Building Community One Book at a Time

The Academy Awards was the brainchild of Louis B. Mayer, who envisioned them as a way to promote the movies. Terrific idea so far. Given the fact that Mr. Mayer cared for the aesthetic aspects of the business a little less than a graffiti artist cares about perspective, the awards’ aura today as the bestowal of immortality upon mere mortals seems a touch inflated. Recipients of the statuette that Jim Carrey wickedly dubbed “the Grand High Lama of bric-a-brac” go through the rest of their lives with three new words tacked to the front of their names: Academy Award winner. It’s like being knighted in England or beatified by the Pope.

I understand that the distribution of awards is not an exact science. The Oscars are voted by people in the entertainment industry who are as much at the mercies of personal foibles and external forces as anyone else. Even given this fact, how do you ever take any organization too seriously that thinks The English Patient is really a better film than Fargo or that Billy Wilder’s acidic The Apartment is a finer achievement than Alfred Hitchcock’s blistering Psycho? The Academy, like the beam from a lighthouse on a rocky coastline, often projects a warning that there are dangers, too, in always choosing the most placid waters to ply.

That is precisely the conclusion that  author Mark Harris reached in Pictures At a Revolution, his excellent book about the 1967 Academy Awards. Harris took an in-depth look at the five movies nominated for Best Picture. Two of them, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night dealt with race relations. It was an especially volatile topic at that time and, if both films exhibited an admirable awareness of the problem, neither displayed too much vehemence about it. Moderation is a trait that the Academy appreciates a lot.

Two of the nominated movies were relatively low budget films, released with little fanfare, that had emerged as huge popular hits. Every major studio had passed on The Graduate. It was finally released by Italian producer Joseph E. Levine. Only Warren Beatty’s insistent browbeating persuaded Jack Warner to give the go ahead to Bonnie and Clyde. The fifth movie was Dr. Dolittle, a gigantic musical turkey released by Fox, which was still trying to recover from the staggering costs of Cleopatra.

Not surprisingly, Oscar voters decided upon In the Heat of the Night. It was a safe choice, discouraging the carping that the selection of either Dolittle or Dinner might have instigated (rightfully so), but it was also an example of how shortsighted the Academy can be. Both The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde took their places near the top of the list of the most influential films of the entire decade.

Nowhere is the disparity between genuine achievement and transient popularity more glaring than in the Best Director category. Of the 14 men named in the Pantheon Directors section of Andrew Sarris’ landmark book, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968, only one (John Ford) ever won a directing Oscar. In the segment that is devoted to those whom Sarris regards as having the most inflated reputations, all but one (Rouben Mamoulian) was not an Oscar winner. Five of the men (Elia Kazan, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann, and David Lean) each received two directing Oscars and William Wyler won the award three times.

This year, the bestowal of the Best Director Oscar was one of those milestone moments that the Academy loves to offer as evidence of how contemporary they have become. The award went to a woman for the first time. Kathryn Bigelow’s achievement in The Hurt Locker was all the more impressive because she was able to deliver a compelling film set in a world in which women are only peripheral characters. Bigelow displayed an audacious talent in Near Dark (it remains her best work to date) before settling into a more conventional Hollywood groove with Blue Shield (her only film in which a woman is the central character), the ludicrous Point Break, and a soggy adaptation of The Weight of Water. It is hardly a daunting filmography.

Bigelow’s win this year is, indeed, a step for Oscar. But a step merely for the sake of movement doesn’t assure that the direction is necessarily a forward one.

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