Oscar-winning biopic on Amy Winehouse shows how cruel we are towards stars
Asif Kapadia has just won an Oscar for Best Documentary for his movie on late singer Amy Winehouse, Amy. While I am very happy that a British-Asian filmmaker has won an Oscar, the lack of any British-Asian voice should be a national embarrassment (but isn't, of course). It is also weirdly awkward. This has nothing to do with the director or any of the team members but because of the subject matter.
Amy achieved international fame with her song "Rehab" and her "rock and roll" lifestyle triggered an instant tabloid frenzy. It is a movie that should make a lot of people in the UK very uncomfortable, and should make us stop and consider our insane tabloid culture of celebrity-obsession, but it won't. And this is what makes it uncomfortable watching. Amy was a clever girl, a good songwriter who had flashes of brilliance, but who was trapped in her own celebrity image, her addictions and bad choices.
The world of celebrity is a shifting, nebulous world whose inhabitants have to learn anew each day how to fix themselves. In some ways, nothing is real, but at the same time, everything is hyperreal, reflected by the multiplicity of media, like some hideous echo chamber. Some stars negotiate it well, some don't. In the movie, Amy says several times that she doesn't know what she will do if she becomes famous. She will probably go mad. It will be horrible. It will drive her insane.
A lot of time each day is spent managing the expectations, jostling for positions and demands of those around the celebrity: the entourage, the glam squads, the managers and the "just good friends" - all those who are trapped in the distorted mirror world of other people's fame. These were Kapadia's sources. On the film Kapadia says, "Her (Amy's) circle of friends didn't trust one another and they all blamed each other, so there's all this guilt and anger, and all this pain."
Kapadia masterfully lays out the mosaic of voices for us to contemplate and makes sure that it is Amy's voice and her work that is given centre stage. The result is deeply disturbing. Her voice, confident and north-London-mouthy at the start disappears by the end. Amy doesn't make it out. She dies.
Kapadia uses the footage to create an almost hypnotic visual experience but it is not a world that you want to be in. Your part as a Londoner who saw the tabloid photos and who partook in the collective rubbernecking at her collapse is reflected at you.
Just as you start to fear for her and her descent into addiction and emotional abuse, you are faced, as she was, by the aggressive full frontal assault of paparazzi flash bulbs attacking her as she steps out her front door, staggering and dazed like a wounded animal.
Your instinct is to rush to her assistance, to help her into the car, but you are trapped in your own impotent voyeurism, and unwitting collaboration in her persecution by the photographers whose job it was to capture her at her most vulnerable. You want them to stop, to leave her alone but at the same time, you know that you read the articles that were written about her, making you part of the machine that tabloidised her work.
The one moment she strikes out at the photographers blocking her way with a blinding wall of light, their response is wounded, "Aww, don't be like that Amy," like the bully who taunts a kid's impotent lashing out. But it is our continued unholy alliance with celebrity news whoring that is the real perpetrator of the crime, our vacuous hunger the real unseeing bully.
This is why Amy winning the Best Documentary Oscar is awkward. Howsoever brilliant a piece of filmmaking, howsoever much it helps reposition Amy in our memories as the musical talent that she was, it still feels like a continuation of the prying eyes and the flash bulbs.