Matt's Big Oscar Challenge Day 290: A Very Meta Musical

Those of you who've followed this challenge from the very beginning know that the musical genre has been well-represented in the Best Picture category. From 42nd Street and Top Hat to Fiddler on the Roof and Hello Dolly! each decade has had two or three all-singing all-dancing nominees. The Oscars love of musicals reached its peak in the 1960s where four of the ten winners came from the genre. However, as the 1980s approached audiences lost interest in the musical and so it seems did Oscar. One man who was still very much involved in musicals both on stage and screen was Bob Fosse, who won a Best Director award for helming Cabaret in 1973. Fosse was also in charge of All that Jazz, the last musical film to be nominated for Best Picture for a shocking twenty-two years. The musical itself was also heavily based on the director's own life as it featured many scenes based on real-life events involving Fosse. In fact the film as a whole is based on Fosse's attempts to direct a production of Chicago while at the same time editing the Dustin Hoffman film Lenny. Fosse is represented in the film by legendary musical director Joe Gideon whose personal life is dominated by three women - his ex-wife, his current girlfriend and his young daughter. Gideon's current work life is interspersed with scenes from his childhood which are presented in haunting scenes involving a mysterious woman played by Jessica Lange. It is later revealed that these scenes are hallucinations that Joe has while being treated in hospital for angina, whilst Lange's character is a representation of the angel of death. As Joe's health deteriorates, these surreal musical numbers increase and they eventually build up to a massive finale which shows Joe ascending to heaven in a suitably over-the-top fashion.

Hectic is the best way to describe All that Jazz which skips between Joe's real life and his death sequences with reckless abandonment. While watching the film, I was constantly thinking how Fosse felt directing his own life story in this way. All the relationships in All that Jazz are incredibly similar to Fosse's down to the fact that he and his ex-wife continued to work together following their separation. I was glad to learn that All that Jazz won the award for Best Editing at the Oscars as to me that's one of the film's most notable elements. The film's unique style didn't always work for me and at times I rather wished it would calm down just a little bit. But luckily the energy of the cast, coupled with some great musical numbers, meant that All that Jazz just about made sense. At the heart of the cast is the brilliant Roy Scheider, who holds everything together superbly and brilliantly conveys why people still love Joe despite the fact that he's really quite horrible. Scheider is utterly convincing throughout as the womanising, pill-popping director whose inability to stop working was finally the death of him. I also found Jessica Lange to be spell-binding as Angelique, the woman who was almost weighing up Joe's life before his death. The scenes between Scheider and Lange were some of my favourites, primarily as because they felt incredibly different from what was going on elsewhere. To an extent they reminded me of the scenes between Liza Minelli and Joel Grey in Cabaret and I do feel as if Fosse was trying to recreate this style. Tragically Fosse himself died of a heart attack eight years later but at least he leaves behind him a legacy of brilliant films and some rather tremendous Broadway shows. Although almost too knowing for its own good, All that Jazz is a fitting send-off for the musical genre which wouldn't see again for another decade and a half.

Next time we look at an all-action hero who used appeared in two very different Best Picture Nominees in the 1980s.