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You’ve been reading and hearing about it for weeks, with the headlines screaming:
•“The Battles of A Beautiful Mind”
•“Ron Howard: The Rodney Dangerfield of Directors?”
•“Will It Be Denzel’s Day?”
•“Are the Stars Aligned in Halle’s favor?”
And let’s not forget all the fashion forecasts as we wait to see what Nicole and Renee will or will not wear.
Yes, if it’s springtime in Hollywood, it must be time for the Academy Awards.
So, as Whoopi Goldberg gets ready to host her fourth Oscar marathon, airing at 8 p.m., Sunday, March 24, on ABC, UDaily asked for feedback from Harris E. Ross, associate professor of English, and Thomas M. Leitch, professor of English, who teach courses in the English department’s Film Studies Program.
Q. What’s wrong with the Academy Awards?
A. Harris Ross
Back in the days when the major studios had a half-nelson on film production, the usual explanation for the motion picture academy’s seeming obtuseness was that a mogul had his employees block vote for one of the studio's prestige pictures. This supposedly accounts for why “Citizen Kane” was trumped by “How Green Was My Valley.”
But that obtuseness apparently continued when the studios collapsed in the 1960s and 1970s. The explanation then became age, the explanation for almost everything else during those decades. Doddering writers and palsied actresses supposedly cast their votes for such old-fashioned movies as “My Fair Lady” over “A Hard Day's Night” or “Patton” over “M*A*S*H.”
That explanation is still floated to explain what some see as the Academy’s myopia. However, as I shuffle through middle-age, I am inclined to note that the Academy’s fogies did vote for “The Godfather,” “Godfather II” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest” and that this year’s Best Picture nominees seem, with one exception, to be a rebuke to Hollywood commercial filmmaking. Of course, that one exception, “A Beautiful Mind,” seems likely to win.
So, for the sake of argument, let’s assume that more often than not the Academy geezers will pass the Oscar to duds like “Forrest Gump” rather than treasures like “Pulp Fiction” and so will earn the disdain of people of taste such as myself, some of my friends and you.
The reason is that academy members recognize that the Academy Awards are not tokens of merit but instruments of public relations. I suspect they are inclined to vote not for what they think is the best film but what they think other people will think is the best film: a serious (though never elitist) drama with an obviously important theme (say, the power of love to cure mental illness), preferably with a popular actor cast against type, who gains weight for the role, adopts an accent, portrays an idiot, etc.
They will usually not vote for comedy because most folks think comedies, even the ones they enjoy, are trivial, nor will they vote for genre films, because the significance of these films (think “Psycho”) have to be ferreted out with a little thought. Neither type of film is good for image building, which is what Hollywood wants.
Can the Oscar selections be improved? Yes. Short of allowing me to pick the winners each year, I suggest the academy institute a rule that before academy members can vote, they have to re-watch last year’s winners. I suspect the thought of slogging through “Gladiator” might make them think twice about checking the box beside Ron Howard’s utterly phony film, which suggests that schizophrenia is the delusion that one is starring in a 1950s spy movie.
A. Thomas Leitch
There’s nothing wrong with the Oscars that isn’t wrong with Hollywood at large. The films least likely to get nominated for Academy Awards or win them are also the films least likely to get green-lighted in the first place: original, offbeat films that don’t appeal to a big target demographic of teenage boys.
The one difference between the Oscar picks and the box-office champs is the presence among the nominees of so many ostensibly adult dramas, from “In the Bedroom” to “A Beautiful Mind,” which would be a lot more adventurous if they didn't fit so neatly into a self-styled sensitive-adult genre–complete with careful craftsmanship, fine acting, physically or mentally challenged male hero–which is in its way just as limiting and self-congratulatory as the teen genre that gave us “Gone in 60 Seconds” and “American Pie 2.”
Sorry to sound so negative. I love the Oscars anyway and plan to watch them once again this year, just as I had a fine time watching “Iris” and “Lantana” because I knew in advance how depressing they would be and so felt free to sit back and enjoy them.
March 22, 2002
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