The Triumph of Oscarness
If you managed to watch more than 45 minutes of tonight’s Oscar broadcast, you’re either far more patient than I or stuck in a studio apartment with a television that won’t turn off and only gets ABC. The appeal of the ceremony is along the same lines as the appeal of American Idol, and while I suppose I can understand it in some abstract way, it’s not something to which I can relate. I love the idea of ranking and judging films, but, as Matt captured so brilliantly, the half-calculated, half-panicked seesawing between self-important Art and anxious populism means that the Oscars aren’t really an indicator of quality anymore, but rather an indicator of Oscarness. Oscarness does, admittedly, overlap with quality (see last year’s awards), but it is not the same thing. Undoubtedly, the biggest triumph for Oscarness this year was Sean Penn’s Best Actor win for his portrayal of Harvey Milk. It’s part political statement, part Hollywood politics, and part bias toward the self-important and showy. I thought Milk was a fine film, especially the first hour, and Penn was striking in the lead role, but he never never feels when he can Emote, never talks when he can Speechify, never acts when he can Act.
That, along with his politics — ostentatiously lefty, but safer (and better looking) than Michael Moore — makes him perfect for Oscar night, especially when the other option is picking a has-been freakshow in a brilliant but little-seen, and frankly sort of odd, comeback role. It’s not just that Mickey Rourke deserved an Oscar tonight, though he did. It’s that the Oscars have already forsaken any opportunity to be about pure artistic merit, and because the gilded self-congratulation of Oscarness, along with the Oscar-gaming it encourages, is producing diminishing returns both at the Nielsens and at the box-office, they badly need another angle.
So rather than recycle the same bloated sentiment into a slightly reformated package, which, with its desperate deployment of amplified star-power (Look! There are five famous actors all together!) has the gimmicky feel of comic-book crossover, the Academy might consider doing something to actually shake things up rather than just stir the same old cocktail of self-consciousness and self-celebration into a different shade of glass — something, say, like going with the genuine weirdo rather than the political activist, like choosing the crackle of uncertainty over a pretty face, like picking the has-been freakshow comeback rather than the Actor — or, more succinctly, like making the whole thing a little less Sean Penn and a bit more Mickey Rourke.
I don’t disagree. But when was it ever different, Peter?
— Tony Comstock · Feb 23, 01:24 PM · #
You allude to something important about how novel yet eternal this particular oscillation between Art and Populism has been. I think it can gainfully be viewed as a version of a deeper oscillation characteristic of the human condition: between our longing for repose in inward self-sufficiency and our longing for feverish engagement with society.
— James · Feb 23, 03:06 PM · #
I agree, and find the Oscars to be wrong more often than they are right. But I think there’s another problem lurking around in there: the fact that a critics-consensus awards would honor films that didn’t win Oscars, in all likelihood, is good. The fact that such awards would honor films nobody has seen is a problem. I can’t decide if it’s just that good movies are more and more small and “indie” or if it’s also the fact that reviewers are more and more likely to only enjoy that kind of film. I mean, look— while it’s true that the Oscars are a bad rubric for what movies are good, it is also true that the Oscars have honored some of the greatest films of all time, your Lawrence of Arabia, your Citizen Kane, your Godfather. Now, certainly, a big part of the problem is that the studios aren’t making movies of that quality anymore. But I also worry that obscurianism is taking over film criticism.
— Freddie · Feb 23, 04:43 PM · #
Gah what a terribly articulated comment. Sorry.
— Freddie · Feb 23, 04:44 PM · #
There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of just what The Oscars are at work in this post and comments.
The Oscars are a PR event, put on by the Hollywood establishment to promote the product the Hollywood establishment makes and sells. Year by year you may think that the choices they make are odd, but overall they’ve got a nice long track record of maintaining enough credibility to maintain the currency of the awards they hand out (mostly to themselves.)
I mean serously? What would the point be of handing out Best Picture or Best Actor to a film or actor that isn’t in a position to make money off of the award? That would be like giving a JD 9030 to a dirty farmer in the Congo; it doesn’t do the dirty farmer a damn bit of good, and it means that someone somewhere else that might be able to actually do something with the tractor doesn’t get.
The only time off brand films get statues is when it’s time to burnish the brand. This happens now and then, but don’t expect it to be a habit.
— Tony Comstock · Feb 23, 05:19 PM · #
Tony, that sounds plausible, but given that the oscar selections are made by vote rather than by an individual decision-maker, do you see what you described as emergent behavior from the interests of the individual voters, or as a set of unwritten rules and agreements that all the voters are aware of?
— kenB · Feb 23, 05:58 PM · #
At the risk of insulting the more learned readers here, I’ll make a bad quantum physics analogy:
Leaving behind the process by which people/films are nominated, any one academy voter can do whatever the hell he or she wants to vote for. As the story goes, Shakespeare in Love was an unexpected and undesired result.
But if each voter is unpredictably quantum in his or her behavior, over time the behavior of the academy as a whole is not. Hollywood is a pretty tight industry, with a long history of being able to (more or less) pull together in mutual self-interest. The fact that Peter is taking the time to write about what he thinks is wrong with the Oscars is one small example of how well they’ve “managed the brand”.
If I were a betting man, I’d give good odds that we’ll still be arguing about what’s wrong with the Oscars long after Peter’s decided quit punditry to take a job in the PR department of a moderately trendy adult beverage company.
— Tony Comstock · Feb 23, 07:15 PM · #
Thanks — that’s what I was trying to get at with the term “emergent”.
— kenB · Feb 23, 09:30 PM · #
I think it’d be more interesting if they’d include clips in which members of the academy explain how they voted and why. Even better if they hooked various members up to a hidden mike so we could hear what they really think.
The best way to get through it if you have to watch it with a teen daughter is to have plenty of your favorite ice cream and toppings around.
— Joules · Feb 24, 05:45 AM · #