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By Richard T. Jameson
Special to MSN Movies
See also: Worst. Oscars. Ever.
Do the Oscars really matter?
This question means different things to different people. This year there's
been some populist grumping that the nominees for 2007's Best Picture do not
include top-grossing attractions such as "Transformers," "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End" and "National Treasure: Book of Secrets." Instead, the academy
floats all these "movies nobody ever heard of" such as "Michael Clayton," "No Country for Old Men" and "Atonement" -- and it turns out "There Will Be Blood" isn't even a Sylvester Stallone picture! If this sounds like you, please
move on. That isn't the conversation we propose to have.
See, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' avowed intention has
always been that its awards should recognize excellence and achievement. But how
often has it met that goal, and according to what standards? And how often has
it gone embarrassingly wrong?
The first year Academy Awards were conferred was a split year, 1927-28, and
perhaps fittingly, the prize-givers appeared to be of two minds about saluting
achievement. They honored, in effect, two Best Pictures. The one you'll find
under that heading in the history books is "Wings," a spectacular tribute to World War I aviators
directed by a veteran of the Lafayette Escadrille, William Wellman. But there was also an award for Unique and
Artistic Production , which went to German émigré F.W. Murnau's "Sunrise." "Wings" was a big, exciting hit and
helped make a star of Gary Cooper. "Sunrise" lost money but worked its way into
the cerebral cortex of the best directors in Hollywood (most notably, John Ford) and changed the way American movies looked. It
still places among the top 10 on best films of all time lists.
The academy retired the Artistic category after that inaugural year, but now
and again the dichotomy peeks through. In 1935, say, when Best Picture went to
"Mutiny on the Bounty" but "The Informer" took Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best
Actor. And in 2003, when "Chicago" was named Best Picture (the horror! the horror!)
and "The Pianist" collected the same, dare we say, real
awards for achievement "The Informer" had copped. Maybe call it Best Picture
versus Best Cinema.
Funny thing about the Best Picture Oscar: It goes home with the producer --
or sometimes the head of the studio, as when Jack L. Warner beat Hal Wallis to the dais to accept the 1943 award for "Casablanca." At base, it's an award less for making the film
well than for enabling the film to get made. Sometimes that's involved heroic
struggle, especially in more recent decades, and there's nothing Hollywood loves
quite so much as applauding a determined S.O.B. who fought tooth and nail to
bring a big, three-hour movie to the screen after every studio in, uh, Hollywood
turned him down -- Richard Attenborough, say, with "Gandhi" (1982), or Kevin Costner with "Dances With Wolves" (1990), or Mel Gibson with "Braveheart" (1995).
Which is fine, and stirring, and gives you a lump in the throat even as your
heart, mind and gut tell you that "Gandhi" wasn't a third the movie "E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial" was, and "Dances With Wolves"
wasn't as good as "GoodFellas," and "Braveheart" doesn't belong in the same
solar system as "Sense and Sensibility." Still, OK, live with it -- it's a
producer's award, no big whoop. But these are producer-directors, even
producer-director-stars, and the voters don't know when to quit. So there's a
sweep, and we're asked to believe that Richard Attenborough is Best Director
over Steven Spielberg, and Kevin Costner has done a better job of directing
than Martin Scorsese, and Mel Gibson is a better director than
... good grief, Ang Lee wasn't even nominated for directing "Sense and Sensibility"!
Ah, yes, nominations. The academy membership at large gets to vote on all the
awards (disregarding some technicalities about documentaries and foreign films),
but nominations are the business of the film industry's various guilds. Makes
sense. Who better than actors to know about acting? Likewise directors and
directing, screenwriters and screenplays, and so on.
And yet ...
In 1942, among the nominees for what we now call Best Adapted Screenplay was
John Huston for "The Maltese Falcon." Marvelous script, of course; terrific
story, great characters, snappy dialogue. Already a screenwriter with a growing
rep, Huston was making his directorial debut with this third version of Dashiell
Hammett's private-eye novel, and as a preliminary step, he asked a secretary to
type up the book's dialogue. She did, somehow studio boss Jack Warner got a look
at it, and he called Huston, congratulated him on licking the adaptation, and
gave him the go-ahead. And that, with very few emendations, was that. A Best
Screenplay nomination for being faithful to a novel that was a virtual
screenplay to start with. (Much the same could be said for Huston's masterly 1985 film of Richard Condon's "Prizzi's Honor"; Condon
and/or co-writer Janet Roach dreamed up one brief sequence -- the
transcontinental phone sex -- and for the rest the cast might as well have been
consulting paperback copies of the novel.)
Then there's the case of the overlooked original. In 1983, critics achieved
near-unanimity on the delights of Scots writer-director Bill Forsyth's comic fable "Local Hero." Especially prized was its screenplay, deemed
best of the year by both the New York Film Critics Circle and the National
Society of Film Critics. When the academy nominations were announced, the film
had received nary a one -- not so shocking overall for a blithely offbeat item
shown mostly in art houses, but in the case of the writers branch, appalling.
All right, maybe "Local Hero" lost out by a rabbit's whisker, missed being
one of the five Original Screenplay nominees because of freak math. And it's
only fair to note that in later years the Best Screenplay categories have tended
to be the one zone of refuge and recognition for adventurous indie fare: "sex, lies, and videotape," "Far From Heaven," "American Splendor," "The Squid and the Whale," "A History of Violence." Not that any of those nominees won,
but "Sideways," "Gosford Park" and "Lost in Translation" did, helping reinforce the
image of Best Screenplay as de facto consolation prize for Picture nominees that
aren't going to win the big one. (Story Continues On Next Page...) |
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