Here’s a theory: Jenny Beavan is the most disruptive force working in the film industry today. In the last few weeks, she’s won two highly prestigious awards – a Bafta and an Oscar, both for her work designing costumes for Mad Max: Fury Road – and both times it’s been as if someone has let a bomb off.
It was her win, remember, that prompted Stephen Fry’s Twitter exit, after people questioned his decision to call her a “bag lady” on air. And now there’s a Vine of her going unapplauded as she walked down the aisle to collect her Oscar last night [see footnote].
In fact, the Vine is much worse than that. People weren’t just failing to clap Beavan. They were literally flinching at the sight of her. Tom McCarthy gave her such a withering up-and-down that you’d think he was auditioning for Meryl Streep’s role in a touring theatrical version of The Devil Wears Prada.
Alejandro Iñárritu glowered as if a woman in a leather jacket was somehow more repulsive than DiCaprio chomping down a raw bison liver. One man, bless his heart, all but leapt into the arms of his companion as she sauntered past, in the same manner that a housewife in a 1950s cartoon would if a mouse suddenly crawled out from under the skirting board.
What’s the real story here? Are these people really offended by the idea that a middle-aged British woman has chosen not to massacre her body in the name of chasing an impossible Hollywood ideal? Are they really outraged by the notion of someone dressing for comfort? Hardly. This is the Oscars we’re talking about, the very heartland of two-faced air-kissing insincerity. These people are professional. They can smile and clap through anything.
So it’s likely that the truth is more sinister. What could Jenny Beavan possibly have done to these people to inspire such outright hostility?
Ten unproven and purely speculative theories
1. The bejewelled skull on Beavan’s leather jacket was modelled after Iñárritu’s dead grandmother.
2. Ten seconds before her name was announced, Beavan was seen strangling a homeless man for his loose change with her scarf.
3. Jenny Beavan is actually Donald Trump doing a weird Mrs Doubtfire turn.
4. The audience had heard a draft of Beavan’s controversial victory speech, and realised that they couldn’t possibly be seen condoning a message as aggressive as “it’s nice when people are nice to each other”.
5. They all thought that this was the ceremony where they had to clap people of colour, not women.
6. It was a simple case of jealously. Tom McCarthy was still bitter that Beavan had refused to dress Mark Ruffalo’s Spotlight character in a silver body armour made entirely of human pelvises.
7. They were reminded of the old nursery rhyme “If you publicly clap a woman named Beavan, none of your children will go to heaven”.
8. The men knew that their significant others were in attendance, and they realised that clapping Beavan would give away the torrid, decades-long affair that they’ve all been having with her.
9. This was approximately the 15th successive award won by Mad Max: Fury Road, and the directors were starting to worry that people might have preferred a fun film about some cool cars to their interminably worthy and hard-to-watch meditations on endless constant hardship.
10. The Oscars are really long and incredibly boring, and clapping Beavan would have distracted these people from the near-impossible task of remaining awake until the show reached its conclusion.