CONK!
I did not watch the Oscars on Sunday night. Part of it was lack of desire, but I also couldn’t. We cut the cord a long time ago and I am on a handful of streaming services, and Disney Plus or ABC-affiliates are not a part of those bundles. Oh, well.
I contented myself with the clips, and from the acceptance speeches to the fillers, it was all kind of meh. As I said in my piece on RedState, Jimmy Kimmel is one of the unfunniest comedians on the planet, and the few bits I did bother to view were excreable.
Two shining moments stood out. The first was Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who won Best Supporting Actress for The Holdovers. Aside from Oppenheimer, which I fell asleep on and re-watched (this is a habit with Christopher Nolan films—always too long and dense), the only other Best Picture nominee I saw was The Holdovers. If you have Peacock it’s streaming on that channel, and it is worth your evening for the performances, especially those by Randolph and actor Paul Giamatti who plays the lead character. Take a peep at my RedState article to get my Oscar overview as well as Randolph’s speech and why it outshone all the others.
The other shining moment was the win for Best Documentary Short. I love documentaries, and the well-done ones, whether feature or short, are hard to come by. The Last Repair Shop is one that is done well.
Directed by Kris Bowers and Ben Proudfoot, the documentary tells the story of the heroes in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) who provide music and music maintenance to student instruments. Four of the repair technicians are featured, but they are among the 12 technicians who maintain and repair the more than 130,000 musical instruments used by LAUSD students, all for free. The LAUSD Repair Shop has been in operation since 1959 and is one of the few remaining school districts in the entire nation that continues to do this. Apparently some good does come out of LAUSD, and this documentary proves this.
One of the students featured in the documentary, violinist Porché Brinker, got to share the stage with Proudfoot and Bowers when they received their awards. Brinker is absolutely adorable and pulls heartstrings as she led off the documentary stories. The documentary moves from the student’s stories to the stories of those individual technicians who do the maintenance; how they found the work, and why it matters to them. The first two stories seemed almost L.A.-obligatory: Dana Atkinson, a gay man and Paty Moreno, a Mexican immigrant single mother. Not that their stories are not compelling, but with the current cultural climate, it felt a bit forced and in your face.
The last two stories from Duane Michaels and Steve Bagmanyan—the latter who is the shop supervisor—were the most powerful and weight the documentary significantly. As shop supervisor, Bagmanyan serves as a narrator who bridges all the stories together, which was a great device by the filmmakers. I loved this one statement from Duane Michaels. His mother helped him purchase a $20 fiddle at a swap meet, and he so loved playing it that he started his own hillbilly-bluegrass band called the Bodie Mountain Express. This went from playing for Liberace, to opening for Elvis Presley in 1975, and then that career took him all over the world. Michaels waxed eloquent about the worth of an instrument to a young kid.
“Kids have a chance to play instruments that they can’t afford, and that one instrument can change their whole life.”
In Bowers Academy Awards acceptance speech, he said,
“L.A. is one of the last cities in America to give public school students free and freely prepared instruments. We need to fix that because music education isn’t just about creating incredible musicians. It’s about creating incredible humans.”
As a musician myself I applaud his efforts and this documentary. It’s free on YouTube (for now) and linked below. If you would like to support the worthy endeavor of bringing music and musical instruments to school-age children, you can contribute to The Last Repair Shop by clicking here.
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