A day before the 86th Academy Awards, Baradwaj Rangan explains why the madness around the event will never abate.
Last Monday, New York magazine’s web site featured an article that was titled And the Oscars Will Be Presented By, and went on to say, “In alphabetical order: Amy Adams, Kristen Bell, Jessica Biel, Jim Carrey, Glenn Close, Bradley Cooper, Penélope Cruz, Benedict Cumberbatch…” For a second, I thought the piece was a joke, a satire on how the minutest of minutiae has become chum in the waters to Oscar fanatics, whose feeding frenzy, clearly, knows no bounds. But no. This was serious. Under the piece, one reader fumed, “No Robert Downey Jr.? No Denzel? No Clooney? Tom Cruise apparently remains in hiding, as does Johnny Depp, after various flops in 2013.” Another wondered, “Why the hell is Jessica Biel here?” A sympathiser chimed in, “I know, right? What did she do to even warrant an invitation?” In the days leading up to the 86th Academy Awards, we’re supposed to be afflicted by Oscar madness. But sometimes, it seems to be just… madness.
The hottest category, this year, appears to be Best Actor, with long-time bridesmaid Leonardo DiCaprio (The Wolf of Wall Street ) reportedly catching up on early front runner Matthew McConaughey, who proved his Oscar-worthiness by dropping some 20 kilograms for his role in Dallas Buyers Club. The correlation between losing weight and gaining an Academy Award has become such unassailable truth that the Facebook page for Quickflix NZ – “the only place New Zealanders can instantly watch hundreds of movies and TV shows online for one low monthly fee” – posed this question on August 29, 2013: Matthew McConaughey lost 20 kilos for DALLAS BUYERS CLUB. Will he be rewarded with an Oscar for his efforts? Fair enough. Only, the film didn’t open in New Zealand until 20 February 2014. Further proof that Oscar speculation is now a yearlong sport was offered by a column in Singapore’s The Straits Times, which said, “So does DiCaprio deserve his long-awaited Oscar? In my opinion…no. As much as he deserves it, and I am sure he eventually will, I think I would be disappointed if he finally won his Oscar with this role.” And when were these sage musings published? June 10, 2013.
It’s no different in India, where, in the weeks before the awards, our English-language scribes turn into tea-leaf readers, issuing predictions about the various categories: who should win, who will win, whose non-nomination was the most egregious oversight (Tom Hanks! Robert Redford!), and whether the recent sexual-abuse allegations against Woody Allen will cost his heroine Cate Blanchett the Best Actress award for Blue Jasmine. We seem to have a fidgety relationship with the Academy Awards. On the one hand, we claim that they don’t mean anything, that we don’t need anyone else’s approval. (Mahesh Bhatt usually comes up with the best quips about the Oscars, from dismissing them as “marketing tools that fetch money” to scolding Aamir Khan, circa Lagaan, that lobbying for an Oscar in this manner was akin to “grovelling before the white man.”) And yet, when the little-seen The Good Road was chosen over The Lunchbox for consideration in the Best Foreign Film category, Twitter practically crashed from outrage overload.
If only to deflate the ridiculous amounts of attention showered on what is essentially a well-lit and polite evening of back-scratching – and to remember that awards in art don’t really mean anything – we might imagine what an old-timer might do when presented a voting ballot. John Wayne would probably spit out his tobacco and say, “Jeezuz! Another bunch of pansies, starving and suffering for their aaht. In my day, we went to the set, spoke our lines and went home for a beer. Should I pick this DiCaprio chap? Haven’t seen his film – I mean, there are so many. Who has the time? What about McConaughey? I liked him in that – um, Sahara. Now that was a movie. A lost Civil War battleship. West African deserts. That Penélope Cruz kid as a scientist. You went in and had fun. Where’s the fun in Dallas Buyers Club? Another goddamn AIDS movie, with those goddamn gays. But at least, it didn’t make me drop off like Nebraska, which barely moved. If I wanted to see an old man for two hours, I’d stare at the mirror, goddammit.”
