Sunday’s Oscars had an awful lot going on. While some of the big events – such as Olivia Colman’s speech, Green Book’s contentious win and the Cooper/Gaga facerub – received the attention they deserved, a handful of smaller, bizarre moments got lost in the cracks.
It is my opinion that these moments also deserve their time in the sun, which is why I am here to laud one such instance: the flaming multi-vehicular pileup that was Vice’s Oscar win for best makeup and hairstyling.
Of course, this isn’t to say that Vice did not deserve to win an Oscar. Of course it did. The transformation of every single actor who appeared in Vice was both amazing and total. However, I cannot believe that anyone involved in the makeup and hairstyling on Vice realised this, because their acceptance speech was genuinely one of the weirdest things I have ever seen. It wasn’t that they weren’t prepared. It was as if they’d been deliberately placed in an isolation chamber since birth and didn’t even understand the concept of what an acceptance speech was.
First, some context. The Oscars this year were surprisingly brisk, and nowhere was this more apparent than with the speeches. The speech that directly preceded Vice’s – the best documentary win for Free Solo – was played off almost instantly. Perhaps this made Vice’s hair and makeup team jumpy. Perhaps they were already jumpy. But, even if they were, it still doesn’t fully explain what happened next.
The winners – Greg Cannom, Kate Biscoe and Patricia Dehaney – staggered on to the stage. Cannom immediately started thanking people, before he noticed his two female colleagues standing beside him. One of them, Biscoe, unfolded a sheet of A4 paper and held it landscape. Landscape, for crying out loud. Nobody writes landscape on a sheet of A4. The only people in history ever to use A4 landscape are kidnappers writing ransom notes, and even then I suspect it feels a bit weird for them.
Biscoe pointed at part of the paper. “That’s you,” she told Cannom. “Read that.” Cannom non-committally stuttered a couple of words, before Biscoe barged in and just read it out herself. At this point, all bets were off. Dehaney – easily a foot shorter than her companions – kept trying to dive between them to say her piece, before chickening out and backing away. In the end, she had to crane in past Biscoe.
Biscoe held out her sheet for Dehaney to read from, but in an act of pure spiteful rebellion, Dehaney revealed that she had brought her own acceptance speech, written on her own piece of paper. The three of them kept starting the same sentences at the same time, hitting an awkward bottleneck that more often than not had to resolve itself when Cannom backed out with a gracious “Go ahead”.
After 60 seconds, the play-off music struck up. But this didn’t deter our three winners from this majestic piece of avant garde performance art; they kept thanking people, sometimes whispering names to themselves like naughty little woodland elves before gaining the confidence to say them out loud.
Another 15 seconds passed, and the camera cut away from them. Their microphone was switched off, but still they stood there wordlessly thanking people. This went on for another 10 agonising seconds before, finally, someone did the humane thing and cut the stage’s lights. Then, and only then, did the speech end.
There were other odd speeches on Sunday. My second favourite was the speech for best live action short for Skin, which began as a solemn address about the bigotry that led to the Holocaust before whiplashing into a detonation of mad-eyed, jazz-handed, room-shaking, all-caps, we-did-it WHOOPING.
But it paled in comparison to the Vice win, which might well be the most excruciating thing I’ll ever see. It was like watching an implosion. And, honestly, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Because, on a night of over-rehearsed slickness, this was a cold bucket of reality. If you or I ever had to give an acceptance speech at the Oscars, in front of the entire world, we’d shrivel up in exactly the same way. We’d whisper and stammer and yell. We’d get shut off in the most brutal way imaginable, too. So here’s to Greg Cannom, Kate Biscoe and Patricia Dehaney. They are all of us. May they never be forgotten.