WAS it good for you — the Academy Awards that is, which last Sunday continued its long tradition of getting it wrong? It was for me, even if the Academy’s habit of rewarding mediocrity, especially if it comes with a British accent, remains intact. Then again I was closer to the action than usual, having finally admitted, if only to myself, that I wanted to walk that tawdry red carpet. I wanted to seeChristian Bale, Natalie Portman and most of all David Fincher win in person or on the screen inside the Kodak Theater. I wanted to watch “The King’s Speech” go down in flames. Oh, well. Forget it, Jake — it’s Hollywood.
The Oscars might be an orgy of self-congratulation, and as absurd and amusing as ever. Yet they also make visible some of the changes rocking the movies and the news media. Attending the show allows you to pull back the curtain to see how this particular movie-media machine works, starting with the mind-blowing security that can bring to mind 9/11 airport safety measures, what with the concrete barricades and metal detectors. Getting there is half the excitement, or so it seemed gliding down Hollywood Boulevard, past the clubs, restaurants, tattoo parlors and, of course, a Scientologyoutpost.
First, though, we had to get past the cops who stopped and searched our car blocks from the Kodak Theater and wondered if the cat litter that we had recently bought and neglected to remove from our hatchback might be fertilizer, presumably for a bomb. “It’s not fertilizer,” I yelped, as my Oscar dreams started to fade. But we made it inside and walked the red carpet, well, the right side of that magic carpet, which, divided by stanchions, runs parallel to the one Annette and Warren strolled on. Once inside, my husband and I grabbed our free Champagne ($18 a bubbly pop after the show starts) and hiked up to the second mezzanine.
The results seemed preordained. “The King’s Speech” is a pudding of a movie, easy in, easy out, and its lack of chew is ideal for those porcelain veneers twinkling in the dark at the Kodak. “The Social Network,” by contrast, requires you to listen, watch, think, which isn’t often demanded of movie viewers. Academy members might be the ultimate film insiders, but there’s no reason to believe that they’re different from most moviegoers, who, used to facile entertainments, have voted for “The King’s Speech” ($114 million domestic box office and counting, as of Tuesday) over “The Social Network” (just under $97 million). Truly, considering the Academy’s track record (“A Beautiful Mind,” ad nauseum), the surprise was that “The Social Network” was even in contention. As a friend said, “If you combine regiphilia with disability, you’ve got a winning ticket.”
I knew the fix was in. Yet I wanted to go to the awards, because after 17 years of living in Los Angeles my curiosity had gotten the best of me. I also understood that, love them or hate them, the Oscars matter. These days movies are a small piece of the market-share pie for the multinationals that own the studios. And the biggest movies are part of a consumption continuum, which begins as a comic book (or a best seller or video game) briefly becomes multiplex fodder (and toys and more video games) before being turned into home entertainment. Some of those movies are good, a lot are lousy, which is why the Oscars are important. It’s a public ritual that sustains the romance that the business of movies isn’t exclusively about product.
Like a lot of people I grew up watching the Oscars. I loved them, or did until I started writing about movies for a living and began to grasp how many good ones were overlooked each year. The films I cared about were rarely nominated, though this changed somewhat with the independent film wave of the 1990s. In 1997, when Emily Watson was nominated for best actress for her role in Lars Von Trier’s “Breaking the Waves” alongside the eventual winner, Frances McDormand (for “Fargo,” from the then-independent stalwarts Joel and Ethan Coen), the Oscars felt different. The independents were invigorating a moribund big-screen scene.
Now the Coens make movies at major studios, and nominally independent filmmakers are part of the mix alongside mass-market Hollywood, with movies that first show at the Sundance Film Festival like “Winter’s Bone” and “The Kids Are All Right” sometimes ending up at the Oscars. The young star of “Winter’s Bone,” Jennifer Lawrence, was never going to win best actress, but her nomination made the Academy look good because it suggested that (debatable) quality matters to it more than box office figures. And Ms. Lawrence is a pretty young woman who looks lovely on screen and on magazine covers, as evidenced by the latest Vanity Fair, where she’s co-starring on the cover, one of her biggest roles to date.
Magazine covers have always been part of the movie machinery. But now the auxiliary parts — the magazines, television shows and red-carpet appearances — often seem more important than the actual movies. That’s especially true for women working in a field where comic books and super heroes rule. A few years ago Nina Jacobson, who then ran Disney, noted that it had become harder for young actresses to be the next Meryl Streep, adding, “It’s easier to show up on the red carpet in a borrowed dress.” It’s no wonder that this year the Academy extended the ABC “Oscar’s Red Carpet Live” show from 30 to 90 minutes, bumping it to feature-length status.
That the studios reserve much of their resources to releasing juvenilia and pricey junk also helps explain why the Oscars are now so crucial, culturally and symbolically if not in ratings terms. Last year most of the Top 20 highest-grossing movies were aimed at the youth market, and a quarter of these were animated features. Junk like “Clash of the Titans” pays the bills, but money alone has never kept the industry chugging. For that you need films like “True Grit,” movies that speak to a mass audience intelligently, and are more than a sum of business calculations. Audiences need movies that they can excitedly recommend to friends and assure them, no, really, it’s very good — and so does Hollywood.
Once upon a time the Oscars were a little affair, or as intimate as a party with famous people ever gets. The first ceremony, in 1929, was held in a hotel ballroom, and the winners had been announced three months earlier. In 1953 television — the movies’ feared new rival — turned the Oscars into a national event. And just in time too, since the old studio system, already collapsing, needed all the help it could get holding onto the audience’s attention that was gravitating to watching Uncle Miltie on the tube. The Oscars became a television event, a Super Bowl with screen stars, and now the awards are also a social media experience, as almost 400,000 Twitterers this year proved.
Much is made about how all-things-celebrity has infiltrated the news, but even before gossip columnists like Hedda Hopper put her hooks into readers, the movies were helping peddle copy. One thing that has changed is the volume of Oscar coverage. In 1948, when weekly movie attendance reached its peak with an estimated 90 million souls, The New York Times published four articles on the awards. Over the decades, as attendance plunged, the paper published more on the Oscars. In all of 1988 it ran 14 pieces on the event, fewer than the number of articles that it ran last week. Weekly movie attendance meanwhile now hovers at under 26 million. Americans don’t love movies as they once did, but they, and the news media, still dig the Oscars and all they offer: the glamour, the history, the bigger-than-life spectacle and the rest. The industry understands this, and, at last, so do I.
So I went and had a good time, even if I would have seen more of the actual show if I had watched it on television at home. But inside the Kodak Theater, surrounded by people who were just happy to be there, the show and its two moderately, unsurprisingly flailing hosts were the least of it. (Even from our nosebleed seats the performance artist also known as the movie star James Franco looked as if he’d rather be anywhere else.) What mattered was the effort it took to get to the Oscars and that we were there. (Part of that ordeal for me involved finding something to wear, which I did in a frenzy at noon on Sunday.)
Going to the Oscars also pulls back the curtain in other ways, for as much pleasure as there is in gaping at movie stars like Jeff Bridges, to see him kick back with his family at the official post-awards party, the Governors Ball, is a reminder of this man who, with no visible effort, creates characters like Rooster Cogburn in “True Grit.” For much of the year the American movie industry, and Hollywood in specific, works overtime to remind you that it churns out industrial products like “Tron Legacy,” another of Mr. Bridges’s recent movies. But once a year the industry hosts a party, puts on its fancy clothes and invites the world to come, partly to sell the goods but also as a reminder that movies are also made by people for the pleasure and delight of those who like to watch.
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