Feb. 24--Once there was a time when watching the Academy Awards was like going to a zoo that only stayed open for a few hours every year. You climbed aboard your tram (or couch), grabbed your binoculars (or popcorn), the gates of the park would swing wide and for a night, you were granted an opportunity to observe a very distinct species of human being, a rare genus that had somehow recognized a trait in itself and migrated to Los Angeles to live among the palm trees, inside vast gated enclosures inaccessible to ordinary people.
The inhabitants were as different from you as a panda. Which was part of the fun: You pressed your face to the cage and watched for recognizable behaviors, deciphering accordingly.
There was you, there were movie stars, and whatever common ground existed was entirely speculative.
"Oh, look," you would shout, delighted, "Robert Redford thinks he's people!"
Watching the Oscars today, though, is to be reminded that movie stardom itself doesn't know which side of the bars it's supposed to stand on anymore. The gene pool has diversified, that old Hollywood charisma is at a premium, everyone has a Twitter feed and audiences don't have any problems rattling cages for effect. So come Oscar night, movie stars look torn: Keep pretending to seem like an impossibly exotic species? Or just drop the facade and remind us that everyday schmucks and everyday movie stars share a few traits?
In other words:
Nicole Kidman, still among the most exotic specimens, continues to say "the-a-tar."
But Rosamund Pike, a next-gen Kidman, drops her chilly poise the moment she opens her mouth.
That's where the suspense is now.
Not with the question of who will win on Oscar night -- by the time envelopes are opened, weeks of prognostication and guild awards have drained away whatever surprise might have existed. No, whatever tension remains exists entirely within the stars themselves, uncertain of how they should be stars. Indeed, Sunday night I was able to identify four subgenus of the contemporary movie star: Movie stars (Kidman, Eddie Murphy) whose stiff smiles and unknowable natures suggest a determination to uphold classic iconic Hollywood ideals, however self-consciously. Movie stars (Lupita Nyong'o) who suggest gracefulness and glamour with genuinely effortless self-possession. Movie stars who have no use for pretense or glamour whatsoever and seem almost naively disappointed when red-carpet interviews turn shallow (Ethan Hawke).
And the majority: Movie stars who try to install a degree of mystery on Oscar night, who struggle mightily not to say or do anything recognizably human, but who can't resist reminding us they are keeping it real.
Take Anna Kendrick, who looked every inch old-school Hollywood but couldn't hide a trying-hard-to-feel-classy doubt in her eye, a microscopic twinkle that she's still a relatable human who, days earlier, tweeted: "It's cute how I used to think this 'barely-holding-it-together' feeling was temporary." Or consider Reese Witherspoon, whose Oscar aura was pitched between classic Hollywood and business casual; Sunday afternoon, using the hashtag #AskHerMore, she tweeted an encouragement for less phony red-carpet talk.
Michael Keaton, in the most dignified spot of a four-decade career, couldn't resist bouncing on his heels, working gum through his jaw and comparing the night to the Super Bowl; Benedict Cumberbatch, whose name and British origins and on-screen demeanor suggest a young actor with Alec Guinness on his mind, referred to the rain-soaked red carpet as "squishy." Each of the three Chrises of the New Millennium -- Chris Pratt ("Guardians of the Galaxy"), Chris Evans ("Captain America") and Chris Pine ("Star Trek") -- wore the right tuxes, had the correct half-smirks of Old Hollywood but also carried themselves with a weightlessness.
Which is perhaps the proper way for celebrity to be in an age of social media and 24/7 branding, when every "Tonight Show" appearance means a possibility of an impromptu game of beer pong and distinctions between generations are so invisible that nobody blinks at how much Bradley Cooper hangs with his mother.
This is not a terrible thing.
Those cracks in the poise make for great, sometimes subtle TV; the fissures also reveal an accessibility to Hollywood that events like the Oscars have tended to conceal for decades. But in the short term, there will be bumps, as we saw on Sunday. What remains of the Old Hollywood guard on Oscar night -- Clint Eastwood, Shirley MacLaine, etc. -- look increasingly out of place, even at their own party. And what happens when a movie star who still believes in unrepentant glamour runs into a movie star uncertain of how to carry himself anymore? Have you seen those pictures of an unbreakable, impossibly glamorous Scarlett Johansson being manhandled on the red carpet by an embalmed-looking John Travolta? She refuses to lower her shoulders, he refuses to get the signals, and, in the cracks, there's a John Cheever short story's worth of unease.
But the turning point, the moment when the old, confidently austere Oscars turned into a new, why-bother Oscars came during that terrifically awkward standoff on the red carpet between "Fifty Shades of Grey" star Dakota Johnson and Melanie Griffith, her mother, an actress who still remembers when Oscar night was about a polished image. "Good Morning America" host Lara Spencer asked Griffith if she had seen her daughter in the racy "Fifty Shades" yet, and Griffith said, "Maybe one day." Johnson told her she didn't have to see it. There was a brief silence, some fumbling for explanation (Griffith: "She's a really good actress, I don't need to see that to know how good she is"), shifting of posture, then Johnson rolled her eyes and snapped: "All right! You don't have to see it. Jeez! I'm like, 'You can see it,' and you're just like, 'No.' ... I think it's OK. It's a movie. She knows that."
"If she tells me to see it, I'll see it," Griffith said.
Then, as fast as it happened, the cage stopped rattling, and the zoo moved on.
cborrelli@tribune.com
