The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Jenny’s attitude fits perfectly
Beavan isn’t in the film industry to look good. She’s there to make others look good
It’s the same old story. It takes me a while to catch up with things, especially where trends, fads and up-to-the-minute, here-today, gone-tomorrow stuff are concerned.
The day anyone ever turns to me for piercing insights into anything state-of-the-art, however remotely concerned with popular culture, is the day that Donald Trump will be unanimously proclaimed the next Dalai Lama.
No George Martin me, full of insight and ideas and open-minded enough to see the important bits of what was going on in the rest of the world outside his own direct experience.
What’s not to admire about the man who, in spite of initially thinking their songs “amateurish” and “not very good”, recognised that the Beatles had something special and like Hey Jude, took several sad songs and made them better.
Sagging?
With that in mind, you won’t be surprised to learn that it has taken me a couple of weeks to get to grips with this year’s Oscar results, the pinnacle of the so-called “awards season” which also features Globes, Grammys and the unfortunately acronym-ed SAGs, offered up by the Screen Writers Guild of America.
Not that anyone in the film industry is allowed to sag much.
And certainly not in public. See below.
Apparently there was much unconscious entertainment to be had this year chez Oscar, watching Leonardo DiCaprio try to pretend he didn’t know he had it licked (rather like his ursine co-star in The Revenant), Kate Winslet bursting into tears (again) when just announcing the winner, let alone winning anything, and Sylvester Stallone doing his increasingly impressive impersonation of Mount Rushmore when he lost out to Mark Rylance.
In a suspension of disbelief worthy of the most far-fetched movie script, Stallone’s commendably loyal brother Frank resolutely refused to accept the result (“Sly won! Who is Michael Rylance?”) and for a moment, it looked like a damned close-run thing on the fisticuffs front.
Which would undoubtedly have livened up the proceedings no end at a time when Oscar speeches have come to resemble the Reith Lectures without the erudition (or jokes).
Grand designs
So in this week of International Women’s Day and amid the news that older women in Britain at least are going to have their future standards of living completely banjaxed by the mucking about that’s going on with the pensions system, all hail costume designer Jenny Beavan.
Not because she won an Oscar (her second, along with three Emmys), but because she didn’t feel it necessary to turn up looking like a winterdykes (indoor clothes horse to those of you not brought up on the west coast of Scotland) barely draped with fabric.
Many luminaries were reported to have folded their arms or sat on their hands when she marched up to receive her award (only to backtrack furiously when the pictures were published).
And there was I thinking it was only black nominees the Academy couldn’t cope with.
She’s had an interesting year so far, has Ms Beavan, and it’s only March.
She it was who was so memorably “insulted” by Stephen Fry at the Baftas when he likened her appearance to that of a bag lady – in a good way, of course, as he’s apparently a chum.
I have a theory that she’s collecting all these handily-sized award statuettes so she can beat him about the head with them – in a caring, sharing kind of manner, of course.
Be that as it may, in a gathering of people who undoubtedly put the a**e into narcissism, Jenny Beavan looked like what she was – an older woman with little time for trying to be something she isn’t but who gets recognition from her peers because of what she actually achieves.
Obviously brilliant
Beavan isn’t in the film industry to look good. She’s there to make others look good and appropriate and believable in their roles. She’s obviously brilliant at it. Apart from anything else, what she wore – a studded faux leather biker jacket, sported with a devil-may-care attitude – was actually entirely appropriate to represent the film for which she was being honoured, Mad Max: Thunder Road. I’ve also got one of those. Old baggery has its advantages, Mr Fry, invisibility not being one of them.
It’s pleasing, therefore, to know that Britain’s representative in next year’s hugely prestigious international art show, the Venice Biennale, is Phyllida Barlow, aged 71. No country for old women? On yer penny-farthing, son!