It’s essentially an easy part in an easily digestible film from a director, Darren Aronofsky, who’s made a career of making genre films that seem more interesting and complex than they actually are.īrendan Fraser, winner of the Best Actor in a Leading Role award for The Whale. His performance in The Whale is fine, and good enough to win the Oscar, but again the win reflects popular sensibilities rather than being a measure of true artistic merit. If anyone had any doubts, they simply needed to watch performances across his career, from Encino Man to Gods and Monsters to his comical cameo as himself in Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star. With his Oscar win for Best Actor for The Whale, Brendan Fraser simply proves something most of us have known all along – he’s a great performer. Brendan Fraser and Best ActorĪri Mattes, Lecturer in Communications and Media, University of Notre Dame Australia This all makes one desperate for a return of the likes of Henry Mancini and Randy Newman to this category. The downbeat, repetitive song didn’t allow her to show very much of her range. Rihanna gave a good performance of another lacklustre number, Wakanda Forever’s Lift Me Up. ![]() That said, I liked the simplicity of the setting for the song, the strong backlighting isolating her and her band in the space and making the large stage seem more intimate. Considering this is a film awards show, the poor cinematography for this performance was striking: Gaga was in an overly tight shot and the camera operator had a hard time keeping this very active performer in the frame. Lady Gaga had a rough start with her Top Gun song Hold My Hand, suffering through some poor vocal intonation, but she warmed into it. This is one of the first songs from song-rich Indian cinema to break through to the Oscars, but we can hope that it will pave the way for more. Naatu Naatu was the only musical moment that brought back something of the Oscars’ glamour of yore. This Is a Life from Everything Everywhere was also an awful song, but it added a much-needed touch of the bizarre to this slick ceremony. Applause from Tell It Like a Woman was really terrible, a surprisingly ineffective song from Oscar stronghold Diane Warren. The Best Song nominees this year were uniformly poor, aside from Naatu Naatu, which did its job well and justifiably won the award. All Quiet on the Western Front’s repeating minor triad is at least memorable, although I was surprised it beat Williams’ and Justin Hurwitz’s stronger work for The Fabelmans and Babylon, respectively, to win the Best Score award. It is possible to write music that is immediately noticeable and interesting just ask John Williams, who can fit more melodic material into two bars than this whole ceremony had in all its incidental music. We heard a lot of a very dull looping motive from Everything Everywhere All at Once as members of its team went to collect their well-deserved awards. ![]() The music clips chosen to accompany the presenters’ and winners’ walks to and from the stage were not very exciting. And despite the fact there was a live orchestra (somewhere), most of the music sounded prerecorded, as it was mixed in a flat, lossy way. They appeared to be in a conference room somewhere backstage just because one can pipe in a remote orchestra fairly easily doesn’t mean one should. The orchestra this year was invisible, other than a few short shots of them leading into commercial breaks and during the Best Original Score announcement. There was a sore lack of good music throughout this year’s ceremony. ![]() Gregory Camp, Senior Lecturer, University of Auckland School of Music University of Auckland provides funding as a member of The Conversation NZ. The University of Notre Dame Australia, University of Auckland, University of Adelaide, and University of the Sunshine Coast provide funding as members of The Conversation AU. RMIT University provides funding as a strategic partner of The Conversation AU. The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment. PhD Candidate & Tutor, Media Department, University of Adelaide Lecturer, Global and Language Studies, RMIT University Lecturer in Communications and Media, University of Notre Dame Australiaĭesign/Fashion Studies in School of Business & Creative Industries, University of the Sunshine Coast
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