This isn’t just idle imagination. According to the findings of a Los Angeles Times investigation into the membership of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, this is pretty much the situation. All this frenzy over who will win is predicated on the votes of actors who mostly grew up with Wayne’s films. As Andrew O’Hehir wrote in Salon.com, “The Oscars are being decided by 5,765 voting members (itself a smaller number than usually reported) who are 94 percent white. The membership is also 77 percent male and 86 percent over the age of 50. At the risk of stating the obvious, this is drastically unrepresentative of the United States population as a whole…”
So why do we still care about this annual ritual, conducted by wizened high priests? Why do the Academy Awards remain the planet’s most unignorable film event? We don’t have to look much further than the fact that it has to do with Hollywood, the film capital of the world, certainly, but more pertinently, the marketing capital of the world. Has any industry in the history of mankind peddled its product with the evangelical zeal this small stretch of California has, turning its stars into gods and its movies into a collective mythology?
The Oscars themselves have been similarly enshrined. In 65 Years of the Oscar: The Official History of the Academy Awards, the author Robert Osborne describes the very first awards night: “After a dinner of Filet of Sole Sauté au Buerre, Half Broiled Chicken on Toast, New String Beans and Long Branch Potatoes, preceded by Consomme Celestine, Academy President Douglas Fairbanks explained to the gathering how the awards selections had been made.” Read that sentence again and breathe in its solemn, ceremonial air. This is how legends are nurtured – even the mention of soup sounds like a sermon. For dessert, there was the tart acknowledgement of the futility of these awards. “It is a bit like asking, ‘Does this man play checkers better than that man plays chess?’”
Many years later, in a special note for the book, four-time Best Actress winner Katharine Hepburn said it better, speaking mostly for herself and her industry, but a little for us too. “However maddening, infuriating, embarrassing and seemingly artificial these occasions are. However drummed up. The truth of the matter is still pure. The Academy Awards are in all good faith. An attempt to honor a person or a product of our industry. And they have maintained in essence a purity, a simple – well, truth. This year by our vote you are the best. Well, there must be something to it. It’s gone on for sixty years. It must be healthy. One can quibble. How does anyone know which performance? Which picture? It’s an Art… Well, hell – let’s face it. How does anyone know anything? It’s our track meet. It’s painful but it’s thrilling.”
See you at the bleachers.
An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2014 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.
MANK
March 1, 2014
Brangan,
The john wayne soliloquy is a classic. i lol’d on it 🙂 that’s exactly how duke would have responded. Yeah the frenzy about the oscar presenters are seen to be believed. i am a subscriber of Wrap, and every hour we would get updates on who has been added to the presenter’s list. huh!. And you nailed it perfectly about hollywood being the movie marketing capital and hence the importance of oscars. well if russia or china could overtake them, then we could see a shift in this (or may be not?). But the thing is that notwithstanding the katharine hepburn example, even other actors of old like Bogart,Brando, etc who spoke disparagingly about oscars , when awarded with them doesnt cringe from going all mush in accepting them.Of course Brando did reject it once, but that was keeping with depiction of natives and nothing to do with the fairness of oscars. I guess the only actor who rejected it on those grounds was George C.Scott.Anyway as you said “See you at the bleachers”
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venkatesh
March 1, 2014
Your John Wayne impression is very true to life …..
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Rajesh
March 1, 2014
Oscar nominations and awards are as soulless, stupid as our own Film fare awards – just my opinion. Oscar has clear propaganda too. So I dont care.
However, whenever something has more money and marketed, it will reach out and claim value and make others look up to it..
How can a nomination team even leave out the performance of Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Enough said) and Emma Thompson (Saving mr.banks), which are just bonus points for me to not care..
“The Oscars are being decided by 5,765 voting members (itself a smaller number than usually reported) who are 94 percent white
– One reason why Densel Washington has won so few..
Sir, have you ever thought about how many non-fair actors have won our own National awards??P J Antony, Premji, Salim Kumar, Archana… is that all
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Sharan (@sharanidli)
March 1, 2014
“For dessert, there was the tart acknowledgement …”
Sup(p)er!
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nagharajabishek
March 1, 2014
@Rajesh: Non fair actors? seriously?
