I’m a movie junky. I can’t see enough of them. So of course I love the Academy Awards television special. I never miss it. And in preparation I try to see all the movies with nominations for Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Actress.
Unfortunately I didn’t quite make that goal for the 2014 movies. I didn’t see Two Nights, One Night for which Marion Cotillard had a best actress nomination. That movie is still on my to-see list along with the documentary shorts.
I also looked forward to seeing Neil Patrick Harris on this year’s award show. I loved him as Doogie, so I was sure I’d love him Sunday night. And I wasn’t disappointed at least with his opening joke and opening song and dance number. So sorry Jack Black interrupted it. I did think, however, that he looked a little embarrassed trying to emulate Birdman’s undies scene. Anything to spice up the show, right?
Doogie’s opening joke in welcoming the audience to 2014’s movies as the best and the whitest seemed to open the show up for political comment. Some of my favorites were:
Patricia Arquette’s comments about equal rights for women something I’ve fought since the 1960s when I hired into the aerospace industry with a college degree and got a nonexempt classification.
“We have fought for everybody else’s equal rights. It’s our time to have wage equality once and for all and women’s right for everyone in America,” she said.
Plus I loved Meryl Streep’s reaction:
Other comments that I resonated with were about immigration from director, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, while receiving the best picture award for Birdman; LGBT rights and suicide awareness from The Imitation Game’s” screenwriter Graham Moore who related his own story to Alan Turing’s. He revealed his attempted suicide when he was 16 years old and dedicated his award to that kid out there who feels like she’s weird or she’s different or she doesn’t fit in anywhere and urged everyone to stay weird, stay different.
I am grateful to Moore for being open about teenage suicide and depression and to Crisis Hotline: Veteran’s Press 1 documentary short producer, Dana Perry, and her inspiring words. She said we should talk about suicide out loud as she dedicated the award to her son Evan Perry, who committed suicide at age 15.
I dedicate this post to my son Paul Sharples who took his life at age 27. I am thankful that we are finally bringing light to the subjects of mental illness and suicide. I applaud those brave enough to speak out about all these important topics at this year’s Academy Awards.
Our son Paul who died in 1999
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