Marsala, the colour of the year. Now this is a sharp suit. With the waistcoat too. Proper. It’s Dolce & Gabbana. And so on point for how to show up at your first Oscars with a seat in front of Oprah Winfrey. They gave him a lot of camera time too. Which then gave us his tears in reaction to Common and John Legend’s performance and acceptance speech. In those moments, his face was the representative of the emotion, of the shared emotion; his face was the ambassador for all our feels. It was enough.
Until the director decided to cut away to give us a shot of Chris Pine’s Will Ferrell Robert Goulet single tear. This is not about Pine. I’m not sh-tting on Pine. I’m talking about the control room, scanning the crowd, panning the cameras to find other wet faces, because that’s who they think we are now. An audience to be emotionally manipulated, like the more people who cry, the more powerful the message is.
It’s gross. And, um, the message didn’t need a power amp anyway. The message was the message. That particular message however was already perfectly illustrated with Oyelowo and Oprah. Nobody needed more. If you thought it needed more? You actually missed the message.
