This is why Lady Gaga didn't wear makeup during her Oscars performance
Bare-faced on the most glam night in Hollywood
While it was widely disputed leading up to the Oscars whether Lady Gaga would be performing, the multi-hyphenate showed up and did the damn thing anyway.
Her bare-faced and stripped back Oscars performance of “Hold My Hand”, from Best Picture nominated film Top Gun: Maverick, benefited from the lack of over-production typically associated with the most glamorous night in Hollywood.
Image credit: Getty
Wondering why Lady Gaga — arguably one of the most visually arresting artists of her generation — would choose the Oscars of all events to deliver a simple (but stunning) rendition of a song associated with one of the biggest blockbusters of the year?
Apparently, Gaga wasn’t even meant to be performing.
At a creative team press conference on March 8th, Oscars executive producer and showrunner Glenn Weiss, told press that while the Academy has a great relationship with Lady Gaga, “she is in the middle of shooting a movie right now.”
“It didn’t feel like she can get a performance to the calibre that we’re used to with her and that she is used to,” he went on to say. “So, she is not going to perform on the show.”
The decision was one made in an attempt to honour the production of Joker: Folie à Deux “and what it takes to make a movie,” he explained.
For the red (or shall we say champagne) carpet portion of the evening, Lady Gaga and her makeup artist Sarah Tanno created a red carpet look they coined “Addicted to Blush”.
A nod to the heavily-rouged faces of the “Robert Palmer girls from the ‘Addicted to Love’ Video” and a “more is more glam” moment in the words of Tanno — the singer’s bare face during her performance seemed like an intentional opposition to the high glamour the pair envisioned for the carpet.
We want to know if Lady Gaga took off all her red carpet makeup for the stage, just to have to put it all back on again for the Oscars after party…
Main image credit: Getty
Briar Clark got her start in the media industry in 2017, as an intern for Marie Claire and InStyle. Since then, her keen interest in fashion and beauty has landed her gigs as a Digital Content Producer and Beauty Editor with titles like Girlfriend, Refinery29, BEAUTYcrew and beautyheaven. She loves the way seemingly innocuous topics like skin care and style have the ability to put a smile on people’s faces or make them think about themselves a little differently. A big believer in self love and experimentation, Briar has made a point of becoming the Australian beauty industry’s unofficial guinea pig for unusual treatments and daring hair trends. When she’s not testing out the latest beauty launches, Briar is big on broadening her horizons, mostly in the form of food but she’s also partial to travelling to new destinations both near and far (and of course, allocating an extra bag to bring their best beauty offerings home with her).
