The day after the 90th Academy Awards, host Jimmy Kimmel filled everyone in on some amusing behind-the-scene anecdotes on his show ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’. His mother, he said, spent the weekend baking Oscar trophy-shaped cookies, which she smuggled into the ceremony in Tupperware boxes and passed around, including one to Steven Spielberg. “…which just goes to show you that even when you’re 50 years old and hosting the Academy Awards, you can still be embarrassed by mommy at work,” he joked. That wasn’t the only glittering ‘mommy’ moment on the night, it must be noted; just enough to bring some sheen to an otherwise painfully predictable night.
Perhaps it went largely unnoticed but the Oscars this year had some serious ‘mom power’, for better or worse. In a number of nominated films, mother-daughter relationships formed the crux of the story. Both the women who took home the Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress trophies — Frances McDormand and Allison Janney , did, in fact, win for playing two devastatingly flawed mothers. In another coincidence, it is for donning the mother hat in Greta Gerwig’s assured Lady Bird that Laurie Metcalf earned a well-deserved place in the Best Supporting Actress nominee list.
All three well carved-out roles defied the generic on-screen mother figures, several times removed from the “ mere paas maa hai ” mould, subverting the trope of glorious motherhood. For one, they were less-than-likeable, in varying degrees.
Not quite ideal
McDormand’s lead role as a grieving, foul-mouthed, justice-seeking mother, Mildred Hayes, in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is heartbreaking her cause is noble, but her methods are not. She wants to find her dead teenage daughter’s rapist and killer, even as she struggles to be a decent mother to her quiet, supportive, schoolgoing son.
She hires three billboards to challenge and shame the local police, especially its revered chief, and doesn’t care that the town hates her for it. Hayes may not have been quite the ideal mother when her daughter was alive, telling her off for wanting to borrow her car the night she was killed, which perhaps inadvertently put her in danger, but now that she is dead, Mildred will not rest easy. There are fewer nuances to the motherhood explored in I, Tonya , in which director Craig Gillespie and writer Steven Rogers present a mother Kimmel called “one of the worst moms in movie history.” The film tells the true story of the famously talented American figure-skater Tonya Harding whose promising career was cut short by a controversy involving an attack on an opponent orchestrated by her ex-husband more than 20 years ago.
At the centre of the story is Tonya’s highly volatile relationship with her abusive, violent mother, played by Allison. Styled on the real-life LaVona Golden, Allison said in an interview that she portrayed her as mean as the real-life Tonya and her ex-husband Jeff Gillooly said she was. “…I represented her side, how much it cost her to get her (Tonya) to the rink. I filled her up with her truth,” she said.
Laurie Metcalf in Lady Bird
On screen, we see Allison’s character fill the frame with virtually no redeeming qualities, drinking, smoking, and swearing in the stands while her young daughter practices in the rink. LaVona is always ready with a hard whack and a curse, taunting and breaking her daughter’s spirit, constantly reminding her how much she had to toil as a waitress, to finance her skating lessons, justifying her behaviour with “I made you a champion, knowing you would hate me for it. That’s the sacrifice a mother makes. I wish I had a mother like me, instead of nice. Nice gives you s***. I didn’t like my mother either, so what, I gave you a gift.”
We encounter this refrain — of the sacrificing but harsh, short-on-resources parent — in Lady Bird as well. “Can I buy this magazine? It’s only three dollars,” asks teenager Christine, or ‘Lady Bird’, as she calls herself, played deliciously by Saoirse Ronan. “You can read it at the public library,” answers her mother. “But I want to read it in bed,” Lady Bird insists. “That’s something that rich people do. We are not rich people,” her mother shoots back. The restrained Laurie is remarkable as an overburdened, passive aggressive but ultimately loving mother to her confused daughter who is desperate to locate an identity for herself which is removed from her family and her surroundings in Sacramento.
On working through a mother-daughter relationship in her solo directorial debut, Greta said in an interview on the red carpet just before the Oscars: “Well, to me it’s the most complex, rich, beautiful relationship that there is and if you stop any woman on the street and say, hey, how is it with you and your mom, it is going to be a really long answer, and I feel like you should make movies about things that have really long, complicated answers.” Allison and Laurie, have, in fact, played mothers on the small screen as well — to more comedic purposes, of course, in the television shows Mom and The Big Bang Theory respectively.
Also worth a mention is the poignant The Florida Project , mostly snubbed by the Oscar committee, save for a Best Supporting Actor nomination for Willem Dafoe. Here, director Sean Baker casts a newcomer, Bria Vinaite, to play a young, defiant, carefree mother to six-year-old Moonee, struggling with the responsibilities of being a parent. Baker has said he wanted to explore the mother-daughter angle as a relationship spilling into sibling territory.
All in a lock
Daniel Day-Lewis’ meticulously played dressmaker character Reynolds Woodcock in Phanton Thread , displays some eyebrow-raising love for his dead mother, whose lock of hair he carries around with him on his person. The first dress he stitched, all on his own, was his mother’s wedding dress. He also makes it a point to tell his lover that she should be carrying her own mother’s photograph with her.
Frances McDormand as Mildred Hayes in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
And then there were the real-life moms. Composer Alexandre Desplat, while collecting an Oscar for Best Original Score for The Shape of Water thanked his mother who was, as old as the Academy at 90, while actor Gary Oldman dedicated his own Best Actor award for The Darkest Hour to his mother, “99 years young”, and asked her to “put the kettle on – I’m bringing Oscar home.”
Age was a recurring theme as well, especially with the appearance of strong female icons such as 89-year-old French filmmaker Agnès Varda — who Greta listed as her primary inspiration — making a case for inclusivity, gender equality and feminism. Actress Eva Marie Saint, who presented the award for Best Costume Design, joked that at 93, she was “older than the Academy”, while 86-year-old Rita Mareno cut an inspiring figure as she presented the Oscar for the Best Foreign Language Film in a standout outfit she wore at the Academy Awards way back in 1962, the year she won Best Supporting Actress for West Side Story .
Actress and comedian Tiffany Haddish, however, got the best line of all. Calling out to Meryl Streep seated in the front row in a laugh-out-loud moment, she said: “I want you to be my mama one day.” Don’t we all?
The freelance writer is a lover of cakes, chai, bookshops and good yarns.
