Title: Oscar Wars
Rating: 4 Stars
I had higher hopes for this book than was probably warranted. On the one hand, I’m not really all that enthralled with Oscars. I probably haven’t watched it in over ten years. On the other hand, I do love films. I watch probably over a hundred a year. If nothing else, the Oscar nominations gives me a heads up if there’s a film that I’ve missed that I should check out.
The award ceremony themselves are kind of silly. For instance, at the 1995 ceremony, nominations for best picture include Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, The Shawshank Redemption, and Four Weddings and a Funeral. Given how different these films are, what rationale can there be to choose the best?
Even so, people care. When people win an Oscar, they lose their minds. They weep. They shout. They climb over chairs. They thank everyone that pops into their head. Somehow the gold statuette seems to endow value.
Oscar Wars is not really a history of the Academy Awards. Given that they’ve been handed out for close to one hundred years now, an exhaustive history would be, well, exhausting. Shulman has identified ten or so key events in Oscar history to focus on.
I can see why he did that, but the book ends up being composed of disjoint chapters. He does try to establish a connective tissue between the chapters, but it’s tenuous at best.
Of course, you have to start at the beginning. The Academy was created by studio heads as some kind of League of Nations (this was, after all, the 1920s), where the various players in the business, be they producers or directors or actors or screenwriters or the technical crew (eg set builders, the lighting technicians) could get together and iron out their differences. The Academy awards were an afterthought to this noble goal.
It turns out that directors, actors, writers, and the technical crew were way more interested in forming their own unions than in participating in some organization that seemed to the product of studio heads. The cinematic League of Nations idea fell away pretty quickly and instead the focus of the Academy was on the awards.
One personal drawback to reading this book is that I do have some knowledge of Hollywood cinematic history, so at times it was a rehash of things that I already knew. That’s not the fault of the book that I have that knowledge but when the author focuses on only certain key events, those chapters in which I already had knowledge were not that interesting to me. It made the book more of a mixed bag. So it was with the chapter on Citizen Kane being effectively shut out of the Oscars due to its plot bearing such a strong resemblance to media tycoon William Randolph Hearst’s life.
I did find the chapter on the blacklist interesting. The impact of the blacklist on writers like Dalton Trumbo and other writers was significant. Trumbo in particular, forced to write under assumed names, had to work at least twice as hard for half as much pay. It proved embarrassing to the Academy when one of his aliases won an Academy award. Trumbo couldn’t accept it and the Academy couldn’t acknowledge him.
Here you see one of the many times in which the Academy, and the movie industry at large, is bent by external forces. In some ways it’s understandable due to the fact that it is a mass media product. For films to be successful, they generally do have to be attractive to a broad audience.
Any time the movie industry feels that its treading even close to dangerous territory, it flinches. You see it with the Hays Code. You see it during the McCarthy era where politicians were looking everywhere for fellow travelling communists. You see it in the 1960s with the rise of television and the rise of the counterculture. Nowadays you see it with the rise of the streaming platforms and the rise of the #meToo and #oscarSoWhite movements.
The chapter that is probably the most amusing was Allan Carr’s. A flamboyant producer, he always had a dream of producing the Oscars ceremony. The mid 1980s was not exactly a golden age for films and the falling Oscar ratings reflected that reality. In desperation, the Academy turned to Carr to produce the 1989 show. Well, its fair to say that the show went a little over the top. It started off with Rob Lowe dancing and singing with Snow White (you kind of need to see it on youTube to truly appreciate it). The musical numbers were long and bloated. Even worse, somehow Carr forgot to get clearance from Disney to use the very much copyrighted Snow White. The resulting debacle is considered one of the worse Academy award ceremonies in history.
One chapter explains how Harvey Weinstein changed the Oscar campaign process. Before Weinstein, the studios would send screeners to voters’ homes and place for your consideration ads in Varsity.
Weinstein became obsessed with winning Oscars. He didn’t necessarily invent but he certainly weaponized the seduction of Academy voters. A number of them lived in basically old folks homes for movie people. Weinstein would arrange personal visits from his stars to these homes. Other Academy voters would get calls soliciting their vote. Apparently in some cases his Oscar campaign budget would exceed the budget of the nominated film. To adapt, all of the major players in the film industry began to play by the same rules, leading to the current veritable annual campaign orgy.
I could go on but that gives you an idea of the type of stories that you’ll encounter reading Oscar Wars. I found it interesting, if not exactly groundbreaking.
dorkenstein 