In the 1960s and 1970s, shortly after Oscar night, the tonier movie critics such as John Simon would write articles scoffing at the choices of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Simon, in particular, would go right down the list, examining nearly every category and complaining that even the worthier winners were not really the worthiest.
This wasn’t just a case of a few New York highbrows flaunting their refinement in reproach of Hollywood vulgarity. Practically everyone who really loved movies felt the same way back then. After all, these were the decades of Film as Art, Film as Fashion (Julie Christie and all those miniskirts), Film as New Morality (the stuff that Austin Powers now mocks), Film as the Voice of Rebellious Youth, Film as International Cinema Renaissance (even the Soviet bloc was part of it until the tanks rolled into Prague). So it seemed to me and to other young movie buffs that, when the statuettes went to Patton rather than M*A*S*H*, to John Wayne (True Grit) instead of Dustin Hoffman (Midnight Cowboy), to My Fair Lady instead of A Hard Day’s Night, America’s most prestigious movie prize was being used by oldsters to keep American films staid, not to say arthritic. It wasn’t merely that the spurned movies were addressed to a younger audience; they actually were more limber in technique and fresher in their responses to life. Seen nowadays, A Hard Day’s Night (1964) still bubbles, Dr. Strangelove (1964) still cuts, and My Fair Lady (best picture of 1964) still creaks.
Furthermore, a perusal of the entire list of best-picture winners, from 1927 on, gives the impression that this top award was a tribute to plushness, not artistry. Of course, the further back you go, the worse the choices seem since the passing of decades brings out the innate seediness of second-rate entertainment. How could they have done it? the movie buff keeps exclaiming. Bad enough that How Green Was My Valley bested Citizen Kane in 1941 and You Can’t Take It with You trounced Bringing up Baby in 1938. At least You Can’t Take It is charming and How Green a decent weepie. But why choose Cimarron in 1931 over City Lights, a so-so western cum soap opera with only one memorable scene (the land rush), over Chaplin’s greatest achievement, a movie so wisely funny that it evokes comparison not with other films but with the best moments in Cervantes and Moliere? Time and again, perhaps two out of every three years, glossy mediocrities were honored. Why?
It is only when you take into account what Hollywood meant to the American people at the height of the studio system (the 1930s and 1940s) and how Hollywood perceived that audience, that you begin to understand what lay behind that stodginess, and may even begin to forgive it (but only if you feel in a forgiving mood), because that stodginess was the byproduct of a sort of noblesse oblige practiced by a pseudo-aristocracy.
It’s a cliché to label Hollywood stars as our royalty, but a cliché isn’t a lie. The studios cultivated their Gables and Garbos not primarily as acting talents (though some, of course, could act) but as cynosures, publicity garnerers, dream germinators. The studio bosses knew what made movies sell and they figured, correctly I think, that much audience daydreaming wasn’t just sex-fantasizing about the stars but conjuration about the stories those stars enacted: visions of elegance, exciting work, exotic locales, noble self-sacrifice, dashing accomplishment. The people who lived out these fantasies had to be, in their many public appearances, well groomed, well fed, superbly coiffed and accoutered, appropriately mated (usually with another star), politically blank, sexually gleaming but ultimately housebroken, and as closely identified with a particular studio as Babe Ruth was with the Yankees. Gable and Garbo and Norma Shearer radiated the satiny ambiance of MGM, Jimmy Cagney’s swagger encapsulated all the violence and grit of Warner Bros., and Tyrone Power’s saturnine handsomeness animated the Rafael Sabatini bodice-ripping swashbucklers produced at 20th Century Fox.
What all these stars had in common was classiness, and the productions they were in had to be classy packages no matter what subject matter was wrapped within them. This is why MGM was the echt Hollywood studio of the first half of the century, its scripts adapted from nineteenth-century novels by Tolstoy and Dickens, its gowns by Adrian, and its sets by Cedric Gibbons. Its productions were slower and weightier than those of the other studios—they moved like great, majestic Percherons, fit for drawing the heavy cargo of Victorian plots. It was this stately, reassuring, not always exciting, instant-classic quality that was synonymous with high-quality moviemaking before 1960.
