The “In Memoriam” especially saved the day.
Held on Sunday, April 3, the long-delayed 64th Annual Grammy Awards had some hyper-recent damage to control. The “Oscar Slap” still fresh in everyone’s minds, a simultaneous distraction and addressing of the “elephant in the room” was required, as this was the first major industry event to take place since one of its most notorious ones.
The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah fared just fine as the likely by-design ever-mobile host of the MGM Grand Arena, Las Vegas-set spectacle. “Newcomer” Olivia Rodrigo went home with as much Recording Academy-issued hardware as the masses knew she deserved. But the night’s by-and-large standout moment was, as mentioned above, the segment that honored the musically departed.
Lost in the shuffle of the lost-no-more live-action episode of MTV’s Celebrity Deathmatch Sunday before last, was just how jarring some other moments of Oscar Sunday played out. Namely, their tribute to those with film ties who had passed since the 2021 ceremony was simply too dance-filled and distraction-laden to be filed away under the “win” column.
Granted, in the wake of “Chris Rock v. Will Smith,” rarely anyone noticed; another issue entirely. That said, running Jamie Lee Curtis onstage with a puppy and a Betty White anecdote did more for the Internet’s “Meme Army” than it did to commemorate White.
The Grammys, on the other hand, perfectly uplifted smiles born from frowns by “sending in the clowns.”
Cynthia Erivo (The Color Purple on Broadway), Leslie Odom, Jr. (Hamilton), Ben Platt (Dear Evan Hansen) and Rachel Zegler (West Side Story) sang over an appropriately-timed, not-rushed slide-show consisting of music men and women who’ve shifted this mortal coil. This culminated in the reveal of late American lyricist and composer Stephen Sondheim’s still. Sondheim died on November 26, 2021, mere weeks before the second film adaptation of West Side Story, which featured some of his most iconic numbers, earned its wide-release in theaters nationwide on December 10.
The power quartet sang a medley of Sondheim-penned originals for the duration of the segment, including: “Not a Day Goes By” from Merrily We Roll Along – which will interestingly see a Richard Linklater-directed film adaptation starring Platt release sometime in the early 2040s; “Send in the Clowns” from A Little Night Music; and “Somewhere” from West Side Story. The latter musical’s seven-times Oscar-nominated new film turned Zegler into an overnight star this past year, as The Messenger detailed in its January profile of the 20-year-old actress.
At the top of the “In Memoriam,” Noah invited audiences to join in a moment of silence for Taylor Hawkins, the fallen drummer of Foo Fighters who was found dead in his Colombia hotel room on March 25 shortly before a show. Foo Fighters won many awards in absentia on the night they were also initially slated to perform, including Best Rock Album (“Medicine at Midnight”), Best Rock Performance (“Making a Fire”), and Best Rock Song (“Waiting on a War”).
Hawkins earned a montage cut to the band’s acclaimed 1998 hit “My Hero,” creating more room for spine-chilling interpretations of the track than it already had.
