"As the famous gather to applaud their seeming greatness. As the fools are fooled again. Humanity you sick motherfucker."
- Charles Bukowski
There are a hundred identifiable, articulate reasons to dislike The Oscars. But to like them? That's a much shorter, more abstract list, and one I don't think I'd be able to compile convincingly. It's more similar to organized sports than people give it credit for; we cheer and boo the success and failures of an institution in which we ourselves take no part, feeling pride or defeat as though our own achievements are at stake. But when I started watching them as a child, I just absorbed it as a big loud TV show with the greatest cast ever assembled and everyone was just talking about movies: old movies, new movies, movies I liked. One could make the argument that that's all it ever was and still is. But that's the trouble with anything: once you invest your feelings into something you start to overthink it until there's a problem. And that's where I'm at now and have been for the past 20 years: I have a problem.
The first year I really took notice was in 1991 - that is, the 63rd Academy Awards, celebrating achievements in films from 1990 (yeah it gets confusing for me). What drew me in was that Edward Scissorhands and Dick Tracy were up against each other for Makeup Effects, and my first feeling was "wow this is something I really need to take seriously." And that was it, my neutral enjoyment was felt for a moment, and then immediately turned into bloodlust; I loved Dick Tracy, but it meant absolutely nothing to me once you put it up against Edward fucking Scissorhands. And so there I was, openly rooting for my movie to "win," which my mother assured me was not likely just based on the craftsmanship alone. And I understood that and I had to agree, and she was right and I took my loss like a man. But with that I was suddenly in the game; my opinions were biased and without any real constructive argument (that would certainly change) but hey, I had an opinion: I wanted the movie I liked to win a prize for being excellent.
I hadn't seen any of the Best Picture nominees at the time of the telecast, but Dances With Wolves seemed like an obvious choice. I mean it just looked like a "Best Picture" - my first sorta conceptual understanding of "Oscar Bait." So I was pretty indifferent with the outcome overall, but in the course of just the next few months, I began to see these very films as they trickled out onto Home Video: Ghost, Misery, Godfather III, Total Recall, and of course, Goodfellas and Dances With Wolves. Gradually The Oscars as a concept started to resonate with me: "I don't know how it works exactly, but they clearly know what they're doing." And yes, I very much enjoyed both films, but I found Goodfellas to be entirely more engaging and memorable than the movie it lost to. But what did I know? Obviously Dances With Wolves was more important, more socially conscious, and just all around better made... This is the mentality of an 8-year-old folks, just keep that in mind the next time you decide to publicly lick boot.
The following year was more of the same: I'd seen enough to get by, but not enough to have a strong opinion in some of the categories. No matter, because this was the year of the Lambs and I was fortunate to have caught it at Tri-Town Drive-In over the Summer. It was an immediate Family Favorite, and as Awards Season started to roll in, my mother informed me of the established protocol: it's a Horror Movie, it came out too early in the year, it's too controversial. Through that and through her, I started to become fully aware of the "buzz" - I was paying attention to general Entertainment News and had an active interest in the mechanics of this weird political side of what I'd always otherwise considered to be a defining hobby.
Night of the broadcast and Billy Crystal is wheeled out onto the stage like Hannibal Lecter and it fills me with this euphoric sense of Community and Humanity and Cinema. I feel grown up, I feel in on the joke, and I'm excited by this blatant prospect that my movie of this year may have a good shot at being honored beyond this flattering parody. Along the way Terminator 2 picks up 4 technical Awards, and again it somehow validates me and my interests in a way that teachers or classmates or even other leisure acitivtes weren't able to address. My parents could - particularly my mother, as this was sorta carrying on her own tradition from throughout her own life. That and my father had difficulty staying up late, so at some point she and I would move the festivities to one of the other TVs in the house and finish out the show.
I didn't really know what what the odds were that year (or that there was such a thing) but we were just openly overjoyed as we watched The Silence of the Lambs win Adapted Screenplay, then Actress, then Actor, then Director, then Picture. I mean they all seemed like the obvious choice to me, but my mother had to explain how unprecedented this was and that I'd witnessed history (which is a loose expression but I understood what she meant). So in addition to the excitement of rooting for the ultimate champion of the evening, I felt like I was part of something - a globally televised event during which a statistical rarity occurred, sure, but more than that I was excited to legitimately like the popular thing, to be on the winning side, to be part of something larger. It was a big party and I liked being there.
