Warm welcome at Oscar-week events

gerry flahive is senior communications manager at the National Film Board in Toronto.

If ‘lax’ is both a way of life and the airport code in Los Angeles, a weekend of pre-Oscar hoopla, hype and earth tremors is anything but. Lax with a twist, perhaps.

Oscar’s allure draws dozens of organizations, hundreds of filmmakers and thousands of caterers to an annual series of events which might collectively be called Cinema’s Super Bowl – except it’s much harder to get a ticket to the Oscars.

It’s more social than mercantile, although some horse trading does go on (one passerby at a reception I attended quickly praised the intensity of what he wrongly assumed was a pitch I was making to a producer. A minute later, the producer asked me whether my ultimate goal was to produce or to direct…

The weekend begins, like all good weekends, on a Thursday (with the annual International Documentary Association tribute to Oscar-nominated documentaries) and runs through Tuesday morning.

This year I arrived on Friday, and attended the reception and screening held at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for nominated short films.

Spirits were high this year, as last year’s reception was more of a political rally designed to lobby the Academy to retain two threatened Oscar categories: documentary shorts and live-action shorts. The lobbying – which led the Academy to commission a comprehensive study of the short film business – was successful.

One of the evening’s hosts, director Martha Coolidge (Angie, Rambling Rose) spoke of getting her start in filmmaking in what she described as ‘the haiku of the art form.’ Some of the live-action shorts nominated this year revealed a trend in the field: the participation of ‘name’ actors and directors (including, in this year’s crop, Ed Asner, Griffin Dunne, Susan Seidelman and Peter Weller).

Chuck Jones, the 81-year-old cocreator of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, was a scream as the host of the animation portion of the evening, making caustic jokes about Warner Bros.’ first short film decades ago (about venereal disease, and starring Jack Warner, he claimed), and about his own recently-signed 10-year(!) contract with the studio.

Frederick Back’s and Hubert Tison’s masterpiece The Mighty River received a very warm response from the audience (Chuck Jones said ‘come up and get your due praise’) but the filmmakers had not yet arrived in Los Angeles. Perhaps just as well, since the buzz that evening – accurate, as it turned out – was for the British animated short The Wrong Trousers.

Academy president Arthur Hiller, yet another expatriate Canadian, said in his introduction to the program that he had been around so long that he could remember when Americans were nominated in the animated short category. Indeed, this year the Oscar nominations went to four British and one Canadian film.

A few weeks before the Oscars, Disney Studios was the site of a tribute to Back. Hundreds attended an evening screening of The Mighty River, followed the next day by a tour for Back and Tison of the animation studios. Roz Wolfe of the Canadian Consulate in l.a. told me that as Back was being shown some of the animation work underway on the updated version of Fantasia, young animators streamed out of their cubicles with cassettes of his Oscar-winning films Crac and The Man Who Planted Trees seeking his autograph. The symmetry was perfect, since Back had told the audience the night before that he was inspired to embark on an animation career by Disney’s Fantasia.

At a post-Oscar dinner, both Back and Tison, astonishingly for two men who have contributed so much to Canadian cinema and world animation, felt as though they had let their Radio-Canada colleagues down by not winning the Oscar. Their humility prompted several senior animators from Disney to rise and to extol, with great passion, the talents of the two.

Tom Sito (who can be spotted as one of the palace guards in the market scene in Aladdin – perhaps the animated version of Hitchcock’s walk-ons in his films), hailed Back’s artistry and expressed his conviction that the animator’s films would be viewed centuries from now.

We always found the welcome for Canadians to be warm, and interest in our films to be high, but sometimes the dissonance was a bit too much. A member of a southern California film society asked me at the Radio-Canada dinner to explain the ‘jerky-motion home shopping tv channel you have up there in Canada.’ At first I suggested that this was simply another example of Canada’s world leadership in digital channel compression, and then I considered trying to explain Canadian content and 600-page specialty licence applications, but ultimately I was happy to defer the question to a Canadian broadcaster at the table.

And a public relations writer told me of the change she saw on movie and television screens now that many films and programs are produced, not in l.a., but in far-flung locations like…Toronto. Now she can’t always recognize the street corners and storefronts! I was full of sympathy.

Filmmakers trade in illusion and artifice, so it wasn’t surprising that on Saturday hundreds of them, many in Ray-Bans, simply pretended that the sheets of rain welcoming them to the Independent Spirit Awards didn’t exist.

