Editing Hollywood
The Academy Museum finds good intentions in messy film history
Tucked in the new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, which opened last week in Los Angeles, is a surprisingly modest exhibit of “significant Oscars”. The museum, after all, is the latest venture of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organisation that each year entertains, inflames and invariably stupefies movie lovers of every taste and critical persuasion with that gaudy bacchanalia of self-love known as the Oscars.
Given the academy’s focus on all things Oscar, its latest production could have played up the event even more than it does. Yet while the awards invariably loom large, as does Hollywood — this is very much an academy endeavour, as the many nods to Steven Spielberg underscore — the long-delayed museum has embraced a tricky, complicated brief to accentuate the positive, to borrow the title of an Oscar-nominated song. The industry’s ugliness, its racism and sexism, is directly addressed, but the emphasis is on diversity and pluralism, not past and present sins. Call it a museum of good intentions.
The 20 statuettes in the significant Oscars gallery underscores this idea. The oldest is the best cinematography award given to Sunrise in 1929, the first year of the ceremony and the only year the academy divided its top honours between “unique and artistic picture” and “outstanding” film; the latter was given to Wings and isn’t on display. The most recent is the 2017 best adapted screenplay award for Moonlight, which is part of an inclusive line-up that includes best actor (Sidney Poitier), costume design (Eiko Ishioka), documentary (The Times Of Harvey Milk) and song (Up Where We Belong).
Like much of the museum, the Oscar exhibit is fun, informative, ideologically freighted and touching, in specific because of the empty case that should hold the best supporting prize Hattie McDaniel won in 1940 for her much-debated turn in Gone With The Wind. (It went missing years ago.) She was the first African American nominated for an Oscar; a clip of her poignant acceptance speech plays nearby. In 1940, the Oscars were held at the Cocoanut Grove, where picketers outside protested the film’s racism. Inside, McDaniel sat at a separate table, segregated from her white co-stars.
McDaniel’s lost Oscar and the empty display case resonate, partly because of her public role as a cultural flashpoint and because they symbolise the larger, structural absences that have long characterised the American movie industry and that the academy has struggled with, particularly in the past decade. Formed in 1927, partly to buff the image of the industry, the academy has recently expanded and diversified its membership, a venture that has generated a great deal of publicity and rather less substantive, real-world change in the concerns it represents. The hashtag #OscarsSoWhite is unlikely to be retired anytime soon, however hard the academy tries to make it obsolete.
The academy’s push towards greater diversity extends to its museum. One room, “Composer: Hildur Gudnadottir”, part of the sweeping “Stories Of Cinema” exhibit, features a work created for it by Hildur Gudnadottir that you can listen to in a dark room. Gudnadottir won an Oscar for her score for Joker — perhaps the strongest explanation for why she’s kicking off this exhibition — and belongs to a select cohort. As the museum’s website (if not its wall caption) notes, in 2019, just 6% of the top 250 films had scores by women.
There is a lot more to see and ponder, even if the exhibition space, at 5,000m², also feels somewhat modest. (The Museum of Modern Art added close to that much space in its last expansion.) Elsewhere, there is an extensive Hayao Miyazaki retrospective. Housed in the Marilyn and Jeffrey Katzenberg Gallery, it is down the hall from a much smaller room that holds “The Pixar Toy Story 3D Zoetrope”, a whirling, carousel-like amusement that features maquettes of characters from the Disney franchise.
The two-story “Backdrop: An Invisible Art” is a showcase for the huge reproduction of Mount Rushmore used in North By Northwest. In other galleries reserved for the museum’s biggest, most provocative exhibit, the multipart “Stories Of Cinema”, you can gape at the bedazzled ruby slippers that Judy Garland wore as Dorothy when she clicked her heels in The Wizard Of Oz and gawk at one of the sleds from Citizen Kane, glowing jewel-like in soft light. Elsewhere, a fibreglass model of the shark in Jaws floats above escalators.
“Stories Of Cinema” stretches across three floors and has a name that is strongly redolent of Sundance. The first part is on the ground floor in the soaring Sidney Poitier Grand Lobby, a vaulted, not especially inviting industrial-looking space. On large monitors mounted in a dim room, you can sit transfixed watching clips culled from international film history, spanning the commercial mainstream and the avantgarde. There are snippets of work from the first woman filmmaker, Alice Guy Blaché (two clips), as well as from Yasujiro Ozu (six), John Cassavetes (one! come on!) and Steven Spielberg (nine) as well as from too many 2021 Oscar contenders (eight).
The first part of “Stories” is expansive enough not to offend, though it will generate arguments. Because the clips are not identified (the list is online), it also has the quality of a game that allows visitors to guess which X-Men zipped by (Days Of Future Past) and wait to see if Roman Polanski, who was expelled from the academy, made the cut. He did (two clips), though notably Woody Allen, the Oscar fave turned persona non grata, did not. He never joined the academy but his exclusion here is striking. Instead, the museum has set its sights on filmmakers who together tend to represent a parallel, less-known vanguard that has been systematically ignored, forgotten and marginalised.
Whether visitors will seek more than selfies with the Star Wars bots remains to be seen. That is, if they stop streaming for a while and get out of the house. © 2021 THE
A fibreglass model of the shark in Jaws floats above escalators.