Oscars and mothers

Sunday evening at the Oscars ceremony, we were far from the great discomfort caused by the slap of Will Smith to Chris Rock last year. Which did not prevent him from getting the best actor statuette for his performance in The Williams Method where he played the father of famous tennis players Venus and Serena.

No, it was time to pay tribute to the mums, who received all the flowers while the dads, without necessarily receiving the pot, were conspicuous by their absence in the speeches of thanks. Of Best Supporting Actor winner Ke Huy Quan, who tearfully held up his trophy and said, “Mom, I won an Oscar! to directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert ofEverything Everywhere All at Once (Everything, everywhere, all at once) who dedicated their award to “all the moms in the world” to Michelle Yeoh, the first Asian woman to win the Oscar for best actress, who also thanked her mother watching her triumph over Malaysia, love maternal was on everyone’s lips. “Because they are the real superheroes and without them, none of us would be here tonight,” said Michelle Yeoh.

Why have so few thanks gone to fathers? Is it because many are conspicuous by their absence also in the lives of their children (or in their vocation) or simply because it was one of the great themes of the evening, which one would have said embodied by Rihanna, superbly pregnant ?

On Facebook, the author and lyricist Pierre Huet noticed this absence: “My very personal little sadness. It took the ultimate winner, the best picture producer, for someone to thank his father. Before that, more than a dozen thanks by actors, actresses or technicians to their mothers. My life won’t have been of much use if one day my daughters don’t feel the need to thank me. »

My very personal theory, my two pennies if you like, is that we were in a ceremony that rewards artists and craftsmen. And that the fathers of yesteryear were perhaps not the ones who most encouraged their children in an artistic career. If you grew up with a traditional dad, chances are he pushed more for you to excel in the sport, like that of the Williams sisters.

Does this mean that women are more sensitive to the arts? At home, when we watched a movie, my mother was the chief mourner, absolutely incapable of control, while I never saw my father cry once in his life. Even Steven Spielberg, nominated for The Fabelmanspaid homage to her mother’s artistic sensibility this year…

In Quebec in any case, studies have shown that it is more they who read, who go to the museum and the theater (sometimes dragging the husband) and who watch the soap operas. Despite this, the media weight of hockey compared to the coverage of all the arts combined remains heavy, which is revealing.

There is also that mothers have this tendency to outrageously celebrate the slightest successes of their children; from the little star in a kindergarten notebook to the statuette of an Oscar, I think their level of pride remains the same. Sometimes mothers have excessive faith in us, like in the novel The promise of dawn by Romain Gary, when she shouts to her mortified son in front of all the other Air Force guys: “You’ll be a hero, you’ll be a general, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Ambassador of France – all these thugs don’t know who are you ! The most fascinating thing is that Romain Gary practically became all that, as if to avenge his immigrant mother for the disappointments and humiliations of her life.

Hollywood being the boulevard of shattered dreams, as we know, where there are many called and few chosen, even more so if you are not white – Oscars so white, has been criticized for several years -, how can we not also see, in this evening where diversity was in the spotlight, the revenge of the children of immigrants whose mothers saw their dreams of young girls shattered to allow the American dream to the next generation? The joke I’ve heard the most from comedians whose parents are immigrants is that they practice their art in secret, rather than studying law or medicine…

In short, there was Sunday something to thrill everything, everywhere, all at once many people who owe a lot to their mothers.