GROSS DISTRACTION - what's the point of the Oscars?
Capitalist tool.
It’s all business. The Oscars are a trade event. One of those industry affairs that the general public isn’t usually invited to. Like the National Pest Awards or the Offshore Achievement Awards. An opportunity for an industry to talk about itself to itself. Not usually of any interest at all to you and me but somehow, in this specific case, also a global pop-culture phenomenon worth millions in its own right.
But the Oscars are different. The awards have been of interest to the world at large for almost as long as they’ve existed. The Academy was set up in 1927 and the first awards ceremony took place in 1929, right at the end of the silent era and right at the beginning of the Great Depression. And remember, this was not a new industry. Hollywood had been a major commercial concern for twenty years. An annual shindig was obviously long overdue.
There’s always some aggro. In 1933, with the depression crushing ticket sales and causing misery nationwide, the studios tried to cut fees for directors. No way, said Frank Capra, who was then president of the Screen Directors Guild. And the great populist (reviewed here and here) cannily threatened to boycott the ceremony:
“We discussed possible power moves. Some members were for calling an emergency meeting of all directors and asking for a strike vote… I suggested a more immediate power play: disrupt the upcoming Academy Awards banquet.”
The studios caved.
It’s entertainment. For about the first ten years the event was pure industry - reported in the trades and in the fan magazines but not an event in itself. The ceremony, such as it was, was hosted by an Academy official - Frank Capra, who had switched sides and was Academy President, hosted twice. So did William C. DeMille, Cecil’s (apparently incredibly boring) older brother. But in 1940 some kind of switch was thrown and it was basically Bob Hope from there on - and at part of the show went out on live radio, later on TV. Hope presented 19 times across almost 40 years. After him came Johnny Carson (and the bond with late-night network TV was made).
It’s not a club. Not a comradely association. The Academy is an instrument of industrial power. The studio heads who founded it designed it as a way to impede the rise of trade unions. Later, during the McCarthy period the Academy administered the blacklist; and for the decades of Hays Office approval the Academy essentially policed the code - nothing made it through to the awards that didn’t comply. It now enforces the various woke codes that govern contemporary movie-making.
The Oscars are still relevant. How could they not be? They’re not an insufferable film festival nor a cynical marketplace. They’re the absolute dead centre of commercial cinema - and they have been since the very beginning. Every year it’s assumed the Academy will fuck it up but, somehow, not yet.
The Oscars were the first movie awards but not the first in the arts. The Pulitzer Prize, a much loftier affair, administered by a university and celebrating American ‘journalism, arts and letters’, already existed, but the Academy Awards are more like the medals and bursaries given out by European guilds and societies during the European enlightenment and the industrial revolution.
Awards for commercial genius were given by institutions with names like the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce in London (which still exists but is now a kind of hangout for post-industrial hipsters). At the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 medals were given to industrial innovators in the cut-throat economy of British manufacturing. It must surely have been a bit like the Oscars.
And it’s unlikely they’ll stop changing. Every year a string of Oscars exegesists lines up to trash the ceremony. Likewise, industry figures like agent Robert Newman are full of ideas: he’s the guy who first suggested that agents who were Academy members should be allowed to vote. Now he thinks the voting should be made public, turning the event into a reality TV show in its own right.
And the evolution continues.