SCOLDS AND GOLD

THE OSCARS AND "THE SNUB" - OUR LATEST CULTURAL GRIEVANCE, OR IS IT

(Julie Andrews taking Sidney Poitier’s gentlemanly arm after he announced her being awarded the Best Actress Oscar of Mary Poppins on April 5, 1965.)

When I was a boy I loved Julie Andrews. No. I take that back. I wanted to be Julie Andrews. I was already feeling my sexuality as a drawling little sissy stuck in Mississippi being labeled and ridiculed as such by those with even thicker, meaner drawls and there was something about her tomboyish, close-cropped, clipped-speech primness that both negated my own prissiness - a kind of accented, akimbo-ed dare all its own - and yet made prurience of any sort more acceptable. And that is what we all want - little sissies in Mississippi and actors out in Hollywood during yet another season of winning awards and rebuffing rebuffs: acceptance. Even the speeches actors make when winning such awards and little sissies practice in front of mirrors pretending we just might one day win them ourselves are called “acceptance” ones. When not practicing my own acceptance speech as Julie Andrews, I listened to the soundtrack album to Mary Poppins over and over and memorized all its songs written by the Sherman Brothers, although I can’t recall to this day ever having seen the original film itself. I would insist that my brother and sister perform the musical numbers with me which I’d stage in the room that held our cabinet-like stereo back when stereos were considered pieces of furniture. I was the only one though I would allow to lip-synch to Julie. As I look back on it, I think it was less about the music and more about that performative melding with her that just made me feel less like myself and more like my own nanny who knew what I needed: something to drop magically from of the sky that resulted in a happy ending that was child-like itself and not to drop so tragically from it, which the consecutive deaths of my parents had seemed to do during Julie’s heyday, that resulted in such grown-up sadness that “child-like” forever after would be a term for me that was synonymous not with hope but a kind of knowing haplessness in the face of life’s cruel narrative being thrust upon me. I became a writer so I could nanny my own narrative back to a semblance of hope. Each sentence I conjure is that conjured need a child has initially to look outward, upward trying to spot something on the wind current arriving in rescue, a redemptive return of the thing the child didn’t know had left until it is missed. Not innocence, but the awareness of it - and not just awareness but the bravery needed not to be wary of the awareness. Mary Poppins in Mary Poppins was the meta morphing into the mother that was not not the mother within my narrative that was not my narrative but became so when I cleaved to it by lip-synching with Julie’s voice on the way to finding my own, first memorizing the lyrics about other chosen children exotically Edwardian and stepped-in time and learnt laughter and staying awake.

I certainly longed to see the film of Mary Poppins when I was that child so deeply exotic myself in my sissy southernness - oh, how I longed for it - but it was playing 47 miles away in Jackson, Mississippi, and its release coincided with my mother’s last days dying of cancer in 1964 after my father having died in a car accident the year before. I also can’t recall the Disney musical ever having been shown at the movie theatre where I lived a few miles outside the small-town city limits of Forest, Mississippi, on a country road of smelly chicken houses and small pastures padded out with hollow-eyed cattle chewing on their hungry cuds like I chew on my childhood one of sadness, sissified, ever-sifting, still in this very column, each of us, southern cow and sissy kid, ruminants raised on that road where we just tried to survive as best we could. My grandmother weary with her own sadness would sometimes smile when catching me lip-synching to Julie Andrews and that fleeting, confused smile would touch me in ways I am still trying to decipher. But my grandmother sitting next to me when Sidney Poitier announced Julie’s name when handing out the Oscar for Best Actress only a few months after her daughter’s death, a daughter who just happened to be my mother but who was first and foremost hers, her child in ways I would never be, sighed in a way even more deeply southern and fed-up with it all than I was. “Let’s hope she don’t kiss that _______ like that woman did last year when she give him his own Oscar,” she said, referencing Anne Bancroft and using the n-word for Sidney Poitier, which was alas an integral part of her country Mississippi lingua franca. Julie didn’t kiss Sidney but she did take Poitier’s arm as he escorted her off the stage. My grandmother groaned at that cross-racial over-familiarity and went to bed. She’d had enough. “Don’t stay up much later. You know how Pop hates you watching television past nine o’clock," she said, referencing now my grandfather. Elated with Julie’s win and finally able to be alone with my longing to live a life that would enable me be out in Hollywood and not stuck in the sticks in Mississippi, I silently lip-synched what I could remember of Julie’s acceptance speech. Years later after living just such a longed-for life which manifested as my becoming a magazine scribe who wrote cover stories filled with subtext about lots of different “Julie Andrews”es for Vanity Fair and attending its Oscar parties where I held the Oscars of other actresses who’d been accepted, I came to realize that the year Julie won her Oscar was itself a narrative filled with the subtext of “The Snub” since that same year My Fair Lady won the award for Best Film and Best Director (George Cukor) and Best Actor (Rex Harrison). But Audrey Hepburn who portrayed Eliza Doolittle in the film, replacing Julie Andrews who had originated the role in the Broadway musical, wasn’t even nominated. Andrews not only won the Oscar for being in Mary Poppins but perhaps for not being in My Fair Lady.

