Back in January, Damien Chazelle’s La La Land made Golden Globes history by winning seven out of its seven nominations, the most the award show had ever seen. Now, with 14 Oscar nods, La La Land is tied with All About Eve (1950) and Titanic (1997) for most Oscar nominations. Does it deserve all this recognition?
ack in January, Damien Chazelle’s La La Land made Golden Globes history by winning seven out of its seven nominations, the most the award show had ever seen. Now, with 14 Oscar nods, La La Land is tied with All About Eve (1950) and Titanic (1997) for most Oscar nominations. The film is nominated for best picture, director, actor, actress, original screenplay, cinematography, costume design, film editing, original score, original song (twice, for both “City of Stars” and “Audition [The Fools Who Dream]), production design, sound editing and sound mixing.
Does it deserve all this recognition?
We’ve all felt the tides turn, suddenly flipping from “La La Land was incredible! Everyone should watch it” to “well, it wasn’t actually that great”. I find myself in the latter category, for many reasons. The biggest is that it’s 2017, so let’s face it, musicals are no longer a risk, regardless of what the team behind La La Land continues to insist.
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Ever since the revolution that was Glee, musicals have been steadily creeping onto our airwaves and into our cinemas. Glee itself was on television for six seasons, and while most can agree the show dwindled in quality, nothing like it had been seen on TV since the 1982 show, Fame. Glee helped to make musicals cool again.
Now the CW has critically acclaimed, musical romantic-comedy Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, which has both won and been nominated for Golden Globes and Emmys. ABC had their own musical television show, Galavant, which ran from 2015-2016. NBC and Fox also helped to continue the trend of musicals on TV, with NBC’s The Sound of Music Live!, Peter Pan Live!, The Wiz Live!, and Hairspray Live!, and Fox’s Grease: Live and its 2016 remake of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Almost all of the live performances had over 10 million viewers, if not more.
There also have been plenty of musicals on the silver screen since the start of the decade, from Broadway-to-film adaptations like Les Miserables, Annie, Into the Woods, and The Last Five Years, to originals, like Pitch Perfect, Sing Street, and even quasi-musicals like Magic Mike and Lonely Island parody Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping.
With Hamilton raking in 3 million dollars a week, even Broadway is back to being cool. Let me say it again, musicals are no longer a risk, especially when they don’t have much more to offer than leads who don’t really know how to sing or dance.
Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling are great actors and more importantly to some, have even better brand recognition, but they are not singers or dancers. Yes, Stone once served a stint on Broadway in Cabaret as Sally Bowles, but her singing fell flat in all songs aside from “Audition”- where she admittedly soared- which sounded as if it was the only song written in her range.
The late Debbie Reynolds had no dance experience before her iconic performance in Singin’ in the Rain, but she would train so hard that her feet bled. Of course, I’m not expecting that from Stone or Gosling- though there are still plenty of dancers who push themselves to those heights- but did no one give Gosling the “Energy-Must-Shoot-Through-The-Fingertips” talk that musical theatre dancers are so familiar with while in rehearsal? Judging by the lack of energy he gives everything above the waist and below the neck during the dance numbers, it doesn’t seem like they did. While him working for months on learning to play the piano shows great dedication, it’s still a musical, and your ability to sing, dance and act at the same time matters, regardless of who you are and what else you have to do.
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It was a letdown, to say the least, and this still isn’t taking into the movie’s narrative issues. Among other problems, Stone’s character is essentially a symbolic vessel- The New Yorker put it best when they observed that Chazelle “turns Mia into an absolute cipher, giving her nothing whatsoever to talk about [...] Chazelle is interested in Mia not as a character or as a person but as an ornament, a symbol of a kind of dream and a kind of success.”
Still, it’s difficult to keep from applauding their efforts entirely. Making a film is never easy, and neither is putting on a musical, so combining the two is understandably an even bigger challenge. So sure, it does deserve a little recognition, but not as much as it’s currently getting.
So let’s finally admit to ourselves, since we know the Academy won’t: La La Land wasn’t revolutionary. (asw)
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