The New York Times tackles the Oscars, with all the pros and cons:
Bob Hope & Marlon Brando at the 1955 Oscars. By MANOHLA DARGIS and A. O. SCOTT
Published: February 17, 2012
New York Times
THE 84th Academy Awards will take place next Sunday at the Kodak Theater in Los Angeles. In anticipation of that night of rapture and tedium, Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott offer their reflections on the deeper meanings of this spectacularly trivial, paradoxically important, endlessly fascinating and often vexing event. A. O. SCOTT:
The Academy Awards seem to demand more attention each year, and one way to pay attention to them is to complain about them. Oscar cynicism has become its own special form of Oscar hype, and I wonder sometimes if the whole thing — the nominating process, the heavily publicized tweaks in the rules, the dreary broadcast and the endless drudgery of the “season” — is exasperating on purpose. The louder we criticize, the more we must care.
I think that underneath all the empty pomp and hyperventilating coverage there is something worth caring about. Yes, the Academy often recognizes mediocrity and overlooks excellence. Yes, the documentary and foreign language film categories are hobbled by ridiculous rules that seem designed to exclude some of the best work. (This year’s scandalous doc omissions include “The Interrupters,” “Tabloid” and “Into the Abyss,” but that’s the subject of another rant.) Yes, the show goes on too long, with too many bad jokes and not enough moments of genuine emotion or surprise. Yes, Hollywood is a swamp of vanity, myopia and bad taste. But it is also a community of hard-working and talented people who approach this annual ritual of self-congratulation with a sincere spirit of respect for the labor of others and reverence for the traditions that bring them together. There is a lot wrong with how the Academy conducts itself, and there are ways that Oscarmania is bad for audiences and movies. Before going into all of that I will say that there is always something moving, something disarmingly genuine, about the sight of the winners basking not just in the applause of the public, but also and more important in the admiration of their colleagues and peers.
MANOHLA DARGIS:
True, it’s nice when someone like Kathryn Bigelow or Curtis Hanson wins. But come on — Billy Crystal!? The Academy would have done a lot better to go with someone like Madonna for host or producer, someone, you know, who at least knows how to put on a big show, retains some cultural currency and can bring the polymorphously perverse to the Super Bowl. Seriously, though, it remains baffling that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences doesn’t trumpet that there’s more to this often-mocked organization than its really big show. What people may not also realize — and should — is that the Oscars are effectively a fund-raiser for the Academy. And while a lot of the money generated by its biggest night goes toward putting on the actual event, the Academy spreads the wealth around in a number of laudable ways, most important through its archive’s tremendous film collection, preservation and restoration undertakings.
You would think the Academy would claim all this good work. At the very least it would show that there’s more to the Oscars than jokes, plastic surgery and publicly sanctioned self-love.
SCOTT:
And it would find a good home on PBS! Don’t Billy Crystal and Madonna kind of represent the same pop-cultural era? As does Eddie Murphy, who was originally slated to host this year’s Oscar show. Which is only to say that the people who program the kind of pop culture that can lay claim to several hours of network time are very, very old — at least as old as you and I are — and maybe a little bit out of touch. But perverse as it may sound, I think the decision to go with Mr. Crystal is an advance over the floundering and unsuccessful recent attempts to pander to someone’s vague idea of the young and the hip. Jon Stewart, Chris Rock and last year’s hapless duo of Anne Hathaway and James Franco are all gifted and interesting performers with an electric spark of relevance. Just what the Oscars can’t handle! The broadcast should be a bastion of the square, the old, the mainstream, and the producers should, as the saying goes, own that.
The paradigmatic hosts of my youth were Bob Hope and Johnny Carson, who showed how hip they were partly by means of their willingness to play it straight and bland in contrast to whatever crazy stuff was going on at the movies or in the culture at large. Mr. Crystal — the last vaudevillian, and also, not for nothing, one of the first actors to play an openly gay character on network television — fits into this tradition (as, in her own way, did the Oscar winner Whoopi Goldberg). He represents a corny, nostalgic, utopian fantasy of popular culture at the heart of both Hollywood and network television. Everybody’s watching, everybody’s happy, everybody’s friends.
