The Art World Crashes the Oscars: 9 Unexpected Cameos Made by Artists, Museums, and Art Memes at This Year’s Academy Awards

Everyone knows the Academy Awards are the biggest night of the
year for Hollywood, but last night’s ceremony was full of notable
art world cameos. In case you missed them, we’ve rounded up our
favorite artistic interludes at the 2020 Oscars.

Parasite takes
Best Picture

History-making Best Picture winner Parasite was
the first non-English language
film to snag the award ceremony’s top honors. It also earned a
Best Director statue for Bong Joon-ho, and trophies for Best
Original Screenplay and Best International Feature Film. What’s the
film’s art world connection? Parasite‘s plot is set in
motion by a suseok, a type of natural stone
traditionally collected in Korea.

JR Walks the Red
Carpet

The beloved street artist JR clad in his trademark hat and
sunglasses, was spotted walking the red carpet with Robert De
Niro—the pair once collaborated on a short
film—and watching the ceremony inside Los Angeles’s Dolby
Theater. JR himself was a nominee in 2018 for Best
Documentary for Faces Places, which he
co-directed with Agnes Varda. This year, the artist was
likely on hand to support his good friend Ladj Ly, a nominee
for Best International Film with Les Misérables.

The two grew up together on the streets of Paris, with Ly
filming JR’s early street-art exploits. JR’s first major work,
which features prominently at his current blockbuster exhibition at
the Brooklyn Museum, is a photo of Ly pointing his video camera
like a gun. The duo is teaming up again at Ly’s Parisian film
school, École Kourtrajmé, where
JR is launching new courses for aspiring
photographers.

In Memoriam Honors Two
Great Female Artists and Filmmakers

Speaking of JR and Varda: the late filmmaker, who died in March at
the age of 90, was among the recently deceased Hollywood talents
featured in the Oscar’s annual in memoriam tribute.
Also honored was
experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer, who died the same month
at 79 from ovarian cancer.

A pioneer of French New Wave cinema, Varda was an
accomplished photographer and artist who showed work at
institutions including LACMA and the Fondation Cartier in Paris, as
well as high-profile exhibitions like the Liverpool Biennial and
the Biennale de Lyon.

Believed to be the first openly lesbian filmmaker, Hammer was
renowned for her groundbreaking feminist practice, seen in a 2012
survey exhibition at the Tate Modern in London. She was
included in last year’s Whitney Biennial, and also had 2019 solo
shows at both Houston’s Contemporary Arts Museum and the Wexner
Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio.

Brad Pitt Adds Second Oscar
Statue to His Art Collection

Best Supporting Actor winner Brad Pitt’s love of art
has been well-documented
over the years. Last
night, he added another sculpture to his holdings: the shiny Oscar
statue, a gold-plated bronze depicting a sword-wielding knight
standing on a film reel. The actor and producer was named Best
Supporting Actor for his turn in Once Upon a Time in
Hollywood; he previously won the Best Picture award as a
producer for 2014’s Twelve Years a Slave.

Everyone’s favorite
fairgoer at last year’s Frieze Los Angeles, Pitt is known to own
work by Richard Serra, Marcel Dzama, and Bansky, among other
artists. During his high-profile divorce
from fellow actor Angelina Jolie, he turned to art for solace,
learning to sculpt
in Thomas Houseago’s Los Angeles ceramics studio. Last
night, after hugging friend and costar—and fellow art
collector—Leonardo DiCaprio, Pitt used his acceptance speech to
attack Senate Republicans for acquitting President Trump during
last week’s impeachment proceedings.

Bro-Ramics Hits the Small
Screen

Pitt’s newfound love of ceramics in line with a growing trend among
male celebrities. DiCaprio reportedly joins Pitt for late-night
sessions on the potter’s wheel, and Seth Rogen and James Franco have both
have become avid sculptors.

During one commercial break during the 92nd Academy Awards,
the bro-ramics trend
came to the fore in an ad for ABC’s long-running reality TV
hit The Bachelor. The series’ current star, pilot
Peter Weber, reenacted the famous pottery wheel scene from the
beloved 1990 romance Ghost, with a special cameo from
Whoopi Goldberg.

