“There’s a Mistake!”: The 2017 Oscars Gaffe as Social Drama
The now-infamous Best Picture mix-up at the 89th Oscars ceremony was a breach of trust that constituted a whole new spectacle tacked on to the end of an otherwise lackluster affair. It defied all expectations among pundits, executives, and cinephiles (those arbiters of emplotment), baffled millions of viewers, and, in the universe of online think pieces to follow, carried symbolic weight among the world of liberal critique. Contemporary explorations of social drama and genre focus on the forms of narration that help both social actors and critics make sense of political theater. Yet not even the melodramas of terrorism or the civil discourses of war could rival the cultural shockwaves that the mistake would inspire in a society so sensitive to changes in our collective cultural scripts. If my hyperbole here sounds inappropriate, then so might my analysis of this gaffe as a sort of miniscule social drama. Yet it is my turn to the realm of the consumer-capitalist low mimetic arena of the Oscars, among the nation’s most arbitrary cultural cornerstones, that should disrupt the too-serious considerations of how social drama applies solely to political theater. The multidimensionality of responses surrounding the Oscars catastrophe indeed point to contemporary social concerns that, inadvertently or not, the moment came to crystallize. I thus contend that certain aspects of theory on social drama and genre are easily applicable to low mimetic cultural blunders.
To borrow from Wagner-Pacifici’s analysis of the Moro social drama, the Oscars gaffe can be interpreted on the levels of the following questions: “What symbolic-aesthetic expectations jumped into place, what expectations were not met, and which protagonists were successful in claiming victory for their plot over others?” (Wagner-Pacifici, 1986:8). Furthermore, we can see how, despite its low stakes (and mimesis!), the mix-up came to constitute a miniature social drama within a larger, more multifarious drama that revealed the “ongoing but normally indistinct social structures and relations” and thus conformed to at least one aspect of Turner’s definition of social drama (Turner, qtd. in Wagner-Pacifici, 1986:9). It is through these narrow elements of the evolving definition of social drama through which I will treat this recent incident. Therefore, it is imperative to consider how the (potential) interpretive world surrounding the Oscars mishap can be more fully understood not through strict adherence to Turner’s or Wagner-Pacifici’s hermeneutics, but instead through a consideration of social drama-as-referent.
The Oscars sit at the crossroads of intersecting social, political, and aesthetic trends and variables of contemporary American culture. Both the Oscars telecast itself and the constellations of branding, coverage, journalism, and revenue that surround it place it firmly within a constructed zeitgeist substantiated by the continuing social and cultural impact of the American film industry. As such, academic analyses of the Oscars as a form of a media event—namely, a contest—both imbue the ceremony and recognize the intensity with which it encapsulates contemporary social and cultural concerns under a veneer of spectacle (see Dayan and Katz, 1992). The annually aired, meticulously planned, and gratuitously glitzy affair is thus intense with “intertextuality of the written, spoken, and gestured world” (Wagner-Pacifici, 1986:15). It is the dynamic congregation of these cultural texts—including the films up for contention at these awards—in one mass mediated form that calls for an immediate interpretation of history merely through discourse (Wagner-Pacifici, 16).
Firstly, what symbolic-aesthetic expectations of the Best Picture reveal presaged the actual catastrophe? The Oscars themselves, especially the winner of Best Picture, are expected to possess an implicitly political aura; such a widely covered event must exhibit its cultural relevance through the films the awarding body recognizes. After two years of suffering public relations nightmares due to #OscarsSoWhite backlash, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences took concrete steps to diversify their membership and champion initiatives to increase access for filmmakers of marginalized identities. The 2017 Oscars—especially given the context of the current political moment, wherein the 2016 presidential election widely shocked the Hollywood community—was expected to, as usual, vaguely extol the virtues of neoliberal acceptance and inclusivity under the typical veneer of Hollywood glamour.
In addition, pre-Oscars discourse often examines which film has the “it factor” to deserve the Best Picture honor at that precise cultural moment. This year, “the perception from the moment the two films premiered in the same week [in] September was that Moonlight and La La Land were locked in a two-way race to the top” (Adams, 2017). The mainstream media’s establishment of the Best Picture “race” as a charged competition between opposing camps surely acted in the service of trying to reaffirm the Oscar’s cultural relevance. The flurry of “isms” and sensitive cultural topics (race, gender, sexuality) at the center of the 2017 derby only helped the perpetuation of this melodrama; indeed, a “blizzard of pre-Oscar think pieces” maintained “how La La Land’s victory over Moonlight would have represented a triumph of Tinseltown escapism over a movie about ‘the real world’” (Adams, 2017). This binaristic framework—the construction of competition between the dreamy, white-populated, Los Angeles-set musical La La Land versus the simple, low-budget, Black- and LGBT-populated drama Moonlight—was easily justifiable given the films’ thematic divergence. Within the critical community, Moonlight emerged as the favorite, but the wider social expectation was that La La Land would triumph, and some critics bemoaned that its victory would thus symbolically perform the victory of white, privileged escapism over a film dealing solely with characters of marginalized identities.
