Changing my mind: occasional essays - By Zadie Smith Page 0,97

to review for this paper, and I had hopes that it would be the best. It is a musical—a form shamefully close to my heart—and has the most remarkable cast: James Gandolfini, Kate Wins-let, Susan Sarandon, Christopher Walken and Steve Buscemi, to name half. When a respected actor-turned-writer-director such as John Turturro cashes in fifteen years’ worth of art-house chips, the result is stellar. And so I can say nothing against any performance in this film—who could object to Winslet’s luscious, humorous, genuinely sexy naturalism! Or malign Gandolfini’s side glance of self-loathing that makes watching Tony Soprano as penetrating an emotional experience as watching Othello and King Lear combined! Christopher Walken is a madman and an anarchic delight, Susan Sarandon is still an obscenely attractive and intelligent performer and Steve Buscemi is the greatest addition to the character actor’s art since Peter Lorre—fact is, he’s better. But the play’s the thing. John Turturro conceived this script while sitting at Barton Fink’s desk pretending to be a writer. It is a real-life role he should have left alone. Turturro is, however, a very talented actor, and maybe this is why he has faith that actors alone can transform lines such as “You made your bed; now lie in it” and “I love you—maybe I don’t know how to show it” and “Life doesn’t give you second chances” and “His lips fill my dreams.” And then there is the fact that a musical is an act of pure chutzpah. You can’t do a half-assed musical, with people half singing, half lip-syncing, sort of dancing but sort of not. Good dancing is never shameful—it’s awe inspiring. To watch Astaire is to gasp. It’s bad, uncertain dancing that makes us cringe. No American musical in the past ten years (with the exception of Chicago) has had the courage of its convictions, and that’s the whole problem. Ditch the irony and you’re right back with awe, as Christopher Walken proved in that wonderful Spike Jonze music video of a few years back that revived the true spirit of the musical. Anyway, enough.

Thirteen

TEN NOTES ON OSCAR WEEKEND

1

Hollywood is vulgar. Every Englishman knows that. He knows it as he knows there is no comedy in Germany, as he knows that the Italians “get it right,” if “it” includes food, marriage, weather and landscape but excludes governance, work, driving and God. David Hockney’s aquamarine L.A. swimming pools strike the correct English attitude to Los Angeles: affectionate contempt for sparkling surfaces. La La Land! Red carpets; semisacred actors in an exclusive Valhalla; parties beyond imagination; jewels beyond price. Over Oscar weekend, an automatic journalism rehashes these eternal ideas, the accounts in newspapers precisely matching the tall tales of the cab driver who brings you in from the airport.

It’s oddly oppressive to set off on a journey into a place so thoroughly imagined by other people. I have already in my dress bag the very picture of someone else’s Hollywood dream, having made the mistake of telling the women in Bond Street that I am on a journalistic assignment to the Oscars. It is single strapped and red; a huge bow sits on its hip; it has a bustle, a train. It is a dress that misunderstands Hollywood, its complex tiers of power and display, its careful politics and manners, which feel at times as intricate as any eighteenth-century France had to offer. On the plane my airplane steward approves, folding the bag carefully over his arm (“I can tell by the weight—it’s fabulous”) and hanging it reverentially in the little closet for which it is too long by a foot and a half.

2

A New Yorker cartoon: a delighted man in a bathtub is proclaiming “It’s Oscar time—there’s that special tingle in the air!” Meanwhile his wife is ironing in the kitchen, surrounded by cats. As you land in Hollywood, a strange inverse relation takes hold between involvement and anticipation: the more degrees removed a person is from the Oscars themselves, the more excited he or she is. Oscar-nominated directors sigh and speak wistfully of going instead to a ball game. The boys who valet park are putting bets on best actor. In the cab to the hotel the driver has this to say: “You gotta understand: when you can imagine that everyone around you has the same goal, one focus, that’s a shared spirituality. It’s beautiful!” My driver, like many in Hollywood, is a screenwriter. He has two scripts at the moment. The first is described as “a shoot-’em-up