THE POLITICS OF OSCAR
The political mood of the time and the Academy Awards have often been inseparable – sometimes for better, sometimes for worse
While handing the Best Picture Academy Award to Casablanca, In The Heat of the Night, The Godfather or Schindler’s List would have drawn little argument at the time and even less now, cinema’s biggest awards have attracted as much conjecture as consensus for almost a century.
For every Casablanca, there are just as many instances where a solid, well-acted melodrama such as Kramer vs Kramer beats a gamechanger like Apocalypse Now.
In those cases, argument often gives way to bewilderment, leaving the public and perhaps even voters to look back and wonder what they were thinking at the time.
Sometimes, those who vote for the prizes get it completely right. Too often, though, they are swayed by the political mood of the time.
We need go back no further than 2018 to see politics at work, costing Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri any chance it had of claiming the film industry’s most coveted prize.
It started straight after Martin Mcdonagh’s acclaimed work took out the Golden Globe for best drama, with a one-dimensional, mediadriven backlash savaging it for not appropriately “punishing” unsavoury characters in the storyline. Masquerading as progress, it was a throwback to the Hays Code of the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, which set out the guidelines on what a film must contain.
The early raging favourite for the Oscar drifted daily in the betting after the campaign started and eventually lost out to The Shape of Water. This was the “feel good” fantasy drama in which a mute woman who has been an outcast all her life takes on the power of Big Government and classified secrets in an attempt to save an equally outcast mythical creature.
The race was between the movie that hit every note for current-day sensibilities and another that showed there are racists and wifebeaters in society but didn’t think it was necessary to work the “apology” into the ending. In the end, it was no contest – the film that pushed the boundaries lost out to the safer option.
Sometimes (they) get it completely right. Too often, though, they are swayed by the political mood of the time
Just one year earlier, no campaign was needed
to create the perfect storm for voters to consider the politics of the day when choosing Best Picture honours.
The US was in turmoil as it ushered in the ultraconservative Trump presidency, which threatened to repeal a raft of social reforms.
The 2017 Best Picture category was always a two-horse race between two starkly different productions.
La La Land was a lavish musical, featuring two of the best, most bankable actors of the modern era in a feel-good throwback to oldtime Hollywood.
Moonlight was a coming-of-age drama about an Afro-cuban drug dealer who had endured physical and emotional abuse and was dealing
with issues surrounding his sexuality.
The Oscar went to the more serious film that sent a political message over the story of pure entertainment.
Best Picture controversy goes right back to the 1930s. The Public Enemy was apparently ahead of its time in 1931, with Hollywood prepared to sneak out to the theatre and watch a hardened gangster film but unwilling to reward the producers, director William Wellman or imminent acting legends James Cagney and Jean Harlow for creating a masterpiece still widely regarded as the prototype for the genre.
The 1930s was a politically conservative time for an industry developing by the week.
Fritz Lang’s early ’30s thriller M, a groundbreaking work featuring a careerdefining performance from Peter Lorre as a serial killer of children, was rejected by all the major awards as being “too distasteful”.
Later in the decade, it wasn’t so much a case of taste or propriety that cost The Women even a mention on Oscar night. The film had an allfemale cast which, in itself, pushed the boundaries.
Audiences and some critics supported the bold move, but it was completely rejected by the Academy, with not one nomination for Best Picture, any of the legendary actresses in lead or support roles or for the director.
Perhaps the director may hold a clue to its complete dismissal at the time. George Cukor, a New York native of Hungarian-jewish descent, was considered a banker by the massive RKO and MGM studios in the 1930s and ’40s – but was passed over for more than 30 years for Best Director honours. The man who had achieved huge critical and box office success also directing Dinner at Eight, Little Women, Gaslight, A Star Is Born and The Philadelphia Story was forced to keep his homosexuality a well-known but unmentioned “secret” and had to wait until 1964 to win the Best Director statue for My Fair Lady.
Just as the negative campaign against Three
Billboards achieved its objective, positive campaigns have also worked.
At the turn of the 21st century, there was understandably great consternation over the lack of recognition by the Academy for black actors in leading roles.
African-american actors Hattie Mcdaniel (Gone With The Wind, 1939), Louis Gossett Jr (An Officer and a Gentleman, 1982), Denzel Washington (Glory, 1989), Whoopi Goldberg (Ghost, 1990) and Cuba Gooding Jr (Jerry Maguire, 1996) had won supporting actor Oscars, which in itself made a statement about their perceived place in the industry, but Sidney Poitier remained the only black actor to win the coveted acting prize for a performance in a leading role for Lilies of the Field in 1963.
In 2001, a campaign gained momentum to reward overlooked actors of colour for their work, the volume of which had grown rapidly in the previous decade.
On cue, Denzel Washington won Best Actor for Training Day and Halle Berry won Best Actress for Monster’s Ball.
They were both Oscar-worthy performances – Berry appeared to be a lock for her intense performance as a grieving widow and mother, while Washington was locked in a two-way duel with Russell Crowe (A Beautiful Mind) – but one suspects both may have gone unrewarded even a year earlier.