In the year that followed I really didn't consciously have the wherewithal to seek out much of the Prestigious Cinema that I thought might recreate that celebratory feeling I had with Lambs; I wasn't dragging my dad to go see Howard's End (or even Aladdin for that matter). I did get to see Bram Stoker's Dracula pick up three trophies and Last of the Mohicans nabbed one (to this day the only Oscar won by any Michael Mann movie). But Dracula was my movie of that year (amongst a few others) and I was more than happy to watch it beat out Batman Returns for Makeup. ("Now there's a bat man.")
I could go on forever, baby! But this isn't gonna be like a year-by-year hopscotch down my own Memory Lane - how boring would that be for you. Suffice to say my interest and anticipation in the event grew with each passing year and I started to see more stuff and read more news and just generally settled into the idea of my movie watching hobby as my dominant personality trait. It became like a holiday that I looked forward to every year, with rituals and counting down the days etc. But in 1998 I started taking it to a new level.
The 70th Academy Awards (which recognized the 1997 movies) was the Titanic year. If you were there for it, it was A Night to Remember: it wasn't just the biggest movie, it was the biggest thing; a bonafide cultural phenomenon that permeated every corner of human life for what felt like an entire year, and this was the night that would determine if the Academy was hip enough to fall in line with the moviegoing public. (It was and still is the highest-rated Oscar telecast to air, as well as any other televised awards show ever.)
This was the first year it occurred to me to tape the show - and not for nothing, I rewatched it dozens of times over the following months to the point I memorized Billy's entire opening musical number. There were memorable appearances and some clever commemorative stunts in honor of their ineffectually round numbered anniversary, including a decent Chuck Workman montage of the "Evolution of Film" or something to that effect that would partially inspire me to edit similarly-themed spectacles several years later. But more than any of that, this was the one that felt most like history - maybe because of the Titanic hype, maybe because I recorded and analyzed the fuck out of it everyday after school, maybe because 55.3 million people watched it right along with me the night it aired, but it did kinda feel like a moviemaking milestone in my lifetime. If my interest in Cinema had been waning, this gave me a bit of a jerk - but didn't jerk me in the way AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies did later that year.
I've professed its impact
in the past, but in June of '98 TNT aired a list of the "best films" of the past 100 years as selected by the American Film Institute. I bring it up again now because because it cooperatively influenced the way I was consuming movies with the peak of my Oscar enthusiasm; I was engrossed in concepts like
prestige and
influential and
groundbreaking. It was an entirely necessary phase in the life of a
cinephile to experience what the majority thought was worthy to represent the medium; I'd seen the rest, now see the best(?).
Entertainment Weekly also published an incredibly in-depth and self aware issue covering the recent Indie Cinema boom which helped guide me into the margins from time to time.
We were teetering on the DVD evolution (and the internet), and so I was still at the mercy of Blockbuster's embarrassing VHS library; suffice to say 40 copies of Jungle 2 Jungle left little room for even the most mainstream "classics." Rough times - saddled with an insatiable lust for new stuff or stuff that's new to me and much of it was unavailable in any immediately gratifying way. From the need to stay actively involved in a passion that wasn't meeting my needs came a mostly-pointless undertaking that resulted in very little satisfaction: with the aid of my immediately outdated Handbook, I copied by hand every Oscar nominee in every category since 1928.
To be fair (mostly to myself) it resulted in a literal encyclopedic knowledge of Academy Award winners and losers. And then, to be real (mostly with myself) I've retained very little of it since then -- I mean I know National Velvet won Best Editing, but I can't tell you who it was, or even when actually. Apart from passing the time and further discovering even more movies I had no way of viewing, I felt a sort of solidarity with the past; I'd missed an entire history of this thing of which I found to be so fascinating and this was giving me a sense of being there for it, or at least being alive at the time. And I looked at all these decades of old movies, a lot of them I'd seen but most I hadn't, and just through that I recognized patterns and peaks and streaks and slumps and upsets, and I was able to see parallels and evolution to my then-current era that I was most familiar with - not just in award-giving, but in Film.
