Dancin' Dan here to talk about what used to be my favorite part of the Oscar ceremony.
Remember those gigantic, often-confounding production numbers set to the nominees for Best Original Song? They were crazy, ambitious, and compulsively watchable, bring levity to the alternately serious and teary acceptance speeches that usually dominate Oscar ceremonies. Even the times they just had a person stand there and sing, those moments seemed chosen because the songs were sung by a superstar who could easily fill the whole room with just their presence and incredible voice*. Unfortunately, those kinds of performances seem to have fallen out of vogue. Barring the odd actressexual dance party and Lego-fest, the days of crazy musical extravaganzas on the Oscars are long-gone. And I would argue the show as a whole is a less joyous, celebratory affair without them. For proof, look at this year's performances.
Set aside for now the fact that two of the best nominees didn't even get a performance slot, and let's take this year's performances on their merits. They were, for the most part, DULL. Herewith, a few thoughts on each...
Sam Smith, "The Writing's on the Wall" (from Spectre)
Look, Sam Smith seems like a perfectly nice guy, and he's won a good handful of Grammys. So why was he so visibly and audibly nervous during his performance? Is it because he knew, like all the rest of us, that his song was the weakest of the bunch? At any rate, it's clear that the staging was borrowed from Adele's "Skyfall" performance, but Sam Smith is NOT Adele. Not by a longshot. Sure, it doesn't help that the song is a wannabe-dramatic dirge that meanders its way from half-formed phrase to half-formed phrase like a drunk in search of his next bar, but Smith's wobbly off-key performance only exacerbated the song's weaknesses. That this song ended up winning was made yet more confounding by his earlier performance.
Best Part: Cruel as this may be to say.... when it was over.
The Weeknd, "Earned It" (from Fifty Shades of Grey)
This was more like it. Aerial contortionist straight outta Cirque du Soleil? Check. Onstage violinists? Check. Dancers in boudoir attire to match the song's sexytimes vibe? Check. A charismatic performer with weird hair singing the heck out of their song, confident in their artistry? CHECK. This was so easily the best-produced number it's almost unfair. Of course, it's also the best song (that was allowed to perform live), so that helped. This is how I like my Oscars musical performances: Big and bold and interesting to watch, yet with an appropriately intimate feeling.
Best Part: The dancers stalking the singer in a circle, while we view from above. Busby Berkeley would approve.
Lady Gaga, "Til It Happens to You" (from The Hunting Ground)
I imagine I'll get some flack for this, but here goes: I didn't like this. At all. It started out fine: Gaga, dressed in white sitting at a white piano singing in her rich lower register. But then she starts straddling the piano bench like she's Tori freaking Amos, which is just the wrong tack for a song about surviving rape. Unless you want us to miss Tori Amos. Barely thirty seconds into the performance, she flips her "On" switch and things goes from zero to ninety in nought point two seconds, zooming right past "performing to the back row" to land on "performing to the opposite coast". The editing and camera movements foolishly tried to match her intensity, rapidly swirling about, cutting the performance to bits and pieces before we're even near the climax. At which point, the staging from last year's winner "Glory" gets a slight tweak and real rape survivors walk from the back of the stage to the front, and hold out their arms, which have phrases like "It happened to me" and "Survivor" written on them. The performance didn't NOT deserve the standing ovation it received -- this is an important moment that comes with inherent Relevancy and Impact. If Gaga had just sat at the piano and sung the song straight, as opposed to climbing on top of it and shouting it at us, imagine the impact.
Best Part: No shade to Gaga, who truly was in good voice, but Brie Larson, giving each of the civilian extras a hug as they filed off the stage:
Then best actress fave Brie Larson gets up, hugs each, every one. #Oscars pic.twitter.com/OI3cFZaLtl
— Chris Gardner (@chrissgardner) February 29, 2016
Did you enjoy the three songs or did you just miss the ones that weren't there?
* The Academy has none of the Original Song performances mentioned at the beginning of this post on its official YouTube channel, and the only ones available are those super-low quality recordings linked, which is kind of shameful, don't you think? AMPAS does have a very strange relationship with its own history, but you'd think they would at least have official versions of performances from recent years. But, no, they have NOTHING. (God bless the lovely souls who taped these Oscar ceremonies and uploaded these important pieces of Oscar history for our enjoyment.)