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MANK
March 1, 2014
@Rajesh, bro you never give up rocking the boat dont you. I never thought about this as fair\ non fair thing at all.Perhaps you are being too paranoid about this. How about mithun chakraborty. I thought Premji was rather fair!. well its being a long time , i have seen piravi so…
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Anu Warrier
March 1, 2014
I liked Kamal Hassan’s take on our Awards, and I think it can be extrapolated to the Oscars as well. When he won the National Award and was asked about the others in the race, he said, (and I’m paraphrasing) that the award did not mean that he was the ‘Best Actor’ of all time or even the year. All it meant was that in the opinion of a handful of people on the jury, his performance in a certain role was better than the performances of the others in their films that particular year. And the ‘best’ was chosen from only a handful of films, and the choice was very subjective.
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Santa
March 2, 2014
“our English-language scribes turn into tea-leaf readers … whose non-nomination was the most egregious oversight”
Such as venting about the nomination of Meryl Streep over the non-nomination of Julia Louis-Dreyfus?
Sorry, couldn’t resist taking a dig 🙂
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brangan
March 2, 2014
Sharan: Thanks 🙂
Santa: Haha. Yes, I was talking about that too 🙂
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Madan
March 2, 2014
Twitter practically crashed from outrage overload
– Ha ha ha, brilliant! Please keep the snark quotient right at that level. I think some things have just become a ritual and watching the Oscars every year is one such (or Mumbaiites swearing they need their copy of TOI every day…why??). In 2012, I actually postponed an appointment I had to keep because Billy Crystal was doing such a fabulous job as the emcee. I am more interested in the frills than the prizes but, whatever. I remember Filmfare awards (for Indians) and Grammys also had a similar following but both ceremonies have sort of lost their sheen now. Can’t really tell why. The fact that the Academy had to bring back Billy Crystal is a sign that they are going through a transition too and it remains to be seen whether they get it right. In short, it’s a hot television property more than anything (for now) and the PR spin is required to ensure it stays that way.
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Rajesh
March 2, 2014
@Mank – sorry if gave a rocking the boat impression. I didnt mean to. It was just because of the whites representation stats on the article.
I have had enough of us talking about the issues in other countries, when we have even terribly pathetic issues in our own boat. And I have ‘managed’ to get the routine word too – parnoic! ):-
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Karthik
March 2, 2014
I feel like the real value of the Oscars lies, not in the ceremony, the winners and losers, or to some extent even the process of picking winners, but instead in the kind of art that the presence of this institution stimulates. If not for the Oscars, and the ability of the Academy to maintain its tradition of “honoring” high quality art, the balance between good cinema and entertaining cinema could quickly veer towards a year long parade of superheroes, sequels, chick flicks and animations. Even the madness surrounding the Oscars, I believe, serves to boost the marketability of good movies that aren’t mass entertainers- through re-releases and DVD sales. Often I have rued the absence of such a tradition in our cinema. The filmfare awards with all the buzz and hoopla has only a tradition of feeding the bloated egos of big stars. The national awards arguably considers all kinds of cinema, but the cloud of corruption around the process, and the fact that the geolinguistic diversity of movies considered is too broad to generate any excitement, let alone interest, for the movies or the awards, renders it incapable of incentivizing artistic excellence.
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venkatesh
March 3, 2014
@Karthik: The Oscars are nothing more than a solid T.V show and a lot of the noise more on what the Emcee wore, said and did.
Case in point : The Golden Globes had a huge upswing when Ricky Gervais hosted it for 3 consecutive years. It was fresh, topical, irreverent and plain funny. I am willing to bet in a few years they will do the same thing at the Oscars bring someone out of left-field to make it relevant to the elusive youth demographic.
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auroravampiris
March 4, 2014
Karthik hits the nail on the head, IMO.
BR, don’t you think these sorts of awards – that reward art for ART (or some notion of art that conforms with the demographic you mentioned) – actually lead filmmakers towards better cinema?
As opposed to our most publicized film awards that reward art for success? There’s no way a Lunchbox is getting an award for Best Picture if there’s a multi-crore grosser in the mix… and that leads to a system where filmmakers are patted on the back for compromising art with money.
