The Last Showgirl Should Have Received an Oscar Nomination for Best Makeup & Hairstyling.
The case for The Last Showgirl's subtle and story-informing makeup.
The Substance. A Different Man. Nosferatu. Wicked. Emilia Pérez. These are the movies nominated for Best Makeup and Hairstyling at this weekend’s 97th annual Academy Awards. To be sure, they’re all feats of their category—Wicked’s makeup designer Frances Hannon searched for the perfect shade of green for Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba, which was found in a discontinued Canadian eyeshadow palette; A Different Man’s makeup team transformed Sebastian Stan into someone with neurofibromatosis, the same condition his co-star, Adam Pearson, has; and Mubi has gone hard on the video featurettes showing how The Substance crafted Demi Moore’s Elisabeth Sparkle’s descent into cronehood. But they’re all obvious, bombastic choices centered on prosthetics and the whole kit and caboodle rather than more subtle contenders.
The Last Showgirl and subtly aren’t necessarily synonymous, but Gina Monaci’s makeup design for Gia Coppola’s Las Vegas strip-set melancholic snapshot of showgirl Shelly’s (Pamela Anderson) last hurrah uses cosmetics in subtle ways to signify how Shelly—and Jamie Lee Curtis’ Annette—are stuck in the past.
The first glimpse we get of Shelly off-stage is when she’s buying groceries to cook dinner for the quartet of showgirls, including Annette, Mary-Anne (Brenda Song) and Jodie (Kiernan Shipka). Her wispy blonde hair is scooped up in a dated scrunchie, and she’s as close to the bare-faced visage of Anderson that we’ve come to privy to in recent years as Hollywood cameras will allow. The remnants of decades of glitter freckle her lithe body.
While Shelly, Jodie and Mary-Anne are dressed down, Annette has her boobs out, her brassy red hair teased up and her face on like the die-hard showgirl she is. Whether tanned—in both senses of the word—by the Vegas sun or by the caked on foundation that is several shades too dark, Annette’s look is completed by the frosted eyeshadow and lipgloss popular with the tween set in *checks notes* 1998.
It’s around this era that Shelly is stuck in, too. Estranged from her daughter, played by Billie Lourd and clinging for dear life to any prestige Vegas showgirls once had like her skimpy outfits cling to her dancer’s frame. Compared to Mary-Anne and Jodie, whose beautiful smokey eyeshadow lined with elongated false lashes leading up to full brows make their eyes pop and angles ping, Shelly favours an outdated single swipe of eye pencil under her bottom lashline. Like the pencil-thin eyebrows Anderson has become known for, what once worked for Shelly in her youth isn’t cutting it under the bright Vegas lights.
The Last Showgirl might appear flashy from the outside, but underneath it’s an unassuming if uneven character study of the titular passé chorus girl highlighted by the makeup that lingers long after the lights go down.
Images via IMDb.