For decades, many African-american actors went unrecognised by the Academy, even when they had achieved commercial and critical success.
Dorothy Dandridge was at least nominated for Carmen in 1954 but the likes of Pam Grier (Jackie Brown, 1997), Paul Robeson (Song of Freedom, 1936), Harry Belafonte (The World, The Flesh and The Devil, 1959), James Edwards (Home of the Brave, 1949), Lena Horne (Stormy Weather, 1943) and Juano Hernandez (Intruder in the Dust, 1949) turned in remarkable, often groundbreaking performances that passed without even a nomination.
In 1978, there was a growing campaign to recognise and respect the sacrifice of Vietnam veterans after almost a decade of anti-vietnam War sentiment. Once again, right on cue, Jon Voight won the Best Actor award for his role as a paraplegic veteran in Coming Home – at the expense of Robert De Niro (Deer Hunter), Laurence Olivier (The Boys from Brazil) and little-known Brad Davis for his tour-de-force in Midnight Express that didn’t even earn the relative unknown a nomination.
Not all campaigns have been political – but
they have still achieved their objectives.
Miramax, led at the time by subsequently disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, embarked on a campaign in 1998 to win the coveted Best Picture Oscar with Shakespeare in Love. The Miramax chief was reported to have strongarmed the film’s talent to undertake an unprecedented awards campaign and the move got results, with the film beating the heavilyfavoured Saving Private Ryan for the main prize and earning Gwyneth Paltrow a surprise Oscar over Cate Blanchett.
At the time, and even more so in review, most film critics believe the Academy got that year’s awards horribly wrong.
Weinstein used the same approach two years later with Chocolat, garnering the sleeper a nomination to the surprise of most critics.
It had been ignored by all the other major awards, widely dismissed as a lightweight film best remembered for the performance of star Juliette Binoche and a curiously lightweight role for Johnny Depp that appeared to be written just to get him into the film.
This time, the nomination went no further but the campaigns achieved their goals and made both films massive box office successes for a combined $400m return.
In the 1950s, the insidious, ultimately illegal politics of Mccarthyism denied – literally – certain writers the opportunity to claim their rightful place as Academy Award winners. Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo should have won two Oscars that decade but the most famous member of the black-listed Hollywood Ten was unable to find work and was forced to write under a pseudonym.
The 1953 and 1956 Best Story awards for Roman Holiday and The Brave One went, respectively, to Ian Mclellan Hunter and Robert Rich – both fronts for the banned writer.
In 1957, blacklisted writers Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson watched on as novelist Pierre Boulle accepted their award for Best
Adapted Screenplay for The Bridge on the River Kwai. The French author had written the novel and went on to write Planet of the Apes but acted as a front for the banned writers.
The same occurred in 1958, when Nedrick Young was forced to use the pseudonym Nathan E Douglas as co-writer of The Defiant Ones. The movie won Young and Harold Jacob Smith the original screenplay award but only one of them was allowed to claim the prize.
The awards’ governing body, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, honoured Foreman and Wilson for their work in 1984, with recognition going to Trumbo in 1992 and Young in 1993. All were made posthumously.
On a less onerous note, rewarding and
“punishing” actors in particular has been a mainstay of the Oscars throughout the years.
Russell Crowe won the Best Actor prize for Gladiator in 2000 and was nominated also for The Insider and A Beautiful Mind (the irony of which of these three performances landed him the award is not lost on most critics) but his reputation understandably took a hit when he threw a phone at a New York hotel clerk in 2005. He may have displayed boorish behaviour but he didn’t lose his acting ability overnight, yet he hasn’t been nominated since – not for Les Miserables, State of Play or Cinderella Man.
Actor-comedian Jim Carrey’s rejection may be the most puerile in Oscar history. Upon winning the Golden Globe for his performance in The Truman Show in 1999, Carrey jokingly finished his speech by thanking the Academy and then apologising for getting ahead of himself. Carrey apparently angered the Academy so much that he was not even nominated for an Oscar – and never has been since, even for standout dramatic performances in Man on the Moon, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
At this stage, politics has been on the back burner this year – although there has been controversy over the snubbing of acclaimed Israeli entry Let It Be Morning for Best International Feature.
This year’s Academy Awards look set for a safe renewal, with Will Smith (King Richard) and Nicole Kidman (Being the Ricardos) warm favourites for best acting honours by sticking to the proven formula of playing nonfictional characters.
The safety switch is set to go to another level in 2024, when representation and inclusion standards change which films will be eligible for nomination and a chance to win the industry’s highest honour.
Under the new rules, films will need to meet two of four standards that include on-screen presentation, themes and narratives and the employment of underused members of minority groups in front of and behind the camera.
All honourable pursuits, of course, but the new rules also mean that an independent masterpiece being made on a shoestring budget by a group of friends who happen to be white would be ineligible regardless of its quality.
Regardless of the arguments for and against the new representation and inclusion rules – that it either compromises the art form or doesn’t go far enough – the move has ensured politics will remain a significant feature of the Oscars.
The 94th Academy Awards will be held on Monday, March 28
At this stage, politics has been on the back burner … this year’s Academy Awards look set for a safe renewal