The Oscars have issues
As we await tonight’s Academy Awards show, Donal Lynch looks at how controversies and causes have shaped the winners’ careers — and maybe even kept the ceremony relevant
WHY do we still care about The Oscars? It’s a question that preoccupies the Academy in an era of falling TV audiences and waning concentration levels. Nobody really knows the answers — but there are any number of theories.
A certain contingent, it’s supposed, will always want to spend the following Monday poring over the beautiful gowns that were worn, but glamour, in and of itself, only goes so far.
Others will tune in to see if their own favourite (which, for many is The Favourite this year) will win, but, in latter years, the Academy has often been jarringly out of step with commercial consensus — remember the failure of Brokeback Mountain or the success of The Shape of Water, for example?
The increasingly art-house leanings of the Oscars have meant they have ceased to be the one true barometer of what constitutes great popular cinema in a given year, and audiences have drifted away; tonight as many people now follow the ceremony online as will watch it live — and this has changed the show itself.
An internet audience wants different things to a TV audience. Speeches are redundant — the Academy has this year all but threatened winners to keep them short. Technical categories are considered a snooze — some will be shown during ad breaks this year.
To maintain relevance, the Oscars now have to generate memes, group selfies (remember Ellen’s famous one with Meryl and the gang?) and, above all, outrage. Controversy about the host has become an annual internet parlour game — everyone from Anne Hathaway to Kevin Hart has endured a public flaying — and in the last few years every ceremony has been organised around an unofficial theme of social justice.
Two years ago it was black inclusion (#OscarsSoWhite), last year it was sexual harassment (#TimesUp). Trans rights and Trump are predicted to be two of the big issues tonight. The Best Picture favourite — Roma — will, if it wins, be hailed as tinseltown’s riposte to the American president’s migration policies.
In a sense all of this is predictable pandering to the click bait generation — but historically speaking it is not really a new development.
“Actors,” the late, great film critic Roger Ebert once wrote, “are drawn irresistibly to causes.” It’s just that for a long time they kept their politics out of the Oscar ceremony itself.
McCarthyism and Vietnam were never mentioned once by any Oscar winner until well after they had cooled as issues, and the American civil rights movement was also given a wide berth — Martin Luther King’s name was never once uttered from the Oscar podium during his lifetime.
Gregory Peck, who won for Best Actor in 1963 as Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird, said nothing about the film’s racial theme in his acceptance speech — even though he frequently spoke about it in interviews. When Sidney Poitier became the first black to win best actor, for Lilies of the Field in 1964, he spoke of the “long journey” that brought him to the stage, but otherwise made no comment on the momentousness of the triumph — the biggest controversy of the night came when Anne Bancroft kissed him live on camera.
When Jane Fonda, for decades a controversial figure because of her opposition to the Vietnam War, won for Klute in 1972, her speech skirted the issue. “There’s a great deal to say, but I’m not going to say it tonight,” she purred from the podium. “I would just like to thank you very much.”
Marlon Brando changed everything. Brando’s role as Vito Corleone in The Godfather remains one of the most iconic performances in cinema history, but his response to winning an Academy Award for the film was iconoclastic in its own way. Flying in the face of a long tradition of bashful gratitude and tearful thank yous, he sent actress Sacheen Littlefeather in his place to the 1973 ceremony to protest Hollywood’s treatment of American Indians.
Viewers could hardly believe what they were seeing, but it turned out to be a highly influential moment.
The following year producer Bert Schneider and director Peter Davis, who worked together on the Vietnam War documentary Hearts and Minds, both condemned the war by name (they were the first winners to do so), and even read a telegram from the Viet Cong. An incensed Bob Hope, an Oscar presenter and staunch Republican, prepared a statement and gave it to Frank Sinatra, who was to introduce the screenplay award: “The Academy is saying: ‘We are not responsible for any political references made on the programme, and we are sorry they had to take place this evening’.”
Despite this view, a certain worthi- ness and social awareness would, in time, also creep into the nominations themselves. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the movie industry became more aware of itself as an agent of social change and actors became aware that playing characters on the margins of society was a sure shortcut to award season recognition.