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Madan
March 4, 2014
There’s no way a Lunchbox is getting an award for Best Picture if there’s a multi-crore grosser in the mix – Well, every winner of the Best Film award at the Oscars since 2000 (didn’t go earlier than that) is a box office hit and I am fairly certain each of these were hits before they were nominated. That is, they didn’t depend highly on a post-Oscar surge. It’s just that their (American moviegoers) tastes are overall still better than in India so films made on relatively serious subjects also have a chance to succeed at the box office. If you look at the nominations for 2012 films at Filmfare, it doesn’t have a single Salman bumper hit, so it’s not a (completely) lost cause.
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brangan
March 6, 2014
Karthik: That’s an excellent point. I’ve always maintained that the Oscars, in their own way, are as important an award as those in Cannes, etc. Those festivals, though prestigious, cater largely to a niche cinephile audience. (I know I’m generalising and that “Taxi Driver” won in Cannes, etc. But I’m speaking about the majority of the films.) The Oscars, on the other hand, play a big part in recognising “middlebrow art,” if you’d like to call it that — films that are accessible to the mainstream. (In the sense that even the most eccentric “Oscar fare” films like “There Will Be Blood” can be seen and appreciated by a large audience, as opposed to say, the films of a Cannes darling like Weerasethakul.) And if nominating films like “Nebraska” can bring more attention to those kinds of films, then more power to the Oscars. I mean, no one can deny the power of the prefix “Oscar winning” when it comes to influencing a viewing decision by a large population.
Madan: It’s just that their (American moviegoers) tastes are overall still better than in India so films made on relatively serious subjects also have a chance to succeed at the box office.
I disagree. They make as much crap as we do, and they consume as much crap as we do. The fact that serious films succeed there has to do with a number of complex factors, beginning with the fact that everyone there speaks the same language, the awesome distribution system, the finely honed sense of which films to release in a carpet-bombing fashion (versus a staggered fashion) and so forth.
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Madan
March 6, 2014
But net net, that does mean there is a better market there for good films than in India, right? And how would that come to be if there weren’t enough people prepared to watch those good films? What I said is not to imply that there is NOBODY in India who is interested in a movie that is a little more serious and does not hinge only on tired romantic/action tropes to get through. But there would appear to be more movie watchers in America who are interested in that kind of cinema than India. Or maybe there are more of them in India but they prefer to watch films on torrents or thiruttu CD rather than buy movie tickets. 😛 And that doesn’t make for great taste either. If the Oscars are truly about judging films on merit rather than commercial success, then at least once in a while (not necessarily every year), they would give THE award to a flop. I doubt their willingness to go THAT far and on the other hand they have time and again played to the gallery (see Titanic). They would not like to give the award to something downright dumb or tasteless, maybe, but also preferably to a film that was watched by enough members of the audience that they wouldn’t go, “lol WUT” on the Oscars.
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Karthik
March 7, 2014
I agree with the “middlebrow” argument. I think Hollywood has perfected this art of taking any appealing issue/story/person/concept and turning it into a screenplay that caters to a wide range of palates. These movies succeed financially because they dont lose sight of the fact that people who go to the movies expect to be engaged emotionally and not just intellectually. The Oscars provide a great context for these movies, bolstering the viewership and enhancing creativity through competition. In fact, one can argue that the “middlebrow” products in other fields have also benefited by creating contexts- the Kutcheri Season for Carnatic music, and the “World Cup” for One-Day cricket.
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Bayta
March 7, 2014
@Madan:” But net net, that does mean there is a better market there for good films than in India, right?”
– No, there isn’t a better market in the US for good films. It is, as BR rightfully said, more that they know how to market such films better than Indian producers/distributors. I think there is definitely a market for good cinema in India. It is just not being tapped efficiently. Hopefully that’ll change.
Karthik’s point about the value of Oscars being in its encouragement of better cinema in general is one I hadn’t considered, and it is a very valid one. Something similar in India would definitely be a good thing, but I don’t see it happening anytime soon.
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Madan
March 8, 2014
Er, why am I not surprised!
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/academy-members-voted-for-oscarwinning-12-years-a-slave-without-watching-it-9177352.html
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