 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Also in this section:
Secrets To Their Excess
Awash in hype, the Oscars prove that when it comes to
show business, marketing is King
The New York Post, February 11, 2001
It's only two days until this year's Academy Award nominees will be announced to an anxiously awaiting world -- or at least to slavering media outlets that can't wait to bump off the news agenda boring real-life stuff like Indian earthquakes, Israeli elections, killer viruses and White House gunmen.
It reminds you that the Oscar ceremony is one of the most brilliant promotional devices of all time, an ever-growing pseudo event that celebrates Hollywood's global power at the same time as it markets its product to the millions of people around the world who watch the telecast.
(And it is millions, even if the producers make even grander claims based on the absurd assumption that, if a foreign broadcaster has bought rights to the telecast, its entire population will be watching the show!)
Any movie lucky enough to score an Academy Awards sweep is all but assured of a massive box-office boost. And the whole process gives newspapers and magazines and TV shows a chance to feature celebrities, thereby selling their own product.
As a result, it's bigger than any sports event or beauty pageant. It doesn't seem to matter that the ceremonies often manage to be both boring and embarrassing, or that viewers expect them to be this way.
Nor does it matter that almost everyone knows the spectacle is more about promoting movies than rewarding achievement. Or that the 6,000 members of the Motion Picture Academy of America have those rather strange biases and vulnerabilities, which provoke an annual dissection by the media -- myself included -- who serve as Oscar's equivalent of Kremlinologists.
The massive media exploitation of the Oscars obscures whether there is any real public excitement about who will be nominated for what. After all, "the Oscar Race" which begins earlier and earlier every year, is really an imaginary phenomenon.
It's not as if the people who direct, write, act in and otherwise work on movies do so in order to win Oscars. Despite the fact that studio publicity machines naturally quote reviewers who use magic phrases like "a sure-fire Oscar contender!," the truth is that the only people who are thinking about Academy Awards way back in August -- when the first prediction stories run -- are journalists and editors desperate for copy with a semblance of drama, and those obsessive fans for whom Oscar competition is the equivalent of the World Series.
Yet by the time February comes 'round, people do begin to care about the awards, and not just because the media has been shoving Oscar down their throats, aided by the pre- Oscar cavalcade of Top 10 lists, Critics' Circle awards, the Golden Globes, etc.
This partly reflects the extent that today everyone has two professions: their own and show business.
We live in a society in which the weekend movie grosses -- once of interest only to people directly involved in the industry -- are now major news, leading radio and TV news programs on Sunday night and Monday morning. How movies do at the box office -- and, to a slightly lesser extent, the number of awards they win -- has become a kind of spectator sport. (A graphic on the Best Actor category in the current Entertainment Weekly, for example, uses racehorses to show the relative positions of leading candidates.)
In a way, this all makes sense. Now that professional sports are more show business than anything else (with teams and players mere brands to be bought and sold), why shouldn't show business be presented as a kind of sport? Like pro sports, movies become personalized when reduced to "battles" over Oscar nominations. If you've really enjoyed a movie, it kind of becomes yours; and you cannot help but root for it.
That said, this doesn't mean the Oscars are a bad thing (as Miramax chief Harvey Weinstein would no doubt point out). The awards, increasingly, help bring smaller, artier movies to a wider public. "Shakespeare in Love," "Life is Beautiful" and a host of other acclaimed but underfunded or underpromoted films would never have reached so many people if they hadn't won Academy Awards.
This has always been true, even though, as cinephiles complain, some of the best movies and performances of any year don't win nominations. Still, as far this year's candidates are concerned, we might see a kind of breakthrough if some of popular pre-Oscar predictions are correct. For instance, if "Traffic" gets nominated for Best Picture and/or Best Director, it would be a sign of real progress at the Academy, proving that even members who vote based on 20 minutes of a video screener can tolerate an opening sequence in Spanish.
And it would indicate that the Academy is again willing to reward films that deal with politics in a sophisticated way, ones that do more than make the usual easy statements against prejudice or censorship. If "Gladiator" gets a nomination, it will be good news for those of us who adore the sword-and-sandal epic and may encourage filmmakers to follow Ridley Scott's example.
Most significant, if "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" gets a Best Picture nomination, as well as one for Foreign Film, it will be the first Asian film to do so. It would also have wider significance: As a global event, the Academy Awards epitomizes the global cultural dominance of Hollywood. It's a symbol of what those resentful French call American cultural imperialism.
But if the 6,000 Academy voters, young and old, male and female, most of them American and based in L.A., actually nominate a subtitled Asian movie for Best Picture? Well, that would mean that Oscar is something that belongs to the world.