—before recent films stopped processing current events.
It used to be that the Academy Award telecast was an event. People wanted to watch people preen in their tuxes or tails and the women stuffed into their gowns, all of them displaying their “real” personalities and interacting with one another even if they had taken roles in different movies and also to see as it was happening, which persons and movies got awards because that seemed important, these matters raised out of entertainment, just a pastime, into an event of historical consciousness. Journalism may be the first draft of history, but movies are the reconsidered draft, whereby “Gone With the Wind'' rehabilitates the antebellum South by eliding the cruelty of slavery and “The Best Years of Our Lives'' confronting how people who survived the war would carry on. You wanted to be there while it was happening, akin to a World Series game or the Simon and Garfinkel event in Central Park or the Bicentennial fireworks or some other non entertainment events like 9/11 or Jan. 6th which were also confined in time and space and played out for a national and international audience.
Now journalists say that the Academy Awards telecast has lost its luster. Ratings have dropped precipitously and producers of the event are trying to reinvigorate its panache as an event by perhaps reintroducing Jimmy Kimmel as an emcee such as had been the cased years ago when Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis and Billy Crystal presided and kept things moving and connected even if the show usually went long. I think that some of the enduring aspects of the event remain to me as surefire. It was soon discovered in the early film age that its most memorable feature was the star and that remains the case. Whatever their acting cops, what a movie star offered was their intriguing personality and that remains the case . We are galvanized by Greer Garson and John Wayne and Meryl Streep and, God knows why, Tom Cruise. Their faces and manners step out from their roles, a composite of their presentations, so assembled into personas which the audience read as people well understood, naked before us, just like politicians. It must be very daunting to be so closely examined, but that is the price and satisfaction of fame.
Here is an explanation of why the movies did so well for almost a hundred years but seems to have gone in decline in there last generation even though the vocabulary of cinema remains ever inventive, as in this year’s use of closeups in Stephen Spielberg’s “The Fablemans” and the box like interiors of Todd Fields’ “Tar”. Nor is the rise and perhaps fall of Hollywood to be ascribed to structural issues with the industry, such as the studio system from the Twenties through the Sixties or the competition with television in the Sixties or the streaming services in the present day or even the decline of the intelligence of the audience, given its preference for comic book movies rather than the deeper stuff offered in earlier decades. Instead, this explanation avails itself of the subject matter of movies. My hunch is that movies prosper when there are war and other politically topical movies even though other genres are also present and that there have been no war movies of note for a generation now and that is enough to do the kibosh to movies which remain as a newsreel to the ensuing events of history that has been internalized into the American psyche. Tara is more real than critical race theory or, for that matter, the serious historians of slavery and its aftermath. Ronald Reagan confused what actually happened from what he saw in the movies. I suggest that we all do that.
Remember that two of the greatest silent films were not romantic soap opera. They include “The Big Parade” and “Wings”, war movies that were sentimental but also occasionally gritty. And one of the first talkies that got the Best Picture award was “All Quiet on the Western Front '', which was quite gritty and whose remake and nominee this year for Best Picture is even more gritty. The interwar years were steeped with the Great War. The Thirties filled out the marvel of talk with, as I have recently suggested in a post, the women’s question and the nature of the poor and the rich, quite relevant during the Great Depression, though not to forget “Cimarron”, also an early talkie that was a Best Picture, that did the Westward Expansion, as did the entire corpus of westerns that lasted from the silence through the adult westerns all the way, I think, to Altman’s “The Wild Bunch” which I think ended it all because he showed automobiles intruding onto the western range.
Meanwhile, the movies were flooded with World War II movies, so rich was the war with full scale battles, small skirmishes, intrigue and politics and culminating in procedural and accurate histories like “The Longest Day '' and "Midway". Korea was covered by “The Bridges of Toko Ri” and “The Steel Helmet” and “Hamburger Hill'' and “MASH”. And filmmakers had an obligation to do justice to the Vietnam experience. There was Capolla’s “Apocalypse Now”, Kubrick’s “Steel Metal Jacket” and Cimino’s “The Deer Hunter”.
There are other movies than war movies which chronicled the decades. The undertows of suburban life was dealt with in Douglas Sirk movies, though to me the best one remains “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” which catches the ambivalence of being an advertising man that is much more clear than in the television series “Mad Men”, and also brings in the long reverberation of the war. Then there was teenage angst in Fifties’ ``Rebel Without a Cause” and Brando in “The Wild One ''. Those would also pass as topics, though I am amused to notice that right wingers cling to the suburbs as idyllic and think social media is destroying the minds and souls of teenagers just as rightwingers thought in the Fifties that comic books were doing that. Right wingers never change their minds, just the objects of their fears, even if the movie public has moved on to a different topic.
But what since? What of the movies this century? It might seem that what were once called “major motion pictures” were in abundance in the usual topics. Kathryn Bigalow won a Best Pictue award for “The Hurt Locker”, which was about the Iraq War and her procedural about torture and how politics got in the way of that might have been called forty years ago “Guantanamo” but was called instead “Zero Dark Thirty”. A lot of movies were about gays and lesbians because that is an issue these years (“Milk”, “Brokeback Mountain”, “The Kids Are All Right”) as are movies about Black people (“Human Figures”, “The Blind Side”, “District 9”). There were movies about how business was different (“Michael Clayton”, “Up In the Air”) and about politics (“Frost/Nixon”, “Good Night, Good Luck”) and even one about environmentalism (“Avatar”). But something else was different, especially in the last ten years. Movies were about cleaning up the past to validate contemporary values while movies used to be about current events, the news still fresh on the page. I still haven't seen a movie about 9/11, much less Jan. 6th, which is more than two years ago, when World War II movies made references to events some six months before or less. I have seen no movie on Covid or Trump while “W.” was released soon after he left office. Are producers too timid to confront the near present? It is easier, less trying, to do comic book superheroes. But to do that is to abandon the movie tradition of covering the news as soon as the producers notice that there is a new angle to take on a hot topic. How is watching rhe Oscars live an important event if the movies don’t keep up with processing the still lively news?
As for the Oscar event last night, the format went back to the tried and true and it worked, milking both sentimentality and significance. It used an emcee who did a monologue that included teasing and praise of some famous figures but did not dominate the scene as had past hosts. The setting was a usual theater that was a bit spiced up by adding lights to the back of the theater seats. The song nominees, as usual, seemed out of place and the pictures of those who had died in the past year brought, as usual, a tear to my eye. Jamie Lee Curtis who won as Supporting Actress acknowledged her movies royalty by saying both her parents were nominated but never won. And everywhere there were Asians as the winner of Best Supporting Actor said by saying he had accomplished the American Dream, which has been a theme of the Oscars ever since it started. People can differ about what picture or person should have won the award-- I preferred “Tar”-- but those debates around the water cooler-- if there are any-- have gone on for a long time. I still don’t think Judy Holiday should have beaten out either Gloria Swanson or Bette Davis that year. She was a one-trick pony. As best I could tell, the entire production was tightened up but, as I say, the production isn’t the problem but that the films aren’t processing current events.