The awards, the Oscars-with-an-edge, are run by the Independent Feature Project/West to celebrate films which, although they may star stars (Jeff Bridges and Sandra Bernhard were among the sodden and sullen) are independent in body and spirit. This year’s nominees included Naked, Short Cuts, American Heart, El Mariachi and Inside Monkey Zetterland.

But despite the fact that many of these films were more likely to be seen in a Berlin cultural center than an l.a. multiplex, the assembled paparazzi outside respected celebrity above all else. If you are well enough known to be hailed by frenetic journalists yelling your first name (fill in the blanks: ‘Kenneth! Emma! Holly! Val!’) you could appear in black-and-white shorts based on Milwaukee municipal bond financing and still make it into Entertainment Weekly.

But no one recognized Jim Sheridan, director, cowriter and producer of In the Name of the Father, the day’s keynote speaker (the Irish seem to own this slot; last year Neil Jordan was the speaker), rumpled, unpretentious and strangely appropriate amidst rain-sodden, linen-clad cineastes.

He spoke of the arrival of television in Ireland – his family’s tv reception was so bad they had to ‘listen’ to the picture, thereby stimulating the imagination. But he warned of the dominance of u.s. images in cinemas and television (‘It’s the way people see the world’), of media monopolies, and of some of his own early writings (‘a play worse than necrophilia’). His final words stirred the crowd: ‘It’s not the money, it’s the spirit.’

Although there is much about the Spirit Awards Canadians would find familiar (in terms of budgets, subjects and styles of the decidedly idiosyncratic and non-formula films being honored), it is a very, well, American event.

Robert Shaye of New Line Cinema, in his acceptance speech for a special award, used such phrases as ‘prudent aggression’ and ‘time utility.’ And producer Sandra Shulberg, seemingly without irony, reported to the audience that ‘American culture is marching inexorably across the world.’ Despite this Jack Valenti-like statement, I was assured by an l.a.-based Canadian that Shulberg wasn’t as jingoistic as the line suggested, but for me it did reveal a confidence in the universal distribution of American films, something even the winner of the Golden Reel Award at the Genies could hardly take for granted.

Some of my colleagues reacted to news of my plans to attend the GLAAD/L.A. Media Awards (presented by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Discrimination) with about as much enthusiasm as if I were headed for the Orillia Educational Film Librarians 16mm Pageant and Panel Discussion.

This was a bit different, with almost 1,200 l.a. establishment types in formal wear assembled at the Century Plaza Hotel to watch Robin Williams, Stockard Channing, Lily Tomlin and many other A-list celebrities (few of whom were willing to publicly support the glaad awards only a few years ago) present prizes to such films and television programs as The Wedding Banquet, Philadelphia and Seinfeld for their positive portrayals of gays and lesbians.

National Film Board chairperson Joan Pennefather accepted the prize for the Studio D film Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives (directed by Aeryln Wiessman and Lynne Fernie), which was named Outstanding Independent Feature (Lesbian). Rarely has non-conformity seemed more respectable. One glaad/la official told me the organization is increasingly being asked by film and television producers to act as a consultant on scripts and productions featuring gay and lesbian characters.

Gladness reigned supreme for most of the next morning and afternoon as Canadians, Americans and everyone in between gathered at the elegant Hancock Park residence of the acting Canadian Consul-General, Alan Poole, for the annual brunch honoring the Canadian Oscar nominees.

(There were five at first count: Back and Tison, David Paperny for The Broadcast Tapes of Dr. Peter, Neil Young for his song Philadelphia in the film of the same name, and Christina Smith, nominated for her makeup work for Schindler’s List. Unfortunately, all the Canadians got skunked on Oscar night – except for young Anna Paquin of The Piano, whose Winnipeg origins were discovered only hours before the awards. I guess that makes her Kiwi-Canadian.)

One Canadian in attendance who expressed disdain for awards of any kind was John Kricfalusi, the creator of Ren and Stimpy, and probably the most anarchic and talented animation export from this country in years. He lost control of Ren and Stimpy (the show and all of the characters) in a dispute with Nickelodeon, but is developing new projects and characters through his own shop, Spumco, including, perhaps, Burnt Toast Man – since he no longer holds the rights to Powdered Toast Man.

Kricfalusi said he would like to work with Canadian animators in l.a. – and there are many -but most ‘get sucked into the vortex’ – meaning Disney.

