By Simon Butler
This year, Forrest Gump won six Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor (Tom Hanks). Hanks, who won the Best Actor Oscar for his performance in Philadelphia last year, is the first person since Spencer Tracy to win that specific award twice in a row. It happened two nights to Spencer Tracy, over fifty years ago.
A long-delayed deja vu. So long, that the delay seems deliberate.
These kinds of set-ups are just some of the specialties of "Hollywood." The industry creates facades, superficially made to reward the results of artistic achievements, and yet propagating less transient suspicions of rehearsed doings among those who look closely. The industry is a fraud. Such a statement is not a revelation. "The Academy Awards" have been rewarding trash and money- making trash since the ceremony's birth in 1929. Gone With the Wind won Best Picture over The Wizard of Oz in 1939 - one of the biggest mistakes in Oscar history (the other equally notorious one was Spencer Tracy winning Best Actor awards two years in a row). Stereotyped, stock roles have always been favored by the Awards' judges: actors who play people with disabilities (Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man), actors who play overtly religious people (Jennifer Jones in The Song of Bernadette), and actors who are token minorities playing harmless roles in politically motivated films (Sidney Poitier, Morgan Freeman, and Denzel Washington in anything). And Oscars are habitually given to those who have been in the industry for a long time, and yet who have never received awards before - Paul Newman and Steven Spielberg are examples. Those who are getting old and decrepit are usually given a special "Lifetime Achievement" plug before they go to the grave, oftentimes regardless of the quality of their contributions to the important history of film.
What "Hollywood" is doing is promoting the appeal of a dangerous myth. The myth is that "Hollywood" really cares about great art. The truth is that "Hollywood" really cares about financing projects and keeping moneymakers within the industry. This year, neither The Madness of King George nor Red - both fine films, and better films than most others nominated - were up for the Best Picture or even the Best Foreign Film Oscars. Red was not deemed "Swiss" enough for that country's entry for the latter award. The almost universally lauded documentary, Hoop Dreams, did not get any nominations save Best Editing, which the film had no chance of garnering. John Dahl's The Last Seduction, previously shown on Home Box Office for a limited time, was excommunicated by the Academy judges for this reason.
Why does the industry even nominate such films, if the judges have no intention whatsoever of rewarding them? Surely, Red is a more profound film than the vacuous Forrest Gump (FG), and The Madness of King George has a stronger, tighter screenplay than FG (as well as a lead actor, Nigel Hawthorne, who performs a bit of a magnificent King Lear... certainly one of the most difficult roles to act. Why mention Hoop Dreams at all? The answer is that "Hollywood" propagates an aura of pseudo-credibility around itself in order to dupe the American and non-American public into thinking that the industry actually cares about the cinema. The last thing "The Academy Awards" people want their stag party to be known as is a stag party for insiders and those who are liked. Robert Altman is nary a name at the Awards these days (even though two of his most recent films, Short Cuts and The Player, were a couple of the most interesting films to be made in the last few years). Why? Because he goes off on his own, and consequently, gets his movies relegated to the "arthouses" in un-American, Bohemian places like New York City. Once in a while, an "unconventional" choice is up for a nomination (this year, Nigel Hawthorne for Best Actor, and the light film Four Weddings and a Funeral for Best Picture), but this practice is usually to satisfy the scrutiny of those who really know something about what came out that was good during the year. The judges like universal-type films with messages and harmless, everyman, amicable actors and actresses to be "Hollywood's" ambassadors to Middle America. The predictions are predictable, and like sequels to films or books, the audience expects the same thing over and over without complaining. Forrest Gump, the epic, benign, feel-good movie of the year, was the most American flick of all the flicks. That America doesn't exist.
The whole concept of an awards ceremony is stupid. There is no Best Picture in any given year. Films are too varied, too many to generalize about them. No Best Actor, No Best Cinematography, No Best Score. And if awards were given every year by judges who were more interested in the future of art than in the future of their business, for the best in any categories, wouldn't great directors, actors, actresses, composers, win every year? Had there been real standards in the Ceremonies, wouldn't Kurosawa, Truffaut, Bergman, Welles, Lean - wouldn't they and their kind win Best Director, Best Picture each time their films came up to be voted upon? Wouldn't Laurence Olivier win Oscars for all his Shakespeare undertakings, and wouldn't Sergei Prokofiev win Oscars for all his great film music? There would be ties all the time - fifteen-way ties for Best Picture! The industry would self-destruct, and that's the point. "Hollywood" has the worst kind of hypocritical image, and they place another image over their image so as to delude the Philistines into believing the validity of these awards. No one in Middle America wants to see a tie - that would be like seeing a baseball game cancelled because of darkness. One or the other - that's America, and "Hollywood" knows this. So "Hollywood" makes things up. And the populace becomes a wild bunch of pawns - worshipping and emulating their captor like the most pathetic kind of sycophantic, ignorant slave. If Goliath says Red isn't Swiss enough for a Best Foreign Film entry, then the Philistines lament the movie's lack of Swiss cheese footage.
They don't realize such footage wins Best Picture almost every year.