It occurred to me late last night, while watching the Academy Awards presentation in English, that Oscar night has its own special lexicon.
For example, Americans say movie, and the British say film… But when it comes to the Oscars, the translation for Melhor Filme is Best Picture. Movies were once called moving pictures, which then got shortened to “movies”. The word picture remained, however, in the now formal-sounding term “motion picture” – hence the now abbreviated “Best Picture”.
The fact that we call the best movie of the year “Best Picture” is even more confusing when we get to the animated and foreign-language movies, called Animated Feature Film and Foreign Language Film (not “picture”), respectively.
Go figure.
And then there’s the music. We all know the word song, but in a movie the songs played are collectively called the soundtrack. But there’s no Oscar for “Original Soundtrack”. The Academy Awards only have categories for best Original Song and best Original Score. Huh? “Score?”, you ask? Yes, “score,” which in Oscar-ese seems to usually mean “music with no words”.
These specialized terms can even confuse native speakers – even people inside the “industry”. When Clint Eastwood stepped up to introduce an honorary achievement award for Italian composer Ennio Morricone for his decades of work writing music for movies, he was unsure about what to actually call him, saying he was the best “scorer” he’d ever worked with, and then questioned himself and the audience: “Um… ‘Scorer?’ Is that right?”
And then there’s the Oscar, um, himself. That little golden award is a kind of trophy, basically, in the shape of a statue, but it has a special name. When
costume designer Milena Canonero received the award for her work in the film “Marie Antoinette”, she called the award a little “doll”. Most folks call the award a statuette.
Finally, I learned the origin of an expression last night which now seems so obvious, but which I’d never thought about before. Kate Winslet introduced the award for best editing, and she said, “I don’t know who first said the expression ‘
cut to the chase’, whether it was…” and it hit me where this phrase, which I had uttered probably a thousand times in the last 38 years of my life, actually originated from. In case you don’t know, the phrase let’s cut to the chase basically means, “vamos ao que interessa”. The expression in English comes straight from movie-editing jargon, since film editors used to physically cut stretches of film that they didn’t want, and in action movies in particular, often directors and editors would want to cut out any boring parts and get to the “chase scene” (usually good guys chasing bad guys) …in
other words, they would cut to the chase.
If you haven’t watched the Oscars, you should see it tonight if only to see how much it has evolved as an international event. Each year, the Oscars is looking less and less American and better reflecting this globalized world we’re living in.
By the way, my choice for Best Picture would have been “Little Miss Sunshine”. If you haven’t seen it, do.
Have a good week.
By Ron Martinez