So it’s no coincidence that MGM won a majority of the best-picture Oscars between 1927 and 1960, for the Academy Awards were the ultimate proclamations of classiness. The writing, directing, and (occasionally) acting awards could go to quirky talents, but the picture prize had to go to a Percheron. Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz could take home writing Oscars for Citizen Kane but there was no way that the modernistic Kane could challenge the four-square How Green Was My Valley, which looked and sounded like a nineteenth-century classic that had wandered into the twentieth. City Lights may be a comedy for the ages but the Little Tramp was too scrappy and too vulgar, too redolent of the streets to be rewarded with an Oscar. In 1942, Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons was shocking in its candid examination of what made an upper-middle-class Midwestern family tick. But since it laid waste to gentility while Mrs. Miniver, that tribute to British families enduring the Blitz, exalted gentility as a weapon against Hitler, which film do you think won the Oscar? Of course, there were bound to be exceptions, most of them coming from the no-frills Columbia studio: It Happened One Night, You Can’t Take It with You, From Here to Eternity, On the Waterfront, were all relatively inexpensive and unpretentious productions that won. But, for the most part, Hollywood was trying to honor those of its productions that pursued the notion of expensive-looking and classy-sounding entertainment for the masses.
Only now can I find something rather poignant in all this. With so much of its audience composed of immigrants and their children, with so many of its Depression customers struggling to survive economically, with so many people in the ensuing decade worrying about sons, fathers, and husbands in the war, and with so many survivors of that war buckling down to work in the late forties and fifties to win their portions of the new prosperity and upward mobility, Hollywood now seems to me a more benevolent dream factory than it did when I was an impatient little cineaste. Yes, the movie industry flattered and soothed and even occasionally lied, but I no longer sense any fascistic mind-control in all that, only an urge (a profitable urge, to be sure!) to fulfill the role of all minstrels: to keep the cold at bay by singing of romance and battle and beauty, to give the hard-pressed and the hard-bitten a bit of velvet. Most of the films that won the best-picture prize were promissory gestures that the velvet would continue to roll.
But that was then and this is now. Anything can win now, and that’s been the case for the last twenty-five years. From the small-scale heroic grunge of Rocky to the huge-scale heroic boasting of Braveheart, from the intimate character studies of Rain Man and Driving Miss Daisy to the extravaganzas, Titanic and The Last Emperor, from old-fashioned weepies like The English Patient to the new-fashioned snideness of American Beauty, anything can win. Hollywood’s current willingness to be open to any scale and texture is an index of its desperate need to find an audience. For where and what is the audience in an era when rich white middle-class teenagers walk around wearing expensive black headphones, playing gangsta rap that lets the world know that they are ready to die but only after they have offed a dozen cops; in a world where TV audiences are offered “reality” shows in which couples test their marital bonds by dating would-be seducers provided by a TV network? How talk of “the audience” at all in such an era? Isn’t it really just bundles of appetites looking for fleeting satisfactions?
Who won at the last Oscars ceremony? You know. I don’t, because I’m writing this piece three weeks before it happened. But I can’t let that stop me from making a fool of myself. I bet Traffic won. It’s big, slick, well acted (Benicio Del Toro won as best supporting actor, right?), and its several plot lines are well juggled. But the main reason I think it won is that this movie deals with a problem the moviemaking town knows all too intimately: the drug trade. In recent decades, drugs have both powered and undermined the business of moviemaking, destroyed and advanced careers, and have made the storytelling of more than a few movies a lot hazier than would have been the case in the old factory system. In an era in which it is impossible to pin down what American audiences are or want, it is still possible to pin down one particular sub-audience that Hollywood can always empathize with: Hollywood itself.
