Why The Oscars Are Worse Than Useless

Above: Joanne Woodward admires her Oscar while husband Paul Newman regards his "Noscar" during his decades-long Oscar losing streak

MOONLIGHT might actually be my favorite movie from last year, which would make it the rare winner of the Oscar for Best Picture that lines up with my own taste. Having said that, and looking past the instantly legendary screw-up last night wherein Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway were given the wrong envelope before taking the stage to hand out the award--I can't help but expressing my disgust at the whole Oscar thing.

Here's why the Oscars are worse than useless: Giving out competitive awards for art reduces art to a horse race. "The Oscars" is just the world's biggest reality game show, turning every film except one into a "loser." MOONLIGHT won, so LA LA LAND lost, but why in the name of all that is holy are these two films in a competition with each other in the first place? Was LA LA LAND the better film for the few minutes that its creators were on stage thanking their families and coworkers? Did it suddenly stop being the best picture released in 2016? Did MOONLIGHT suddenly become the best? No, because one director's love letter to the Hollywood musical and the other director's poignant exploration of race and sexuality were not trying to do the same thing. They are separate works of art, and though some people have tried to make them into proxies for larger cultural arguments the truth remains that the films themselves are self-contained works, both years in the making, and neither attempting to capture the current zeitgeist.

If MOONLIGHT won because Academy voters wanted to send some vague message about inclusiveness, then it really only proves the point that the Oscars are bullshit. MOONLIGHT is a great work of art. It didn't need a shiny gold man to be a great work of art. 

At this point, the most notable thing about the Oscars is how wrong they are. We could add up all the great films that didn't win the Oscar for Best Picture and we'd have almost all of the greatest movies ever made. Cary Grant never won a competitive Oscar, and neither did Judy Garland. Since they might be cinema's two greatest performers, does this make sense? After years of not winning, John Wayne and Paul Newman finally did win Oscars, but does anyone really regard TRUE GRIT and THE COLOR OF MONEY as their greatest performances? Do many people consider SCENT OF A WOMAN to even be a passably good movie, much less Pacino's best performance? Is TRAINING DAY really the keeper from all the leading performances that Denzel Washington has given?

The answer to all these questions is no, yet the Oscar myth creates a counter-narrative in which competing marketing campaigns decide which work of art had more merit, all for the benefit of a flashy television event, the real purpose of which, like the Super Bowl, is to sell soap and beer during the commercial breaks. The awards themselves have a longer history, with their roots stretching back to a promotional scheme cooked up by Louis B. Mayer, a scheme that first morphed into a status symbol (industry bragging rights in a one-industry town) before becoming modern television's biggest waste of time.

Like I said, though, the awards show is worse than useless, it's reductive. It diminishes, for the sake of money, artists and works of art. The movie business is already volatile enough mix of art and commerce (of "movie" and "business"). How about we just skip the show next year and go to the movies? 

THE SHOOTIST (1976)

The latest entry in The Cowboy Rides Away, my series on the final Western roles of the great cowboy actors, is up at Criminal Element. 

This time around I look at the John Wayne and THE SHOOTIST.

Actors In Motion: The Art Of Movement and Meaning

This morning's Washington Post has an excellent essay on Cary Grant and the art of physical movement on screen. The author, Sarah Kaufman, posits that the defining difference between new movie stars and classic movie stars is they way they move across the screen. Kaufman argues that today's movie stars don't have the graceful flow of Grant (or, one could add, the rugged integrity of Gary Cooper or the pure sexual power of Marlene Dietrich).

One aspect that Kaufman underplays in her otherwise insightful essay is the way in which modern movies restrict actors. Classic filmmakers like Howard Hawks and John Ford were interested in letting action play out in wide shots. Directors like Orson Welles, John Farrow, and Joseph H. Lewis were famous for shots that lasted five, eight, sometimes ten minutes. This allowed actors the chance to move around the space on screen, to use their entire body in performance. Today, mise en scene is largely a forgotten art. Filmmakers move their cameras in nearly every shot, they edit shots much quicker, and they rely heavily on the close-up. Watch something like The Dark Knight again and notice how short the average shot is. I don't know what to make of this exactly. I like the quick moving film if it's well done, but we lost something when filmmakers gave up on long, wide shots. For one thing, those kinds of set ups demand more out of the audience. We have more of a share in the action on screen, more responsibility to interpret meaning.

Look at an important scene from John Ford's The Searchers. After a long absence, John Wayne has come to his brother's ranch to visit. His brother's family gathers around the breakfast table to eat when a lawman played Ward Bond shows up to recruit men to investigate an Indian attack at another ranch. Wayne gets up to go. His brother's wife, Martha (Dorothy Jordan) gets his coat, stroking it gently for just a moment. Bond, drinking a cup of coffee, sees her but barely reacts. He just takes a deeper pull off his coffee. Wayne gently kisses Martha on the forehead and leaves. This is done in just three shots. What is the relationship between John Wayne and his brother's wife? What does Ward Bond infer from what he's seen? This is a magnificent scene, subtle and rich with meaning (with deeper resonance as the film progresses). Moreover, Ford trusts the viewer to read the action and interpret it. The relationship between Wane and Dorothy Jordan is never underlined in a closeup. Nor is Ward Bond's respect for the intimate and probably unconsummated passion between these two people. Through Ford's blocking--and the exquisite body control of Wayne, Jordan and Bond--we have a three-way psychological exchange full of meaning and subtext.