The expectations surrounding the ceremony are not arbitrary; they are the elements that converge to establish Oscars-, and indeed awards show-as-genre, establishing protocol that at once satisfy the viewer, sufficiently praise the film industry, and withstand the constraints of consumer-driven capitalism in order to generate revenue. Here the dimensions of the symbolic order coincide with the age-old strictures of Hollywood decorum, exorbitant production value, and the demands of the marketplace to create a ceremony that must adhere to what are now “genre-driven expectations” (Smith, 2010:32). But the mundanities of competition in this ceremony—the eighty-ninth of its kind—had, by many accounts, “never been illustrated as dramatically” as it had during the gaffe; it was indeed the hyperrealized performance of competition (Adams, 2017, emphasis added). When Faye Dunaway mistakenly announced La La Land to be the Best Picture winner due to an envelope mix-up, it was not until the mistake was revealed that the literal and symbolic expectations of that revelatory moment seemed to be violated. The sudden change was so unexpected that many critics saw the drama as a sort of cosmic scheme: “events conspired to produce a literal handoff from one film’s crew to another” (Adams, 2017). Thus reviewers were not unaware of the theatrics of the moment: “the metaphorical transfer of the Oscar from Chazelle’s hands to Jenkins’ added a powerful symbolic dimension, as if a torch was being passed along with a trophy” (Adams, 2017). Appeals to the poetics of the shocking moment only came to reify the melodramatic frames that had defined the Oscars race. For “this time, against all odds—and in a stunning reversal of fortunes that unfolded live on stage with a dramatic mix-up of envelopes—[Moonlight] did win” (Hunter, 2017). Framing Moonlight’s victory as improbable, here, is an indirectly reflexive buying in to the theatrics and staging that surround the Oscars each year, not to mention the added drama of the envelope gaffe.
Moonlight might have won Best Picture, but who ultimately won the narrative? Critical satisfaction with the actual outcome of the blunder seemed to deem it a symbolic success for the value of inclusivity; as one critic put it, “Now more than ever, we need not escapist fantasies but truthful, honest, authentic, and diverse stories of human experience” (Hunter, 2017). By the logic that it was the Academy’s duty to reward the more “authentic” film, it would seem as though the drama of the gaffe ultimately heightened the surprise of Moonlight’s win, ensuring that the “underdog” protagonists could dominate the narrative through claiming literal and symbolic victory. Yet much of the post-gaffe discourse focused on the La La Land team’s gracious admission of defeat, only further perpetuating the constructed conflict set up between the producers of both films. Tweets and think pieces abound praised the honesty of La La Land producer Jordan Horowitz, who first called attention to the mistake; “he became the closest thing the Oscars can get to a folk hero” (Merry and Bever, 2017). This interpretive focus away from the pure fact of Moonlight’s triumph instead indulged in more symbolism and theatrics.
Here a critical engagement with Jacobs and Smith’s concept of irony comes into play. To the extent that irony-as-genre “allows for reflexivity, difference, tolerance, adjustments to intersubjectvity, and forms of healthy critique,” then coverage of Oscars mistake should have adopted this interpretive framework (Jacobs and Smith, 1997:74). The irony inherent in the Best Picture conundrum is that it did not change what was on track to occur: the statuette was still awarded to the properly elected film. The theatrics of intertexuality and cultural anxiety engendered multivocalism and self-reflexivity, but at the necessary cost of dramatizing (read: trivializing) the potential poignancy of an historic cultural moment. Thus the more profound sense of irony here is that Moonlight’s triumph was itself incapable of any change on the symbolic level. Irony therefore becomes an inadvertent constitutive element of the post-Oscars discourse. Opinions published on progressive online news sources like The Huffington Post and Panjiba made it clear that Moonlight’s triumph did not absolve the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences of its past and present bigotries and injustices, nor did it “fix our societal woes” (TK, 2017). Why, then, further attempt to contextualize and narrativize the event?
