The Academy Award For Grotesquerie

Daniel D’Addario is looking forward to tonight’s “Best Makeup and Hairstyling” award – “the place where Oscar honors those films unlikely to get love anywhere else” and “a great reminder that Hollywood isn’t solely defined by its most tasteful work”:

To their credit, the makeup branch of the academy finds great work in movies that the rest of the academy, to its own credit, overlooks. The Wolfman certainly deserved no Oscars for acting, directing or writing. But the moment at the 2011 Oscars during which presenter Cate Blanchett couldn’t bear to look at the footage and announced, “That’s gross,” was revelatory. How many performances are so viscerally affecting that an awards presenter would look away and say, “That’s moving”?

We’d really lose something if the best makeup category were filled out, each year, by whichever of the three best picture nominees had the most good-looking hairdos and foundation. Best makeup is a valuable reminder not merely that Hollywood, which brings out its marquee biopics and historical dramas at year’s end for awards time, is founded on cheap and visceral thrills. It’s a reminder, too, that those projects we’re inclined to dismiss out-of-hand employed people who didn’t know the movie was destined to be dismissed by the blogging class. They wanted not necessarily be the best but to scare, to delight, and to convince.

Update from a reader:

The nominees for Best Makeup for Dallas Buyers Club had a makeup budget of only $250. The film is remarkable in its technical quality on a budget. It took years to get this film made and the dedication and skill by the filmmakers to shoot on the cheap has much to do with the accomplishment.