There have been 6,000 aftershocks in Los Angeles since ‘the big one’ (not to be confused with ‘The Big One,’ which hasn’t happened yet). The most powerful of these arrived in the middle of the reception as 500 guests, standing under a party tend held up by rather large metal poles, were listening to a heartfelt tribute to John Candy delivered by sctv’s Robin Duke. As if on cue, the tremor began as Robin referred to Candy’s giant bear hugs. For those of us who had never experienced anything more geological than the Yonge St. subway at rush hour, the 10 seconds was… interesting. But for the l.a.-based Canadians, sleepless since January, natural disasters which arrive one inch of snow at a time have begun to seem much more attractive.

My ‘date’ for the Oscars was La Presse correspondent Nathalie Petrowski, and as she quizzed me throughout the evening as to the identities of several famous faces (‘Who is Christian Slater?’), I realized that as a unilingual anglophone I would probably be just as lost at the Prix Gemaux (‘She plays who in Blanche?’).

As we turned the corner in my rented Corsica onto the final star-studded stretch of street adjacent to the red carpet, the cold hard truth hit home: if you are not in a limousine, get the hell out of the curb lane and the view of the tv cameras. At least the far lane gave me a clearer view of the many ‘Movie Scum Repent’ signs waved by concerned film aficionados in the crowd. Bit of a sweeping statement, no?

Knowing that some producers might not have spotted pro-repenting placards, one miffed… screenwriter? investor? aerial cinematographer?… hired a plane trailing a sign overhead urging we movie scum to ‘boycott films by Sony, Columbia & Tri-Star’ and offered a telephone number to answer the question ‘why?’

Once the awards begin, if you are in the know, and especially if you are in a crummy seat, you head for the basement bar, to rub shoulders, literally, with Kenneth Branagh or Kim Basinger without ever letting on that you are stars-truck.

My award for Most Influential Yet Least Recognized Celebrity at the Oscars went to James Carville, the Clinton political strategist whose campaign artistry, as chronicled in Donn Pennebaker’s and Chris Hegedus’s compelling and Oscar-nominated documentary feature The War Room. Carville didn’t look too happy as he stood in the lobby of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, but he headed for his seat (just before The War Room failed to win) too soon for me to tell him I thought there should be an Oscar category for Best Actor in a Documentary.

Sometimes, though, I wondered just what one has to do to garner fame these days, as an Oscar certainly isn’t enough. As we waited in the hall to return to our seats after a commercial break (something you don’t have to do in a cinema), one of the now cigarette-satiated number sniffed as four tuxedo-clad but anonymous Oscar-winners strode by, statuettes in hand: ‘They must be documentary filmmakers.’

Many years ago, as an usher at Toronto’s least-lamented cinema, the Imperial Six, I learned an important lesson: you can get away with a lot if you are wearing a uniform. And at the Oscars, if you are not one of Janet Jackson’s musicians (and clearly I’m not), a tuxedo is the required uniform, and it offers an immediate respectability and anonymity that can prove valuable in a place where out of 3,000 there are maybe 50 seriously famous faces.

And so, with a disbelieving Nathalie in tow, I headed for the door leading into the first two rows of the auditorium as the last tv commercial of the evening was ending. With a stern `I-am-really-miffed-that-you-won’t-seat-me-now-that-the-show-is-starting-again-bit-I-suppose-I-will-just-stand-here-against-the-door-if-absolutely-necessary’ look on my face, I parked myself 10 feet away from the podium and several inches from a by-now bored security guard. As far as he knew, I could have been the chief architect of the information superhighway. While Steven Spielberg, Clint Eastwood and Harrison Ford spoke, I entertained fantasies of leaping on stage to speak of the need for constitutional reform in Canada, or simply to embarrass the hell out of my family and friends.

But I did nothing of the sort, and as the awards ended, I exchanged knowing glances with Deborah Kerr and Daniel Day-Lewis, and then ran for the valet parking.

Two Canadian comic actors – Leslie Neilsen and Jim Carrey – dominated the l.a. movie billboards in March (last time I visited Mike Myers’ picture was everywhere), while another – John Candy – became the chief subject of conversation whenever an American met a Canadian. Candy’s several dozen movies generated hundreds of millions of dollars, and Canadians have already spent more than $10 million at the box office on Naked Gun 33 1/3 and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. In the shuttle bus on the way to lax the morning after, I couldn’t help but think that Canada has an almost unbeatable movie industry – parts of it just happen to be located somewhere else.