vip in the city

I’d like to thank the Academy…

From February 12 through Oscar Saturday, February 24, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences displayed for public viewing 50 newly minted Oscar statuettes in New York at Times Square Studios, home of ABC’s Good Morning America.

Included in the “Meet the Oscars” exhibit were two statuettes previously owned by Hollywood legends Bette Davis and Clark Gable. Academy Award winners are required to sign a waiver, preventing them from ever selling their award. To dispose of an unwanted statuette, owners must sell it back to the Academy for $1. Oscars awarded before 1950 — including the two on display here — are exempt from the rule. In 2001, Steven Spielberg paid $578,000 for the Oscar Davis won for Jezebel  in 1938, with the express purpose of returning it to the Academy. Five years earlier, Spielberg bought Gable’s 1934 Oscar (for It Happened One Night) for $607,500, returning that statuette to the Academy as well. (Each of these was a relative bargain compared to the $1.54M Michael Jackson paid at auction for David O. Selznick’s producing Oscar for Best Film Gone With The Wind  (1939).

Oscar stands 13.5 inches tall and weighs a surprisingly hefty 8.5 pounds. The best part: the Academy made one golden statuette available for members of the public to pick up and hold (and perhaps fantasize a little bit.) How could I resist?

On Oscar Sunday, I was thrilled to see New York filmmaker Martin Scorsese win his long overdue Academy Award after three decades and seven previous nominations — five for directing (Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ, Goodfellas, Gangs of New York  and The Aviator) and two for screenplays (for co-writing Goodfellas  and The Age of Innocence.)

In his acceptance speech, Scorsese remarked of his drought:

I just want to say too that so many people over the years have been wishing this for me. Strangers. You know, I went walking in the street, people say something to me. I go in a doctor’s office, I go in a whatever. Elevators, people saying, “You should win one, you should win one.” I go for an X-Ray, “you should win one.”

So typical of New Yorkers!

Hail, hail Freedonia (and French toast)

For the past several weeks, SYB had been tantalizingly tight-lipped about a surprise awaiting me this afternoon. When at last the day arrived, I was treated to a homemade Sunday brunch of challah french toast and crispy bacon — not part of the surprise — which I happily devoured with the B brothers while playing television catch-up.

I inadvertantly spoiled everything by figuring out our destination just as we were setting out — probably because I already had the Marx Brothers on the brain. SYB seemed so crestfallen that I was tempted to continue claiming ignorance, but I sensed that my acting skills wouldn’t quite hold up during the long subway ride into Manhattan.

Still, the outing was no less diminished by my pre-knowledge: I’ve loved Duck Soup since childhood; J, J and I rewatched the film so many times — guffawing hysterically at the same corny jokes each time — that each of us could probably even now, decades later, recite most of the dialogue and songs verbatim. As Roger Ebert has noted, “to describe the plot would be an exercise in futility“; indeed, there is political satire, strategery, espionage, treason, nationalistic jingoism, musical numbers, romantic rivalry, international warfare… and not all of it quite ties together in a cohesive narrative. No matter: in this theater full of Upper West Side families, the near constant screaming laughter of young children stood testament to the film’s broad, continuing appeal.

Rewatching Duck Soup as an adult, I recognized once more how some of the jokes are not really all that appropriate for younger audiences. Some of the saucier/misogynistic bits surely escaped our grade school notice in the rapid-fire stream of one-liners and zany comedic bits. And sequences like the famous and famously mimicked “Mirror scene” require no measurable level of sophistication to appreciate. No wonder that the film was named one of the funniest American films of all time by the The American Film Institute (AFI) in 2000.

Sitting outside the theater, finishing off my contraband beverage before the double feature, we randomly crossed paths with AC, whom I hadn’t seen since our high school reunion last June; the time before was the reunion five years prior to that. Funny how through those six years of shared classes, I never realized that he and I also shared a common love for the Marx Brothers.

Squares, Stars, Stripes

Long Island City on Saturday morning:

Like many young girls, my introduction to the ballet was a class trip to see a George Balanchine production of The Nutcracker. From those sugar-plum beginnings grew a season subscription as a young adult. But as with so many things, after a couple of years, the escalating cost and scheduling logistics became too much to manage. The Philharmonic, the Opera, assorted theatrical productions… it’s the best and worst thing about New York City: so much to do, so little time.

But tonight, I was back after a few years hiatus. The name of the program — new to the NYCB repertory — was Essential Balanchine: Square Dance, performed to a selection of Antonio Vivaldi and Arcangelo Corelli songs; Liebeslieder Walzer with songs by Johannes Brahms; and Stars and Stripes to the music of John Philip Sousa.

Such lovely performances. We were awed by the elegance of the Square Dance tableaux (Balanchine’s nod to American folk dance tradition) and by the beautiful, gilded ballroom set of the Liebeslieder — the four dancing couples sharing a stage with a quartet of singers and a pianist. The rousing Stars and Stripes finale was a crowd pleaser with its vibrant colors, flashy costumes, and dizzying bursts of virtuosity. With such parade patriotism on display — a baton-twirling majorette! a marching band! a kickline! — it’s not hard to see why this particular work was chosen to welcome home the former hostages upon their return from Iran in 1981.