In 1988, Dustin Hoffman won the best Oscar actor for portraying a man with autism in Rain Main, while Robert De Niro received a nomination for playing a man in a catatonic state in Awakenings in 1990. That same year our own Daniel Day-Lewis won the statuette for Best Actor for playing the Irish writer, Christy Brown, who suffered from severe cerebral palsy. The following year Tom Hanks became the first mainstream star to portray a gay man in Philadelphia.
Also in 1993, Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins presented the prize for best editing and used the moment to highlight the plight of Haitian HIV victims in Cuba, publicly asking authorities “to admit 250 refugees to the US”.
Oscar producer Gil Cates called their actions “outrageous, distasteful and dishonest” and said the pair would not be invited back (in fact Sarandon was back on the Oscar stage two years later, after she won the Best Actress award for Dead Man Walking). Cates was similarly incensed by Richard Gere, at the same ceremony, urging the Chinese premiere to “take his troops and take the Chinese away from Tibet and allow people to live as free independent people again”.
For the most part, audiences were a little more cynical about the intentions of actor-advocates than they are today. Whoopi Goldberg, host of the 1994 show, made light of this when she hurried out a list of causes during her opening monologue: “Save the whales. Save the spotted owl. Gay rights. Men’s rights. Women’s rights. Human rights. Feed the homeless. More gun control. Free the Chinese dissidents. Peace in Bosnia. Health care reform. Choose choice. ACT UP. More AIDS research,” she said.
The following few years were light on controversy until Michael Moore was booed from the stage after his documentary on gun control, Bowling for Columbine, won for Best Documentary in 2003. The filmmaker took to the stage to a standing ovation — but the mood soon soured as he attacked George W Bush as a “fictitious president” and charged him with sending soldiers to Iraq for “fictitious reasons”.
The uproar that followed was cacophonous enough for host Steve Martin to joke, “Right now, the Teamsters are helping Michael Moore into the trunk of his limo.”
Moore turned out to be the modern Brando, however, igniting a steadily increasing number of protests and stances within the salubrious surrounds of the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. It was as though for the mass of glittering and tuxedo-ed millionaires, the inherent frivolousness of pitting one piece of art against another had to be leavened by heavy doses of social justice and worthy campaigning. Recent winners have brought up everything from climate change (Leonardo DiCaprio, for The
Revenant in 2016) to equal pay for women (Patricia Arquette, Best Supporting Actress winner in 2015 for Boyhood).
Part of this movement toward more overtly political winners and themes was that the Oscars, has, in recent years, been sucked into what writer Zoe Williams called “a solidarity arms race” with the other big awards shows, “the organising principle of which is: bigger and better.” In the last few years the Golden Globes were a #MeToo showcase that saw actresses speak out against decades of sexual abuse. The Screen Actors Guild Awards, with its line-up of all-female presenters, focused on gender inequality.
All of this has meant that Oscar producers are now, belatedly, on board with drama around social issues.
By last year that meant that not only was protest tolerated during the speeches, it was all but encouraged by host Jimmy Kimmel, who added, “if you are a nominee tonight who isn’t making history, shame on you.”
Kimmel mixed comedy and gravity by saying Oscar himself could possibly serve as a paragon of what a modern-day Hollywood man should be in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein allegations: “Look at him. He keeps his hands where you can see them, never says a rude word, and most importantly has no penis .... That’s the kind of men we need more of in this town.”
But, despite Kimmel’s humour, the overall didacticism of the Oscars itself is perhaps inducing a kind of protest fatigue in viewers. Last year’s ceremony drew the second lowest ratings on American TV since 1974 — and the trend has been downward.
The dresses and the looks will be breathlessly reported over tomorrow but the Oscars have some fundamental flaws. They are not hip enough to draw in millennials, and they don’t give enough dues to blockbuster titles to entice the cineplex going masses (though Black Panther may change that tonight).
The show’s political moments seem like forgone conclusions, long overdue in their observations, and the actors’ self-deprecation seems scripted and calculated.
The Hollywood royalty of the Oscars live in a difficult netherworld between reality and fantasy. They are, what Susan Sarandon called “the keepers of the dreams” — beautiful creators of art — but they also aspire, for one night, to be topical.
The result is that the ceremony always looks like a dream, but is inevitably a few steps behind the culture it preaches to.
‘The increasingly art-house leanings of the Oscars have meant they ceased to be the one true barometer of what constitutes great popular cinema in a given year’