If you think the Academy Awards are an annual festival of disappointment, embarrassment and disgrace, you are in very good company. The first time Alfred Hitchcock was nominated, in 1940, he stayed home and paced around his living room, debating whether to listen to the show on the radio. When he learned he had lost, his wife offered advice that still sounds good: "Don't take it so seriously. Remember that this is the group who gave an Oscar to Luise Rainer. Twice!"
Rainer was just the sort of schmaltzy overacter who always seems to wind up with an Oscar -- along with the likes of Yul Brynner, Dustin Hoffman, Shirley MacLaine and Charlton Heston. And Hitchcock, of course, is just the sort of person who would end his life without winning one (except a non-voted lifetime-achievement trophy), putting him in the company of Cary Grant, Fred Astaire, Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, Kirk Douglas, Barbara Stanwyck, Errol Flynn and the Marx Brothers.
You can simply wave off the Oscars as a large boil that erupts on the face of your TV screen once a year, impervious to nature and science. But, since you're probably going to watch it anyway, it might be worth explaining some of the academy's mysteries.
Just who are these people? There are several good answers to this question, but a short, simple one will suffice: Actors. Of the 5,607 voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, actors are by far the largest branch, with approximately 1,400 actors making up more than a quarter of the organization. No other group even comes close: The second-largest branch, the producers, occupies only 8 per cent of the academy, with around 400 members.
Have you ever been to a party attended by a large group of actors? You can immediately tell who they are. They're the ones who start crying while recalling scenes from The Black Stallion, who clear the dance floor with mannered moves and who must demonstrate, loudly, that they know all the words to some awful Broadway musical. They are honourable and talented people, and pretty to boot, but they should not be trusted to determine the fate of the cinematic world.
Is this a ridiculous stereotype? Yes, but one that goes far to explain the nature of the problem. Actors like to see Acting, the capital-A kind, with lots of facial contortions and gesticulations and emotional extremis. When the great French director Robert Bresson dismissed American cinema as "a grimacing contest," he was referring to the sort of material that the academy's actors had chosen to hoist onto the pedestal in the 1950s.
Things have improved only slightly.
The best films are very often the products of directing, editing and photography, helped by acting that does not draw undue attention to itself. This is a truly great and challenging form of acting, but it holds little truck with actual thespians, who this year felt The Green Mile's thick histrionics more worthy of a nomination than the cool remove of Eyes Wide Shut or The Limey.
"If there's a film that really appeals to actors, it's automatically going to sweep the awards, no matter what else is out there," says Oscar historian Damien Bona, author of the invaluable reference work Inside Oscar. "That's what happened when the actors fell for Titanic, and it's basically the same thing that happened 40 years earlier when they went gaga over Ben Hur -- it's the same people, and the same tastes."
Can they be bought? Beyond their own dubious tastes, award juries are subject to all manner of extraneous pressures and temptations. If awards are arrayed from the utterly corrupt (the Golden Globes, say, or the Olympics) to the reasonably fair (the Nobel Peace Prize), the Oscars fall somewhere in the middle.
Their biggest flaw in the process can be found in the nominating process. Academy members are sent a list of every film produced that year and are expected to tick off their nomination for the best in their category (directors select best director, for instance), as well as for best picture. Unfortuntely, they are not required actually to see any of the eligible films. According to the academy's rule book, all the board of governors must do is "provide for such screenings or special meetings as may be desirable to insure a full and fair consideration of the merits of all eligible achievements."
As such, the nominating process is open to all manner of influence, lobbying and semi-bribery. As recently as the seventies, studios would ply the academy members with food and drink -- the gaudy 1969 epic Anne of the Thousand Days became known as "Anne of the Thousand Filets" because of the number of steak dinners Universal laid on in its effort to secure a nomination (it worked). Such overt forms of vote-buying have diminished, but influence still works.
In 1990, the less-than-stellar actress Diane Ladd personally wrote a letter to every member of the academy's acting branch, on pink paper with "Harmony - peace - love" inscribed in her hand, urging them to give her a best supporting actress nomination for her part in Wild at Heart. Actors eat this sort of stuff up, and Ladd got the nod.
This year, the film industry's favourite form of influence-wielding is in full sail. If you live in Hollywood and subscribe to the town's trade papers, you'll be forgiven if you never want to see American Beauty again in your life, as virtually every scene in the movie -- and every memorable line of dialogue -- has been reprinted day after day in full-page ads bearing the famous phrase "for your consideration." TV viewers in Los Angeles and New York have been treated to wall-to-wall ads for The Green Mile and The Cider House Rules, highlighting performances of certain key actors, aimed not at the theatre-going audience but at the academy members in those cities.
Academy members are still permitted one item of graft from every movie producer -- a videotape of the movie. By January, their mailboxes are stuffed with tapes of just about every film made, and few can resist the temptation to watch them in their living rooms, sparing a trip to the theatre. As a result, the Oscars have turned into a contest of small-screen entertainment rather than big-screen drama. Some believe this is a significant difference.
"Personally, I believe the reason Shakespeare in Love beat out Saving Private Ryan last year is that it played better on videotape," DreamWorks marketing executive Terry Press said in a recent magazine interview. This is a popular theory, as is the one that holds that Shakespeare in Love's thespian in-jokes appealed to the actors. On the other hand, Saving Private Ryan is just the sort of chest-pounding morality play that usually appeals to the actors. Likewise, few academy members watch their videotapes on 12-inch screens in their kitchens -- among this group, the wall-sized TV and surround-sound audio system is as commonplace as the prenuptual agreement.
This does little to offset the fact that great films sometimes go unseen. In Premiere magazine's annual survey of U.S. movie critics, the top-ranked film last year was Election, followed closely by The Dreamlife of Angels. Neither film registered on the academy's radar, largely because they were not subject to bombastic marketing or mass-market hype. While an Oscar can't exactly be bought, you don't stand a chance of getting one if you don't pay your dues.
Is there hope? Well, they did get rid of the Debbie Allen dancers.
Also, it is common wisdom around Hollywood that the academy membership is now younger and, presumably, hipper in its tastes. There is no empirical proof of this, and little to indicate how this could be. In recent years, the academy has tightened up its membership qualifications: You must have produced a "significant body of work," as judged by the governors, and be recommended by at least two academy members and then you have to undergo a stringent hearing. (This, however, does not prevent an estimated 300-plus publicist types from enjoying membership under a bizarre 'public relations' category -- nor has it stopped Hollywood agents lobbying for their own voting rights).
Doug Saunders