Influence, Imitation, and the Oscars
Backwards and Forwards at the Academy Awards
I don’t write or read reviews. I basically agree with what
wrote in a recent post, Substack’s Cinema Community has arrived—I have to admit I don’t find reviews that useful — or even that fun to read; but we’ve been trained to rely on them for discussions of cinema culture. I love great writing about movies as much as anyone else, but I generally don’t read reviews until after I see the movies.
Thumbs up, thumbs down, five stars, whatever, I don’t care. Talk to me about the editing or costume design or development, now I’m interested. Same goes for most awards shows.
I make an exception for the Oscars, because they’re awarded by people who make movies, and thus presumably know something about not only what’s good, but why. I don’t particularly care who wins, but I find the list of nominees interesting, since each department gets to nominate within their own field.
And of course I would be remiss if I didn’t suggest to newer readers my most popular Too Much Film School video essay, The Best Picture Winner The Academy Doesn’t Want You to Know About. It’s a modest proposal for how to improve the Oscars ceremony by bringing back an award from the very first Academy Awards.
The horserace of it all is fascinating, too, which is why I follow
’s Prestige Junky reporting at The return of mudslinging in Oscar campaigns is both sad and predictable—
It’s also healthy to keep things in perspective. In his Oscar nominations post,
wrote: “Snubs? Snubs are bullshit. Almost 10,000 people voting are not being withholding as a group… or doing anything as a group.”So while the competition is fierce, I don’t have a dog in the fight. Thus why I haven’t really written much about my lack of opinion of the Oscars this year. But last night, the influence of the Academy Awards on popular culture came to my mind in a strange, round about way…
Backwards and Forwards
REM’s “Imitation of Life” is my favorite music video for a song I don’t like.
The song (from 2001’s Reveal) is kind of annoying; I never listen to it all the way through on the radio. But when I watch the video—as I randomly decided to do last night—I am always enthralled. Tl;dw: It appears to be a small moment (less than 30 seconds) of one party with dozens of guests. As the music plays, the camera zooms in and picks out individual participants, whose actions and even words move in sync with the song, oftentimes while moving backwards.
I genuinely don’t know how they did it. In the modern era, I would assume each segment was filmed separately and then stitched together digitally, but it really doesn’t look like that to me. It looks real, which would be a nightmare to film. For context, watch this video from YouTuber erdavila, who managed to piece together the entire 27 second sequence—
They also created a side-by-side view, showing the music video with the context of the larger scene (sans music, I assume to avoid a copyright strike)—
Yet despite my best efforts, I can’t find confirmation or denial that it was actually shot in a single take. According to the New York Press, director Garth Jennings used 12 Super 8 cameras to film the scene, but that still doesn’t tell me if the scene was filmed all it once. If you have some inside information, please leave a comment below.)
While I didn’t find the information I wanted, in my research I gleaned another interesting bit of trivia…
Imitation’s Inspiration
Declaring that the music video was a “dead, dead form,” REM front man Michael Stipe sought inspiration from the experimental art film scene. The band decided to pay homage to Tango, a Polish film which won the Best Animated Short Oscar in 1982. (NSFW Warning: the film contains nudity.)
Like “Imitation of Life,” Tango is one, continuous shot. But honestly, the similarities end there. Tango is a static shot, while Imitation pans, scans, zooms in and out. Tango’s characters repeat their actions, but Imitation’s don’t; rather, the video repeats by scrubbing back and forth. Tango layers complexity over time, whereas Imitation begins with a confusing mass of people before isolating the elements.
What Tango actually reminded me of was one of my favorite episodes of Bluey, “Handstand” (excerpted below).
Turns out, it’s not a coincidence. Bluey’s creators actually were paying homage to a 40-year-old Polish short. And it wasn’t even the first TV show to reference Tango! The Drew Carey Show did the same in 1998—
Nor was “Imitation of Life” the first music video to try it. Green Day copied (more successfully, I might add) it in their third single off 1997’s Nimrod, “Redundant.”
So, we’ve got a children’s cartoon, a sitcom, and two music videos (and probably more I’m not even aware of!), all referencing a short animated movie from a Soviet Bloc country. And keep in mind, the early 80s were a terrible time for discovering shorts. There was no YouTube yet, but it was also way past the time where there was any theatrical market for shorts. Tango was too racy for television, even MTV. How would anybody even know about it?
Because 53 million Americans, the third most popular Oscars ever, watched a man with an unpronounceable name playfully shoo Matt Dillan away so he could finish his acceptance speech.
The Oscars matter because, at their best, they expose audiences to wonderful films from around the world they might not otherwise have even heard of.
At the Oscars
Speaking of Best Animated Short, my friend Tim Reckart was nominated for that same award in 2012 for his wonderful film Head Over Heels—
If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to attend the Oscars, check out this interview I did with Tim—
RIP David Lynch
Apropos of nothing above, I already miss David Lynch.
