Hollywood is fine, but the Oscars need life support

The guest list for Sunday night’s Oscars reads like Steven Spielberg’s Rolodex. As well as the glitzy nominees, presenters will include Barbra Streisand, Helen Mirren, Michael Keaton, Daniel Craig, Whoopi Goldberg, Jennifer Lopez, Charlize Theron and Serena Williams. But it was a sigh of relief, rather than a starstruck gasp, which met the confirmation on Thursday of another guest. An Academy Awards press release assured us that Hollywood’s “official doc”, Dr George Gauthier, will “supply emergency and stress care for the celebrity attendees, able to do more on site than EMT [emergency medical technicians] and mainstream medical doctors”.

Although one hopes more medics may be available (the theatre seats 3,300, and there’s 600 crew), this is good news. Gauthier has apparently been so essential over his 20-year tenure, veteran producer Dick Clark declared: “We don’t want to have an event without him!” Even if you’re not feeling peaky, it might be worth faking a dicky hip during a boring bit. Says Gauthier’s website: “Currently 98% of his clinic’s patients heal substantially beyond their satisfaction.” Go in with a limp, come out with a new kidney. If there’s anything the Oscars need right now, it’s a doctor. Recalling its recent history triggers hives. The phrase “nervous breakdown” came all too readily to the lips of its producer last week after the order came to once again retool the ceremony – this time to reverse a decision to relegate the awarding of minor prizes to the time during TV ad breaks.

It’s the fifth big capitulation since last year’s awards, with reverse-ferrets on plans to introduce a popular film category, to bin some original-song performances, to stop previous winners presenting key awards and to hire a homophobic host. This after their nerves were already shot by Faye Dunaway announcing the wrong film as best picture winner in 2017 – not to mention a constant fight to persuade the public their members aren’t unshakably sexist, old and racist.

This year, the eggshells are too thickly strewn across the red carpet to miss. No wonder those goodie bags are rammed with cannabis: make one off-colour comment and your career is toast. So heightened is the anxiety that the Academy opted not to replace Kevin Hart as host, perhaps figuring a rest is safer than a change.

For a film, as well as a figure, to survive current conditions, a social message is compulsory. A Star is Born was considered a shoo-in for best picture six months ago. Now it has no chance, for it cannot be tethered to a political bandwagon. It’s an insular story about the fabulousness of showbiz – a subject that would, until recently, have been catnip to the Academy, but is insufficient today. You need confidence to celebrate yourself so explicitly, and the Oscars are a gibbering mess. The film that will win, Roma, acquits Oscar voters on artistic grounds: foreign-language, black and white, long and resolutely unsexy. It is just political enough: set in a country under attack by Trump, sympathetic to a class and ethnicity of domestic workers to whom white Californian artistic types could feel especially indebted. That it is also the best film on the list is coincidental.

With or without the ministrations of Dr Gauthier, Hollywood will survive Sundaynight. The dust will settle and the trauma will fade. And if not, that goodie bag also includes therapy.