Last year, actor Marc Maron brought the author Chuck Klosterman as a guest on his Wtf podcast. The two have discussed many things (including the new Klosterman’s book, But what’s going on if we are wrong?that he was there to promote), but one of them was sport – and the particular thrill they offer to the public. Sports events, argued Klosterman, promises that the most dramatic things: an unknown result. Unlike other widely regarded events – the half -time show of the Super Bowl, Grammys, Oscars – The main argument for the sale of sporting events is that their ends are, by definition, unpredictable. In them, anything can happen.
GOOD. Although you can say a lot about the Oscars on Sunday, you cannot say that the sumptuous price show was predictable. The 89th annual academies’ award ceremony, in order, brought a mixture of confusion and shock and full pleasure to its viewers while Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway joined forces to announce the best winner of the film and went, because of a flow behind the scenes, to announce the bad film. Chaos – and really, really good television – have been made aware. The tired East lengths were summoned in their salons in their rooms, on the ground that “Ohmygodyou’Vegottoseethis”. Twitter broke out of jokes – about Bonnie and Clyde being again, about Schrödinger’s envelopeAbout “Dewey Bat Truman” an Oscars update. It was late on Sunday evening, and the unexpected had occurred in the most unexpected way, and everything was, like my colleague Adam Serwer Summary perfectly,, Moonlit.
The whole thing was also a reminder of the rarity on the part of the public so that the public is rare for the public to see collectively something that is really unexpected. It was live television, with all the potential human error that live television can bring – chaos, correction, drama, thanks – to its depths but also to its heights. What happened on Sunday has reached roughly the same mechanisms that gave the world all these memes of left shark, and these tattoos “nevertheless, they persisted”, and the term “dysfunction of the wardrobe”: the Oscars mentioned the care by surprise. The best image Flub has become sadly famous overnight for roughly the same reason that its predecessors have done: it is extremely rare, in the very produced world of mass media, so that expectations are thwarted.
We know so much nowadays. We are actually Of course So many things – Humanwood -and -priced politics and prices and the correct ingredients of Guacamole. During a time when Google did so instantly accessible information, knowledge has become a default presence in American cultural life. Oooh, this show is supposed to be excellent. This film is supposed to be terrible. The poke bowls are the thing now. The major cultural events, the fabric of the grammys and the Emmys and the Oscars, are in many ways the culmination of this posture: we know precisely what to expect. We can point out, as they play, that everything went as planned, because we knew from the start what they were supposed to be; We can also make this report with a note of disappointment. There is little dull things after all, that expectations met.
In this context, the Beatty-Dunaway-Ooscars Flub was a gift for the public (and perhaps to future notes in ABC live). It was also the point of Chuck Klosterman towards Maron, both proven and proven. Here is the logic everything that is the happening of the live sporting event, applied to the highest, the most ceremonial and most focused rituals. It was a powerful thing: for a moment in the United States which so often holds for granted that “reality” is something that can be produced and experienced, the Oscar Flub of the best image was a powerful reminder that reality always has its own production values.
Yes, the Flub was also many other things: too bad for MoonlightWho deserved so richly to win the best film and whose victory threatens to be overshadowed by the error and its dramas that followed. A shame for La la Landof which the producers delivered their acceptance speeches before learning that their “victory” had been announced by mistake. A day in the field for professional photographers and not, who took photos of reaction on stage and behind the scenes and among the celebrity public. A moment of grace, as La la LandThe producer, Jordan Horowitz, met the cheeky suggestion of Jimmy Kimmel that everyone should get an Oscar with a disfiguring “I will be really delighted to give this to my friends from my friends Moonlight.“And also, of course: a metaphor for slings and arrows of the 2016 elections. A ratification of the current obsession of pop culture with Alternative realities. A vehicle for many, a lot of jokes At the detriment of Steve Harvey.
Above all, however, it was an end of touch that happened, by the appearance of things, in the most winding way: a shock that did not come to the hands of a wise producer, but in the hands of the original reality. Twist Endings may have been a decisive characteristic of the events of 2016 and early 2017 – the reality TV show, which was the 2016 presidential campaign found that its favorite and its main expert defeated in the last episode; The 2016 World Series presented another victorious outsider; The Super Bowl Li found the expected winners, but only after his match projected himself in overtime. Their twists and turns, however, took place in events whose ends were, by definition, unknown. The Oscars were a shocking ceremony. It was the wait, thwarted convincingly.
And so: it was powerful in a way that little can be, more, in a world that knows so much and waits, in the end, so little. In a test for Screen Last year, Erin Whitney argued that “ours is a culture built on anticipation, where the films end with scenes teasing the next episode of the franchise, which never allowing a moment of rest to absorb what we have just seen. We are talking about films from years before making his debut, we analyze the twists and turns of the TV intrigue and plan albums for years before hearing a single song. ” This whole process led, explained Whitney, to “the slow death of surprise”.
The best proof of this can be the fact that marketing specialists have recently focused on surprising consumers – capitalism making its best to maintain this particular type of magic. The abandoned album. The surprise television show. The trailer secretly produced. The live television comedy live and everything that could happen. They try to capture what Klosterman transmitted to Maron Wtf Interview: “Sport is a link with authentic alignment”, the author put it to the actor. “It is not something that someone can control or script. It is this unknown thing.” He added: “There is something really interesting in” No one knows “, because you no longer feel that.”
You do not do it, until you do it – until this error on the most visible and most scripted Hollywood stages of all Hollywood stages. Sunday’s best image flub is not only already emblematic; It is also the subject of conspiracy theories from a wide range of truth of the Oscars that suggest that, among other things, the error was the result of President Trump demanding revenge on Jimmy Kimmel; or a farce fired by Kimmel himself; Or Leonardo DiCaprio’s dark relations. They can have a point; We do not know, for the moment, how the bad card has entered the hands of Warren Beatty. What they forget, however, is what Klosterman knows and what all these audiences delighted on Sunday knew with him: that the best conspirator is often the great capacity of people to make important and dramatic mistakes.
