Oscars, Movies, and Me

The first Oscar ceremony that I remember seeing was in 1964. I was already a movie fan, but I took no interest in this ritual. My mother was watching them, though, and I remember sitting on the couch and glimpsing people in evening wear walk to a stage and collecting those gray statuettes. Back then, you see, television was black-and-white, so the gold in those Oscars didn’t come through. I vaguely recall seeing a film clip from Cleopatra (a nominee for best picture of 1963), as well as repeatedly hearing that “the winner is Tom Jones.”

Tom Jones?

Where was Jason and the Argonauts?

X - The Man with the X-Ray Eyes?

Or The Slave: The Son of Spartacus, the best Steve Reeves movie yet?

Clearly, the Academy and I had very different tastes.

It wasn’t until the 1968 extravaganza that I took any interest in the Oscars. I had matured a bit by then, you see. In 1967, I was ten-years-old. I could trace my obsession with movies to 1962, the year I saw Hercules with Steve Reeves at the kind of third-run neighborhood movie house that no longer exists. By 1965, I had graduated from American International horror flicks and Elvis Presley musicals to the somewhat more adult world of James Bond. Agent 007 was there in 1967, too, in the person of Sean Connery whose fifth Bond movie, You Only Live Twice, was released in June. But that summer I also saw what I now recognize as the first movie for “mature audiences” to cross my line of vision. In August of that year, my family and I visited the Auto Drive-In in Cleveland, Ohio to see In the Heat of the Night, a movie whose title and ad campaign suggested it was a crackling good murder mystery.

Back then, the MPAA had yet to institute its self-censuring ratings system. There were Disney movies, which didn't interest me at all, and there were movies - PERIOD. The ads for some of them included a small warning, "Suggested for Mature Audiences," but even the Bond movie, so popular with kids, carried that designation. A movie was a movie, and except for those raunchy titles that played one downtown theater and whose ads featured grubby text and illustrations, there was no effort to keep anyone out. If you had the money to pay the admission, you were free to enter.

In the Heat of the Night contained some rough language, not the F word or the one that is slang for excrement, but there were a few "damns", and in a couple of scenes, the dreaded N word was uttered by racists unhappy to see Sidney Poitier's black detective help solve a crime in Mississippi. There was also a brief, fleeting hint of nudity when shapely Quentin Dean was glimpsed through her window, topless and drinking an RC Cola, as a police officer (played by the great Warren Oates) stops his vehicle to indulge his voyeurism.

In the Heat of the Night went on to win the Oscar for best picture that year, and I had also seen quite a few of the year’s other nominees, including Paul Newman’s performance in Cool Hand Luke and Audrey Hepburn’s tour de force in Wait Until Dark, so I didn’t yawn through the telecast as I did four years earlier.

Since then, I’ve watched the Academy Awards every year and have yawned quite a bit. There’s nothing I dread more than the scripted interplay between presenters that is meant to be amusing but usually falls flat and is often embarrassing. In living rooms around the country, I suspect that many people are shouting the same words that I’m thinking:

“Read the nominees! Open the damn envelope and announce the winners! Get on with it already!”

The show’s producers who repeatedly try and usually fail to keep the telecast under four hours probably think it’s the awards in the less glamorous categories - film editing, cinematography, sound, etc – that make the show drag. Those are important awards, and the winners in those categories earned their time in the spotlight. It’s the supposedly cutesy repartee, the lame jokes, and the production numbers that need to be cut.

Dreary as they often are, the Oscars are the only such event that I wouldn’t miss. Like everyone else, I often criticize the choices (Dances with Wolves over Goodfellas? The English Patient over anything?), but they have more validity than the other industry awards. Despite some very questionable choices through the years (“and the Oscar goes to . . . Roberto Begnini!”), the Oscars are infallible compared to the Grammys which spent most of the ‘60s and ‘70s pretending that rock ‘n’ roll didn’t exist. While history suggests that maybe Citizen Kane was the film to honor in 1941 instead of How Green Was My Valley, and that Raging Bull may have been a worthier choice for 1980 than Ordinary People, there are just as many examples of the Academy getting it absolutely right. I’m thinking of Casablanca, On the Waterfront, West Side Story, Lawrence of Arabia, Midnight Cowboy, The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, Unforgiven, Schindler’s List, and many others.

