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Oscar Winners

February 27, 2012 by · Comments Off on Oscar Winners 

Oscar Winners, Octavia Spencer with the Oscar for best actress in a supporting role for “The Help”, left, and Meryl Streep with the Oscar for best actress in a leading role for “The Iron Lady” pose at the Governors Ball following the 84th Academy Awards on Sunday, Feb. 26, in the Hollywood section of Los Angeles.

From the return of well-liked host Billy Crystal, for his ninth tour of duty, to the sweep of the ceremony’s top awards by “The Artist” – a black-and-white silent movie celebrating Hollywood history, which won for Best Actor, Best Film, and Best Director – the evening tripped heavily down memory lane.

Veteran actors such as Christopher Plummer and Meryl Streep, who was up for her 17th nomination and took home her third statuette, lent to Tinseltown an aura of timelessness.

“My feeling is we live in a time where looking forward is very discomfiting,” composer Charles Bernstein said by cellphone as he mingled his way from the ceremony to the Governor’s Ball on Sunday night. “So we are looking backwards, and frankly nobody does that better than the movies.”

The music of this year’s Best Film nominees underscores his point, he says. “All the film scores are like musical time machines,” says Mr. Bernstein. Whether set in 1929 Hollywood, Paris in the early 20th century, the cold-war era, or World War I, he notes, “they took us back to other times and places.”

Nostalgia often overlooks the messy reality of another era, says Derek Burrill, associate professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California, Riverside, who notes with chagrin that his only miscalculation on his Oscar-party ballot was in the Best Actress category.

“I had picked Viola Davis for ‘The Help,’ ” he says. But he’s not surprised she didn’t win, saying that the movie was outside Hollywood’s comfort zone this year, despite what he calls its whitewashing of the civil rights era in the Deep South.

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