I loved what a big stupid game it was: I loved how pointless it was when they got it wrong, I loved how important it was when they got it right. I felt true joy when my picks got a trophy and legitimate depression when they were robbed. In 1998 I began to go to great lengths to see at least all the Best Picture nominees before the night of the telecast. (That streak officially ended with Return of the King.) And it was around this time that The Great Divide began to take form; the gulf between myself and Modern Cinema. As the 21st Century pressed on, The Oscars (second only to critics and sometimes box office) were informing me what was supposed to be "good," because I began having trouble determining that myself. And every year as the buzz began to blossom, it always felt forced or off; I could recall many head-scratchers in terms of nominees (and winners) just in my own lifetime, but now year after year after year it just felt like a cakey buildup of mediocrity and I'd ask "so this is it, huh? The Gold Standard, Best of the Best." And in nearly every instance, yes, these were clearly the best of the year, and that clarity was the inconvenient truth that the Academy was using to pummel me in the face: this was sorta the tone of mainstream movies from now on and we've accepted it to the point that we're rewarding it.
In the wake of every show, the two things that attract the most scrutiny are the red carpet fashions and just how much the telecast generally sucks; people adore the pageantry and then demonize it for its self-indulgence and decadence. The movie-related stuff was always secondary and maybe rightly so; as a kid it was a big magic act, like a movie unto itself. Then I got older and learned about the politics and campaigning and money and favoritism and racial anxiety and everything else that has zero to do with the art and science of filmmaking, and the interest began to gradually wane. Teleprompted riffing from flavor of the month hosts carrying a 4 hour drag-athon showcasing flavor of the month films no longer sparked much passion in me. Now I'm just here out of habit. I'm here for Quentin and PTA. I'm here for the montages. I'm here for the fist fights and envelope mixups.
Were they right all along, is it just an irrelevant bore? Did it start circling the drain after Y2K? In 2021, for the first time in over 30 years, I consciously skipped the ceremony - due largely to skipping every single movie nominated in every category that year. That was also a first, maybe ever: not seeing a single thing in the whole lineup. These were films from 2020 and nobody saw much of anything that year, but even still I didn't feel the least bit deprived. I skimmed the results the following day and thought, "boy, that Fran McDormand and Tony Hopkins are gonna go far in this biz." Even though I was marked absent, this debilitating joylessness was still palpable even from beyond its broadcast grave; it looked and sounded like it was pretty fucking depressing and I'm possibly healthier for having not seen it.
I thought maybe this was the beginning of some defiant trend of "who gives a shit," but of course Licorice Pizza had me coming back so I could pay my respects upon its inevitable losses. But even that was a logistical headache: I don't have cable TV anymore, just a small handful of borrowed streaming channels, and so I had to sign up for a free trial of some goddamn service which turned out to be the wrong one and had to be cancelled so that I could then sign up for the correct free trial of some other channel. All this and for what - I remember Will Smith and that's about it, and god bless him because that petty crime of passion was the liveliest bit of business the show had seen since that streaker ran across the stage back in '74. But you can't depend on that kinda stuff, so we're just stuck with musical numbers and acceptance speeches. What a nightmare.
This year I've got even more shared passwords so it seems entirely likely that I'll at least have the option to watch. And that's funny in a kinda circular way: for decades now this show (and the entire Awards Season) has been a calming (as much as it's been a disquieting) reminder of my ultimate "option to watch." The sting of obligation died so long ago; I didn't really wanna see Chocolat but I was playing my own little game that was fun till it wasn't. I used to have this incredible angst if I didn't go into the show with a well rounded itinerary of everything that was up for a statue. Once I got past that mentality it was such a goddamn relief; if I needed to do all this outside reading to enjoy the thing, was it really even worth it? It became apparent very quickly that the nominees were not the pinnacles of artistic form, and even just as a list of suggested viewing it was a pretty watered down cocktail. I mean who needs it - I've got Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB and Letterboxd and Sight and Sound and you and your friends and strangers to tell me what the best films of the past 5 minutes are, and I owe it to no one (especially myself) to try and keep up.
For the last 15 years of her life I don't think my mother saw any of the nominees (at least not prior). But it didn't matter to her - she wasn't wound up in whatever pretentious approach I have. She liked the celebrities and the fashion and the glamour and the possibility of some humor throughout. And even with that superficial approach she was vocal about the dip in the quality of the show. It's become a finicky, pampered Chihuahua that's just as frightened of the world as it is of itself. Now more than ever people are lifting themselves up by calling out Hollywood as some kinda "freak show," while the irony is that it's as bland as it's ever been. It's palpable in the films themselves, and this show has become a condescending high five between its own two hands. Sure, throw some Marvel movies in there so the Sound crew can get some trophies (which is the same trick they used to hook me in the first place), but now when I watch I have the same thought as when I'm cruising through the streaming thumbnails or digging through the Walmart bin of physical media: they gotta start making some better movies.
- Paul
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