And so I’ll watch this year to see if Argo trounces Lincoln, as the “experts” are predicting, or if Silver Linings Playbook pulls off a surprise. Most of all, I’ll tune in for the 50th anniversary salute to 007 and to see who they neglect to include in the dead people montage.

© 2013 Brian W. Fairbanks

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The King's Speech VS The Social Network: Heart over head?

So now The King's Speech is the frontrunner for the best picture Oscar at this month's 83rd annual Academy Awards. The Social Network, long considered the film to beat after having swept the critics awards and winning the Golden Globe for best motion picture-drama, is now an underdog. The King's Speech rose to its current status after winning awards from three major guilds, most of whose members belong to, or at least wield influence with, the Academy, as critics and members of the Globe bestowing Hollywood Foreign Press do not. Once Oscar nominations were announced, The King's Speech strengthened its lead by garnering 12 nominations, compared to The Social Network's 8, two less than even True Grit, the Coen brothers's western that the Globes and those critics pretty much ignored.

The amateur pundits who track the Oscars all year long, debating each film's merits and likely appeal to the Academy, are outraged. To them, The Social Network is a movie that speaks to its time (the word "zeitgeist" is trotted out repeatedly in discussions about the film) and speaks to the intellect (its characters are backstabbing creeps that only other backstabbing creeps could love). The King's Speech, they say, targets the emotions. It touches the heart and tells an uplifting story, mostly true, based on historical fact. There are the usual naysayers, including Christopher Hitchens, who are dumping on the film's distortions (King George VI was not nearly as unsympathetic to the Nazis as the movie claims, Hitchens says), just as they questioned the true character of Oscar Schindler and other subjects of heartwarming biopics.

The quarrel I have with these critics is that they almost always imply, or flat out state, that a film that appeals to the emotions is inferior to one that appeals to the intellect. Compassion and kindness are qualities believed to be related to the heart, and where, oh where, would our society be without compassion and kindness?

Someone whose head overrules his heart would probably not adopt an orphaned child or an abandoned puppy because his head is thinking only of the responsibilities, the expense, and the sacrifices required. The heart has other priorities and it could be argued that they are of greater value than a decision made only by the head. The heart usually proves wiser than the head in the long run because it takes others into consideration, something the main characters in The Social Network never do.

The head VS heart argument is even a little sexist. After all, we have always been told that women let their hearts rule their lives while men favor logical thinking. Ideally, a work of art appeals to both the mind and the emotions, but if it only aims for one, the greatest works of art usually go for the heart. They inspire rather than report, and as Bob Dylan once observed, the greatest thing you can do is inspire someone. Technical writing appeals exclusively to the head. Is it art? If so, does its appeal to the intellect make it superior to poetry?

I haven't seen The King's Speech, but The Social Network and its characters left me cold. Mark Zuckenberg is an obnoxious, fast-talking, opportunistic asshole without one redeeming personality trait. A movie's characters don't have to be noble or even likeable for a film to achieve greatness, as Martin Scorsese's magnificent Goodfellas proves, but it helps to have someone you care about or can identify with.

As for its "hitting the zeitgeist," maybe it does, but The Social Network strikes me as being a little too much of its time to remain relevant in the future. It's about the founding of Facebook (which is, as far as I can tell, nothing more than My Space with a different name), but Facebook will almost certainly fade away once the next big thing arrives. The Internet itself may be subsumed by some other technological innovation before long, and the web that we know now may look as quaint as those cylinders once used to record sound. The Social Network could just as well be a film about the invention of the compact disc. Some have suggested that it's comparable to Citizen Kane, not only because it has a media mogul at its center, but because of its supposedly revolutionary technique. Its certainly well-made, but I didn't see anything I haven't seen before. Furthermore, Zuckenberg is not Charles Foster Kane, and David Fincher, the director of The Social Network, good as he is, is no Orson Welles.

© 2011 Brian W. Fairbanks

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