Much of the “discursive fabric” of Oscars season, and the symbolic characteristics of the telecast’s denouement, was, of course, conjured by mass media (urban, neoliberal pundits and critics in particular) (Wagner-Pacifici, 1986:287). But Moonlight’s win only underscored the need for further progress to be made in the film industry with regards to the representation of diverse narratives in Hollywood: as one reviewer put it, “There are incredible works of art by people of color produced every single year, and it’s a war to get them to be recognized. That war is not over just because one battle was won. That victory is a critical and wonderful victory, but hardly the end of the line” (TK, 2017). The language of warfare, here, frames the already-charged moment of Moonlight’s rushed coronation as one call to arms among many; paradigms of conflict-ridden, if not completely binaristic, melodrama persist. As the Oscars, the mistaken announcement, and Moonlight’s triumph “did not take place in a vacuum,” this year’s ceremony has maintained its intertextual dynamism and endless levels of interpretability (TK, 2017).
In this context, genre guess also exhibits how unexpected outcomes only serve to reinforce generic assumption. If the gaffe performed the affective power of competition’s resolution, it was also read as a meta-comment on the neoliberal values of inclusivity and unity. The New York Times’ chief film critic A.O. Scott’s optimistic take on the Oscars championed “the messiness of the finale” as “the theme and the true political message of the night, which was inclusiveness” (Scott, 2017). By Turner’s standards, this saccharine pronouncement certainly points towards reconciliation of social drama rather than schism. But this formulation itself is still rooted deeply in liberal ideology, and imposes narrative closure through a presupposition of the self-reflexive political dimension of the gaffe, and of the Oscars overall. Here, an urban-neoliberal journalistic interpretation of the gaffe unsurprisingly invokes the political context of the contemporary moment (inaugurated by an election that certainly flipped many cultural scripts and was marked by an aversion to inclusivity and a culture of respect) to augment, qualify, and color the drama of an otherwise hermetic (albeit unintentional) moment of live television. Scott’s subsequent concession that this evinces how “[i]nstitutions no longer function according to established rules and patterns” charges the Oscars and other low mimetic media events as cultural harbingers, or, at least, more malleable than the rigid narrative structures with which we treat them (Scott, 2017). It is this retrospective framing that confirms how the uncertainties of genre guessing allow “readings [to] propel events down one track and not another,” though the ambiguities of how genre politics might inform any event can remain contested (Smith, 2010:34).
I have hopefully demonstrated how loosely employing some theoretical concepts to a memorable cultural moment reveals the multiplicity of miniature social dramas that inform the rhetorical structure of non-political media events. Yet even this impulse to cast roles, detect plot, and eke the theatrics out of the Oscars gaffe is the product of the comfort of retroactive emplotment. If the blunder, and the discourse surrounding its unexpectedness and effects on symbolic orders of meaning, is incoherent with Turner’s conception of social drama, for instance, then my thesis might at least be redeemed through its reflexivity. My unintentional engagement in metacommentary might indeed be the ironic force that legitimizes close academic analysis of all annals of popular culture: in a sociopolitical milieu where pure aesthetics and rampant falsehoods are inextricable from “unmediated, untransformed, uninterpreted ‘reality,’” keen self-awareness may act as an invitation to see theatrics and guessing as the substance of all of American society (Wagner-Pacifici, 1986:293).
Citations
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Dargis, Manohla, Wesley Morris, and A. O. Scott. “‘Moonlight,’ ‘La La Land’ and What
an Epic Oscars Fail Really Says.” The New York Times. The New York Times,
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Dayan, Daniel, and Elihu Katz. Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History.
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Merry, Stephanie, and Lindsey Bever. “‘La La Land’ Producer Jordan Horowitz Is the
Truth-teller We Need Right Now.” The Washington Post. WP Company, 27 Feb.
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Reynolds, Daniel. “11 Records ‘Moonlight’ Broke at the Oscars.” The Advocate. Here
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Smith, Philip. “Why War? Theorizing the Role of Culture and Civil Discourse,” from
Why War?: The Cultural Logic of Iraq, the Gulf War, and Suez. pp. 3-34.
Chicago: U of Chicago, 2010. Print.
TK. “The Lessons We Must Learn From the 2017 Academy Awards.” Pajiba. Pajiba, 27
Feb. 2017. Web. 10 Apr. 2017.
Wagner-Pacifici, Robin Erica. “Introduction,” from The Moro Morality Play: Terrorism
as Social Drama. pp. 1-21. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1986. Print.
———————————— “Conclusion,” from The Moro Morality Play: Terrorism
as Social Drama. pp. 272-294. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1986. Print.