Nicolás Casariego Los Angeles
The Angels
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A trip to Hollywood during Oscar week,
at least in my limited experience, really begins when a physical therapist treats the contractures that you have accumulated while preparing for the expedition.
Or perhaps that same day, on the eve of the flight to Los Angeles, when, while attending a concert by the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra at the National Music Auditorium in Madrid, you realize that your head was already somewhere else: at Watching Augustin Hadelich, the violin virtuoso, perform a tango, shaking and trembling with a sprawling posture while the music runs through his skeleton, you don't hear the music, but rather you think that the man looks like a Tim Burton character.
Simultaneously you realize that the piece is Por una Cabeza, composed by Carlos Gardel and written by Alfredo Le Pera.
And that same tango sounds in Essence of a Woman, where Al Pacino and Gabriella Anwar dance it.
But the dream of the trip to Hollywood in search of a statuette, which is a dream shared by millions and millions of people and fueled since the late 1920s by the film and media industry, began literally in the airport.
At the gate of the Barcelona-Los Angeles flight last Thursday there was excitement.
Laughter could be heard and there were hugs between people who recognized each other.
The producers of
Robot Dreams,
Pablo Berger's Spanish film nominated for an Oscar for animation, were there, accompanied by their families and other members of the team.
Nicolás Casariego with Sandra Hermida, Juan Antonio Bayona and Belén Atienza.
It was a very special trip, and jokes abounded.
There were also some politicians and quite a few journalists.
Suddenly, some teenage girls became excited when they recognized Juani Caruso, one of the actors in
The Snow Society.
They were careful, because Caruso, cautious, was wearing the hood of his dark sweatshirt.
The Argentine, a 22-year-old boy, tweeter, Twitch streamer and musician, has been baptized as "the snow
influencer
" for his publications on networks about the hard and long filming of the film, in which he played Álvaro Mangino, one of the 16 survivors of the plane crash in the Andes.
He and Nuria Costa, the film's press manager, enlightened me about the adolescent phenomenon that has occurred with the film directed by Juan Antonio Bayona.
The Snow Society has already been seen by more than 200 million people on Netflix and, if every global phenomenon is a surprise, the fact that young people have become so hooked on the film is the greatest of all.
Caruso, according to him, arrived in Madrid, posted a meeting at a place and, in a few hours, the place had been filled with 400 people.
But Nuria's experience accompanying actors in the screenings of the film that took place in the Madrid cinemas of Palacio de Hielo and Kinepolis was more extreme.
"With Blas," says Nuria, referring to Blas Polidori, who plays Coco Nicolich, "it was crazy... There were teenagers waiting for the actors since two in the afternoon for the night's performance.
The security was overwhelmed...
In Kinepolis there were 100 girls and, suddenly, it sounded like a zombie roar, everyone wanted to touch them... And they tore off my necklace.
The very young actors in the film, most of them new to film as performers, have experienced what Marilyn Monroe commented in an interview: "When you are famous, you face the rawest part of human nature."
Caruso, as soon as he arrived in Madrid, posted a meeting at a place and in a few hours it was filled with four hundred people
The plane I traveled on was one of those that took nearly
150 people to Los Angeles, including crew and family members from the two Spanish films
nominated for the Oscars.
A number of people who give an idea of the enthusiasm generated by the dream of the Academy Awards, and also of how animated we are in Spain and Latin America, because, in other countries, those who do not have a ticket for the gala prefer to see the awards. From your home.
As soon as we landed, the mecca of cinema engulfed us and we dispersed throughout the city to friends' houses - in my case, that of the writer and director of the Instituto Cervantes Luisgé Martín and her husband, Axier, always so generous -, hotels and apartments. rent.
The next morning, each one went to the events or meetings they had, to perceive in an instant the frenzy of Los Angeles when the Oscar ceremony approaches.
It is a city that already has a few tenths of fever
, and that on Sunday will become completely sick with ego and what some call glamour.
In the first Uber I took, while we were driving through Beverly Hills with the windows open and smelling the freshly cut grass of the chalets, they were talking on the radio about parties with celebrities.
They explained who was the highest paid actor -Adam Sandler- and the actress -Jennifer Aniston-.
The taxi driver told me that his previous client had been a Ukrainian journalist who covered the awards.
Cinema, cinema and more cinema.
At the informal press conference for
The Snow Society
that I attended at the Teleferic Barcelona restaurant, where the Spanish and Chilean party will also be held on the day of the awards, I chatted with Bayona and with the producers
Belén Atienza and Sandra Hermida
from until To what extent the choral proposal and from the emotion of the film could be the reason why young people and adults have connected with a story that, told in a very different way, had already been seen in the nineties in Viven, directed by Frank Marshall .
The Snow Society
is a film narrated from a place of compassion and that alludes to the best of human beings, to trust in others.
If we talk about survival stories in extreme nature, that of Shackleton and Endurance in Antarctica represents the ideal of individual leadership;
On the other hand, that of The Snow Society in the Andes, talks about choral leadership.
“The need for the other to survive, for the collective,” Bayona told me as we reached for the water bottles and croissants.
"Young people are the ones who gather the most, young people, partly for that reason, understand the film."
A moment from the presentation panel of the films nominated for international film.
Belén commented that the idea of mutual support as a way to survive in isolated communities and the idea that appears in
Pablo Vierci
's book that the ego is useless in the mountains were driving forces of the project.
Sandra added that The Snow Society tells a story that comforts you as a human and social being because of its commitment to the group over the individual, to the idea that, without friends, without a partner or family, without the other, you are nothing. .
While we were talking, we were trying to swallow something in a hurry, because these days here we have done everything in a hurry.
Long distances have forced us to go with our tongues hanging out.
As
David Martí,
one of the makeup nominees, told me, the experience is “overwhelming.”
Also candidate
Ana López Puigcerver
- the trio is completed by
Montse Ribé
- commented that one perceives to what extent one's life changes for a while during the awards season when one realizes that it has been a month without having vacuumed.
She and her sister Belén, nominated for hairstyling, experienced the horror of having their suitcase lost on their flight, just on the trip in which clothes really count, because the Oscars also represent the obsession with image.
To go to the nominees' dinner they had to run to buy something at Zara, precisely the brand of which actor Enzo Vogrincic is the image.
One perceives to what extent life changes for a time for the prizes when it happens that it has been a month without having vacuumed.
There, scattered throughout the neighborhoods of that extensive city in which you remember a movie in every corner, we were more than a hundred people sharing a dream that had already been fulfilled by the fact of being there, regardless of whether we won the award or not. .
As for
The Snow Society,
I suspect that being part, each one in their role, of a multitudinous choral dream that defends a twinning society is already very good news.
Whether you are a survivor, a family member of a deceased person, a dedicated spectator or part of the team.
Whether or not you go to Hollywood.