Snubs have been a part of the Oscars since its inception and, yes, they are more than cultural and can take on the politics of their time from Hattie McDaniel winning hers for Gone With the Wind from her segregated seat after having been snubbed at the front entrance of the Ambassador Hotel and having to enter the hotel’s Coconut Grove nightclub where the Oscars were handed out through the kitchen to Poitier’s historic win at the height of the Civil Rights movement in America. Indeed, I wrote in my first memoir, Mississippi Sissy, about my own cultural and political consciousness being raised when I used that n-word myself the morning after his win in expressing dismay to our maid, Mattie May, that such a person could win the Oscar. The look on Matty’s face - a sadness that surpassed anything my grandmother and I could feel because it was historical, haunted, more than weary, at war still with her very existence in such a place having to put up with such language from such a child, a sissy who dammit should know better - stays with me still. I snubbed my better self that morning and Matty, God bless her for it, would later snub me and it when she heard me use the word again after she had pointed out how I had broken her heart with its use. Years later, I would make an amends to her by writing about her in that memoir and the scene that morning that changed my life as even further her purposeful snubbing of me had. Matty utilized Poitier’s name as a kind of mantra when confronted with the tragic racism that did not have to drop from any damn sky or arrive on a wind current in some magical way but existed on-the-ground rooted in the rotten southern soil of her life. Oprah Winfrey would tell me later she read Poitier segments of my book where Matty invokes his name and I, kneeling by his side, at a picnic during an Oscar weekend when I, living that manifested life for which I longed sitting out in that Mississippi countryside as a little sissy child, told him all about Matty and what he had meant to her and to me. Ever the gentleman, ever graceful, ever grace-filled, Sidney Poitier did not snub me.

(Above: Greta Gerwig directing Margot Robbie in Barbie.)

All of that is to say I understand the cultural and political significances of the Oscars even as I disagree about what constitutes the conflation of them with “The Snub” - especially this year when social media platforms have been sagging with the heavy load of outrage “put upon” them regarding Barbie and Greta Gerwig, its director, and Margot Robbie, its star, having not been nominated for an Oscar, mostly because Ryan Gosling who portrayed the penis-free Ken did. (I would have given his slot to another actor myself, but for artistic reasons.). The Barbie outrage has so often left out the fact that the film was nominated for Best Picture as was Gerwig’s screenplay which she co-wrote with her husband, Noah Baumbach. Moreover, it diminishes the nomination - also so often not cited in the outrage - of America Ferrera, a woman of color, being nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of a real woman with a real throughout-the-film vagina, a woman who so brilliantly channeled the feminist monologue that most likely resulted in the nomination. Or as a Black person here in London said, “Let me get this straight. Two white women who made millions from a movie about a doll didn’t get nominated for an award and that is what passes for a social injustice in America? Okaaaaayy …”

I know there is nothing I can write that will convince those who were incensed that it wasn’t a social injustice. I do understand the disappointment because I felt a kind of cultural heartbreak as a gay man that All of Us Strangers was completely ignored but then I focused on Colman Domingo, an out gay man, being nominated for his portrayal of the gay cultural and political hero, Bayard Rustin, in Rustin and on Jodie Foster, an out lesbian, being nominated for Best Supporting Actress for portraying the lesbian Bonnie Sue Stoll in Nyad. I was deeply disappointed that The Color Purple wasn’t nominated for Best Film and Fantasia for Best Actress. And Bradley Cooper for Best Director. And, except for screenplay, that May December was shut out. I wish Celine Song had been nominated for Best Director for Past Lives - to me a much better film than Barbie. In fact, I got a message from its female producer, Christine Vachon, in which she wrote, “I am thrilled to FINALLY be nominated for best picture … For the first time. After producing about 100 movies...” That is a nomination that the feminist in us all can celebrate, as is the one Justine Triet received for Best Director for Anatomy of a Fall, another film to me better than Barbie. I would ask those who were so upset about the lack of nominations for Gerwig and Robbie whom they would have replaced in their categories. I wouldn’t have replaced anyone who was nominated with either of them. Barbie was a societal and commercial phenomenon but I don’t think the Oscars are about such phenomena. Or shouldn’t be.

(Above: Julie Christie after being awarded the Best Actress Oscar for Darling. 1966.)

The year after Julie Andrews won the Oscar for Mary Poppins, she was nominated again for The Sound of Music. I did see that film more than once and again memorized the soundtrack album. Instead of lip-synching to the lyrics and Julie’s voice, I sang along with her in my own, a little sissy’s self-assertion oddly aborning. Julie Andrews was still my favorite actress though and I was certain she was going to win the Oscar again. When the other Julie won, I was shocked, dismayed. It might have been my first cultural heartbreak as a gay person before I even called myself a gay person. And then I got really mad. Who was this usurper? I had never heard of Julie Christie or the film in which she starred, Darling. I cried myself to sleep at such a snub. Years later I discovered that Christie’s character had had an abortion in the film. She had won the Oscar for playing such a character over Julie Andrews whose character’s assertion of her own dominion over her own body - her own self-assertion oddly aborning - was to leave a convent so she could be a nanny again but this time stay on the ground with only her legs presumably longing to be in the air. Would an actress today win the award if her character had an abortion as part of her narrative? Would social media scolds from the right - just as those from the left this time - erupt in outrage and grievance? We are all just lip-synching with ourselves.