my favorite oscars performance of all time
For reasons I'm afraid to interrogate, I love awards shows. I love every unbearable minute of the Oscars, the Emilys, the Grandmothers, and the Anthonys. I feel actively disgusting the entire time I'm watching them, and I keep doing it! I will stay up until midnight EST on a Sunday to watch multimillionaire circlejerks disguised as celebrations of the arts. I rarely even have any skin in the game, yet I always end up pissed off by at least one snub or undeserved win. And by the nine hundred hours of commercials they somehow manage to cram into a three and a half hour ceremony.
On Sunday I wasted three hours and twenty-five minutes of my only life on the 96th Academy Awards, and do you know how many major category nominations I saw this year? Just the two!
I could've done anything else — "I'm Just Ken" was on YouTube like, three minutes after the fact. Messi only appeared thrice. There are half a dozen overdue library books gathering dust on my desk. I could've gone to sleep, since it was Daylight Savings. But no. I sat there and I watched Jimmel Kimmel read a Trump tweet aloud.
Almost nothing good ever happens during these shows, and with the Oscars ceremony specifically, you are guaranteed a minimum of 97% bullshit. Usually, it's closer to 99%. You need something something really transcendent, like Lady Gaga's 2015 Sound of Music tribute, to keep it at 97%.
I mean, just listen to it! Her pitch-perfect Julie Andrews impression on that first hills! The seamless transition between "Edelweiss" and "Climb Ev'ry Mountain!" The flawless sustained D5 at the very end! Only we diehards knew she had anything like this in her — the masses found out that night. This was post-ARTPOP (often incorrectly derided as her flop era) Gaga casually dropping in to deliver what is probably the highest quality Oscars performance of my lifetime. Certainly the best one I watched live.
Lady Gaga's Sound of Music tribute is my second favorite Oscars performance of all time.
Two things happened in 2019: most of the world was introduced to Billie Eilish via her debut album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?; and Universal Pictures released Yesterday, a movie where everyone forgets the Beatles except Himesh Patel. It took me a minute to get the whole Billie Eilish thing, but I was fully on board by December of that year, and still am. I didn't see Yesterday, but I know I (and many others) made proto-"nature is healing" jokes upon hearing the premise. And that was really it. Yesterday wasn't nominated for any Oscars, or Golden Globes, or Screen Actors Guild awards. We all forgot about it like everyone except Himesh Patel forgot about the Beatles.
Except someone must have remembered it, because they asked Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas to perform the titular Beatles song for the In Memoriam segment of the 92nd Academy Awards, in February 2020.
Listen, I know it's cool to dismiss popular, well-known things as overrated, but they could never make me hate "Yesterday." "A Day In The Life" is the reigning champion of Beatles songs rankings, but is "A Day In The Life" one of the most-covered songs in history? No, of course not. It's really hard to recreate the scary orchestral parts, for one thing. For another, it's too interesting. "Yesterday" is boring. It's basic, repetitive, and barely two minutes long. Paul McCartney literally wrote the thing in his sleep. The original lyrics were, "Scrambled eggs/Oh my baby, how I love your legs/Not as much as I love scrambled eggs/Oh, I believe that men get pegged." I may be misremembering that last line. The finished product's narrator just wallows in a breakup, (or whatever) wishing he could change the past, knowing he can't. This song is nothing. I adore it. So do you.
And it's not a bad choice for a montage about how much we all miss Kobe and Chewbacca, especially in the hands of pop's most melancholic star. If there was anything hopeful buried in that forlorn little song, Eilish mercy killed it. Inexplicably, she hated her performance.
I didn't hate her performance. Wow, that was really good, I remember thinking before I fell asleep that night. In February 2020.
I thought about that performance quite a bit before the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, and then I thought about it even more as everything fell apart, and I did, in fact, long for the proverbial yesterday. Then I really thought about it, because it's not like I had anything better to do, and also because Gal Gadot and twenty-four of her closest friends tried to save the world with John Lennon's "Imagine."
There has never been anything as tone-deaf as this, both literally and culturally. Two dozen millionaires holed up in their mansions, pretending they can sing, does not a world save. Read the room, Gal!!! Jesus Christ. The pandemic was a paralyzingly confusing time that made 2019 seem idyllic in retrospect. Nobody wanted to imagine anything, because there was no indication of a viable tomorrow upon which to project our imaginings. We were all longing for yesterday.
My "Yesterday" critique applies to "Imagine" as well, but the latter has never done much for me, and I think Gadot and co. may in fact have barred it from my good graces for all time. Though cloying, the song worked coming from antiwar activists like Lennon and Yoko Ono, who wrote most of the song. "Imagine" was a mission statement, not the mission itself. Lennon and Ono were actually trying to build that world they imagined. If you're a millionaire, and want your "Imagine" cover to succeed, you should at least be donating a few hundred grand to combat the devastating virus you think you can defeat just by singing a song you didn't even write.
But "Yesterday" comes with no such obligation, and Billie Eilish wasn't trying to save the world with it anyway. "Yesterday" is casually devastating in a way that happened to fit the moment far better than any other song I can think of, and I did try at the time to come up with others. (It seemed marginally more productive than catastrophizing.) The poignancy of the Oscars performance was a perfect accident, the likes of which I hadn't seen since "Stressed Out" by Twenty One Pilots scored the lead-up to the 2016 election.
Billie Eilish has two Oscars of her own now, and she's the youngest double winner in history. Her most recent win occurred in a packed Dolby Theatre without so much as an allusion to the (still ongoing!) pandemic, and the In Memoriam piece was performed by Andrea Bocelli. It was fine, as was Eilish's rendition of her winning song.
I didn't think about either as I fell asleep.