethnic minorities is well documented by Roma (and Capernaeum: the Lebanese film about the miserable life of a neglected boy who sues his parents for being born), it seems that no Indian made film made it into the Oscar’s selection of foreign films, or any other category. While I was in India, I watched a subtitled version of Thackeray, a film that is brilliant depiction of an era and the consequences of political emotion. In 1983 Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi won 8 Awards, including Best Film, but it was not an Indian made film. Now that the Indian film industry has matured and is capable of making accurate and dramatic representations of the past it must be time for Bollywood to be represented at the Oscars.