The Academy Awards ceremony, the “Oscars” to its friends, turns seventy-nine this year. Born near the dawn of the sound film, Oscars have crowned annual kings and queens of the silver screen, cemented reputations, raised stars’ paychecks, and spawned controversies over the years. And it’s all about to happen again.
The earliest Oscars presided over a difficult period in Hollywood: the advent of sound created considerable upheaval in the film industry, and those early awards ceremonies not only acknowledged important work but also helped to stabilize the business of the business.
Once the sound film came of age, movies helped to get us through the Great Depression, and buoyed our spirits during World War II, the golden age of the Hollywood studio productions.
Then along came television, and now the internet. Seventy-nine years after the inception of the Academy Awards, the film business of the twenty-first century seems to understand that it is fighting to hold onto its place in a market that has become glutted with other distractions. So what’s at stake for Oscar and the industry he represents?
For one thing, the Oscar ceremony itself became grander as well as more hyped over the years. It started as a relatively small dinner at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood to honor the first Academy Award recipients. Today, some regard the annual event as just another extended display of decadence from an industry that has monopolized popular culture for a century, but may now be losing some of its grip on audiences.
Red-carpet coverage of the awards on cable stations often takes up more time than the (already inflated) ceremony itself. This prelude is largely a three- or four-hour commercial for fashion, jewelry, and makeup. The image business is a world unto itself, and not a small one, as Meryl Streep reminds us in The Devil Wears Prada, as if we were all hearing it for the first time.
Nevertheless, there are some serious issues buried in the Oscar glitz.
One is the argument about what role cinema will play in the twenty-first century. How much longer will it be that we go to movie theaters to watch films? Are they about to become as anachronistic as the old movie palaces of the 1920s? How will films be distributed in the future, and how will that impact the industry? Will movies become just items downloaded to computers or televisions or iPods, or whatever will be the next incarnation of technology?
What will happen to the actors themselves in motion pictures? Films like The Polar Express and A Scanner Darkly present actors in unconventional ways, and virtual characters such as Gollum and (ahem) JarJar Binks already abound — can virtual actors be far behind?
More immediate are questions posed by the global marketplace. What does it mean to say a film is American? The old, largely vanished studio concept made it easy to answer this question. Each studio had its own stars, its own technicians — even the pictures it made had a consistent look. What happens now when a film is “packaged” and funded by Hollywood, but is not only made abroad, but also uses international casts, artists, and creative energies throughout? Was the phenomenal Lord Of The Rings trilogy an American film? A New Zealand film? Is it a new Hollywood film, even though it was forged, not by elves, but by highly skilled technical wizards half a world away? Will “American” eventually only mean “some Yanks put up the money?”
And maybe most importantly, what about the perennial issue: does the Oscar reward art or commerce?
This leads us directly to the case of the long-neglected — by the Academy at least — Martin Scorsese. In the film community, among film enthusiasts, and certainly among academics, Martin Scorsese is America’s premiere living film director. He has never won an Oscar, and indeed is still seen, after a career of over 35 years, as a Hollywood outsider. True to his own vision, Scorsese has been more of an independent filmmaker, an artist always based in New York who has nonetheless spent much of his career within the Hollywood framework.
It has not been easy. Long ago, Scorsese said that his career has been in part about alternating projects — doing “one for them, [the studio], and one for me.” The result has been a long list of films that show not just a consistency of vision, but also deal with a wide range of subjects that have explored the darker side of growing up in an urban environment — Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, Gangs Of New York, The Departed, Raging Bull, After Hours — as well as a whole gamut of social and cultural issues — The Age Of Innocence, Casino, The King Of Comedy, The Last Temptation Of Christ, Kundun, The Aviator. And then there are the Scorsese music films and videos: New York, New York, The Last Waltz, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, an episode of Jazz for PBS television, and the soon-to-be-released documentary on the Rolling Stones.
Some of these films are masterworks; all of them are well worth looking at. Together they make up an extraordinary body of work that forms a cohesive whole, free of the taint of commercialism. Of course, other master filmmakers never received an Oscar for directing: Robert Altman, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Orson Welles. It’s an industry that does not take to the art film easily. But perhaps at last it’s time for the Academy to embrace the work of a man who has taught many of us so much about ourselves.
The envelope, please.