Set, of course, to the sounds of Unchained Melody,
the spot featured Weber sculpting clay as numerous pairs of
disembodied hands caressed his hands, face, and shirtless, torso—a
reference to the 30 eligible women who vie for the Bachelor’s heart
each season. “Love is messy,” read the closing title card, after
Goldberg warned Weber, “you in danger, boy.”

Tom Hanks Hyped the
Long-Awaited Academy Museum of Motion Pictures

“There is plenty of culture to be found here in the City of
Angels. There are museums dedicated to art and music and history
and science, and we even have a museum dedicated to
selfies. I’m not sure why, but there it is,” actor Tom Hanks
told the crowd inside the Dolby Theater. “But there has never been
a museum dedicated to the art and science of major pictures.”

Come December, that will change. It hasn’t been an easy road for
the forthcoming Academy Museum, which has twice delayed its planned
opening and seen its founding director step
down amid criticism. But the institution now has an official opening
date, as announced by Hanks.

The two-time Best Actor winner joked about helping out with the
construction along with Scarlett Johansson, her fiancé Colin Jost,
and Brad Pitt—who could be spotted working shirtless on the roof,
naturally—before announcing that the museum would finally be
welcoming the public come December 14, 2020.

Sculptor Nabs Best Makeup
Oscar

Japanese-American artist Kazu Hiro, formerly
named Kazuhiro Tsuji, took home his second Oscar for Best Makeup
and Hairstyling. He continues to win industry accolades, despite
repeated attempts to retire from the film industry to focus on his
sculpture practice. It was Charlize Theron who coaxed Hiro into
signing on to do the makeup for Bombshell,
transforming the film star into Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly.

Hiro and his fellow winners, Anne Morgan, and Vivian Baker,
achieved an uncanny likeness by using special prosthetics and other
tricks of the trade. He thanked Theron for convincing him to take
the job in his acceptance speech, saying “because of your bravery
and passion, we were able to set a new bar in the makeup industry
and create a new way to tell stories.”

The award show coincided with the last day of the LA Art Show, where Hiro’s larger-than-life,
eerily hyperrealistic sculptures—on view with Santa Monica’s
CoproGallery—were among the fair’s
top-billed work. Hiro previously won an Oscar in 2018
for his work on The Darkest Hour,
starring Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill.

Kathryn Bigelow Thanks Her
Mentor, Artist Lawrence Weiner

In an ad for Rolex that aired during the award ceremony,
director Katheryn Bigelow—the only woman thus far to claim the Best
Director Oscar, for 2010’s The Hurt Locker—spoke about the
importance of her mentor, conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner, to her artistic
development.

As a young San Francisco Art Institute graduate, Bigelow came to
New York to enroll in the Whitney Independent Study Program. It was
John Baldessari who introduced her to Weiner, kickstarting a
fruitful ten-year mentorship.

“He would challenge your ideas, like ‘Why do you want to make
this? Why is that an interesting idea? What is the purpose of it?
What is the purpose of art?’” said Bigelow. “[Weiner] has so much
integrity, and there’s so much honesty and truth in his work, that
it’s very, in a way, overwhelming.”

Best Short Documentary
Winner Highlights a Girls’ School in Afghanistan That Supports
Itself By Selling Skateboard Art

Carol Dysinger’s film Learning To Skateboard in a
Warzone (If You’re a Girl), about the Skateistan School
House and Skatepark, in Kabul, Afghanistan, won the Oscar for Best
Short Documentary. Skateistan, which teaches Afghan girls to read,
write, and skate, is largely funded by the sales of skateboard art.
The organization, which was founded by Australian skateboarder
Oliver Percovich, has teamed up over the years with high-profile
names, from Paul McCarthy to the Andy Warhol Foundation.

The post The Art World Crashes the Oscars: 9 Unexpected
Cameos Made by Artists, Museums, and Art Memes at This Year’s
Academy Awards appeared first on artnet News.