In the real world, of course, not as many people are watching, a lot of people are unhappy, and if everybody’s friends, it’s in the hostile Facebook sense of the word. Is it time to give up the fantasy or do we need it more than ever? Does it strike you that some of the favored movies this year play into some version of this dream, of a magical, inviting, accessible realm of popular art — or a version of historical reality — in which conflict and anxiety melt away?
DARGIS:
Hope and Carson hip? That could only be true for the 10-year-old you once were or my wonderfully innocent aunt who, also back in the day, thought it was such a shame that Liberace never got married. Mock me all you want, but I’m not saying the Oscars should become a Film Awareness Telethon; I’m just saying that a little education about its good deeds might help improve the Academy’s crummy public profile. And, for what it’s worth, a reprise of Madonna’s Totally Gay-Fabulous Halftime Revue would be bound to attract more (open) eyeballs than Mr. Crystal’s neo-Henny Youngman shtick, even without a big game. And, in answer to your question: It’s been noted elsewhere that a number of this year’s contenders for best picture are wreathed in nostalgia for bygone eras, cinematic and otherwise, including “Hugo,” Martin Scorsese’s digital ode to the film pioneer Georges Méliès; “The Artist,” Michel Hazanavicius’s ingratiating ode to so-called silent cinema; “Midnight in Paris,” Woody Allen’s Borscht Belt ode to Paris in the 1920s; and “The Help” Tate Taylor’s (and Disney’s) zip-a-dee-doo-dah ode to race relations. Only a few contenders, including Stephen Daldry’s “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close,” are set exclusively in a recognizable present. But as so many Hollywood prestige pictures have done in the past, this one radically depoliticizes its central event (Sept. 11) and turns it into ahistorical sentimental sludge.
Of course being good and being Oscar-worthy are rarely the same thing, and what matters now is hype, hysteria and Harvey Weinstein. It’s no surprise that the Weinstein Company has pushed “The Artist,” a pleasant if trivial distraction, into becoming this year’s apparent foregone conclusion. No one practices Oscar hoodoo like Mr. Weinstein, as witnessed by last year’s forgettable best picture shoo-in, “The King’s Speech,” yet another of his releases. Frankly, given his blitzkrieg approach to the Oscars, and that he’s about the only one who knows how to hijack, I mean, enliven, the tediously long march toward that seemingly endless night, the Academy should consider letting Mr. Weinstein put on the next awards show.
SCOTT:
I don’t begrudge “The Artist” its probable win. It’s a charming, likable movie — a movie in love with movies and its own charm and also full of the genial cosmopolitanism that the Academy tends to like. It and “The King’s Speech,” different though they are, may define what an Oscar movie is today: well made, emotionally accessible and distributed, as you note, by the Weinstein Company. People who see them mostly like them. But the movies people love — both the idiosyncratic, ambitious movies that spark passions and start arguments and the hugely popular, hugely expensive genre movies that are Hollywood’s global cash crop — have become marginal. Which could be why the Oscars seem so small these days.
DARGIS:
The major studios still clean up at the Oscars, only now it’s often one of their dependents — divisions like the old Disney-owned Miramax — which tend to generate heat and grab awards (well, the divisions or the post-Miramax Mr. Weinstein). From 1990 to 1999 seven of the best picture winners were released by the majors (five) or their dependents (two). The studios still have the most cake; they just cut it differently. From 2000 to 2010 seven of the best picture winners were released by the majors (three) or their dependents (four). Significantly, however, in the 1990s and ’80s every best picture winner but one was also among the Top 20 at the box office; in the 2000s, however, about a third of the best picture winners finished out of the box office Top 20.
The Academy has been accused of snobbery for nominating “small” critical darlings over populist picks, as if movies like Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia” were even in the running. If there’s a disconnect between most moviegoers and the Academy, it’s mainly because the studios now bank on their blockbusters (ostensibly for Joe and Jill Popcorn) and hang their award hopes on smaller titles (for fancy-pants elites like us), many released by their divisions. Given that cartoons and kiddie flicks have dominated the box office for much of the decade — last year 9 of the top 10 grossing releases were sequels, most juvenile oriented — it’s no surprise the Academy ignores these mass-market items. The Oscars have become the golden fig leaves that the industry wears to pretend it’s as committed to being in the quality business as it was in the past.