Celebrating the little golden idol
As awards season heads towards the big one, the Oscars, on February 22, Kylie Klein Nixon takes a stroll on the historical red carpet.
In Hollywood, where youth is the hottest commodity going, there’s one 87-year-old everyone wants to be seen with.
He’s short, only 34 centimetres tall in fact, he’s skinny, weighing in at about 31⁄ kilos; and like all good Southern Californians, he’s a skimpy dresser.
His name is Oscar and (almost) everyone loves him.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences started dishing out Oscar statuettes in 1927 at a star-studded ceremony hosted by Douglas Fairbanks in The Roosevelt Hotel’s Blossom Room.
Tickets cost $5 and the whole thing lasted 15 minutes, a far cry from the hours-long rigmarole the Oscars have become today.
Outstanding Picture – the category would become Best Picture in 1928 – went to racy silent film Wings, set during World War I and starring a pouty Clara Bow.
The choice was immediately controversial since Wings included a tantalising glimpse of Bow’s breasts and a scene in which two men kiss.
Kissing fellas didn’t return to the Oscars until 1971, when Sunday Bloody Sunday’s Peter Finch was nominated for Best Actor for playing a gay doctor.
Ironically, rumour has it Finch missed out on winning the statuette because of squeamishness over the gay kiss he shared in the film with star, Murray Head.
The Oscar went home with straight-as-an-arrow Gene Hackman that year. The awards aren’t altruistic. Studio head Louis B Mayer concocted the awards as a way to placate the stars of MGM who wanted bigger pay packets.
The joke was ultimately on him – MGM filed for bankruptcy in 2010 while Oscar winners command multi- million dollar fees today.
More than 2947 of the little golden gods have been given out for everything from Best Dance Direction to the most coveted Best Picture. That’s not bad for a little guy who started out as a consolation prize for slender pay packets.
Today there are more than 36 categories of film-maker eligible for the award, up from 12 back in 1927. One conspicuous absence is casting directors.
Supporters of that most pivotal role in film-making have been lobbying for an award for years, but due to a stoush between the Casting Society of America and the Directors Guild of America over the use of the title ‘‘ director’’, they’ve never been given an Oscar spot.
That snub, however, is nothing compared with Oscar’s issues with race.
In the 87 years of Oscar’s reign, only three African-American and one Bahamian-American (Sydney Poitier in 1963) have won Best Actor, and only one black woman has won Best Actress – Halle Berry for Monster’s Ball in 2001.
Just three black directors have been nominated for Best Director, and none of them have won.