The pointlessness of the Oscars

Given some of the absolute howlers that have won Best Picture Oscars over the years (to say nothing of a long-overdue Best Actor Oscar for Al Pacino, for one of the worst performances of his career), it's a wonder anyone cares what happens when the envelopes are ripped open. But hey, it's celebrities, it's long suck-up speeches, it's two-bit political posing ... it's showbiz.

The real reason, of course, is that it's publicity for all concerned, and publicity means money.

There's a great piece in The Times of London today on the typical backbiting, shameless self-promotion, and nonsensical rules governing the whole Academy Award process. This gem stands out:

It would appear that the makers of The Hurt Locker, which features real actors on location in Jordan, consider themselves more worthy than the “blue screen” computer technicians who made Avatar possible. “Let’s be honest: this is Hollywood,” one well-known Hollywood writer told The Times yesterday. “Everyone hates each other. People here can nurse grudges better than high school girls. The emotional immaturity is stunning, and then you throw in something like the chance to talk on a live international telecast, and it’s really quite a combustible combination.”

Fame is a drug, indeed. Just one more.

Of course, the stink this year is over one of the producers of The Hurt Locker, an excellent low-budget (by Hollywood standards) film about an explosive ordinance detonation (EOD) crew in Baghdad circa 2004. Producer Nicholas Chartier apparently crossed one of the lines when he sent out a blast e-mail urging support for his film over its Best Picture rival, the technological behemoth Avatar. (Of course, the directors of both films, Kathryn Bigelow and James Cameron, respectively, are exes who purport to be friends now.) He took a very mild swipe at the rival film, too, which apparently got the attention of the Academy itself. They took an unprecedented action of banning Chartier from the ceremony itself. Will this judgment affect the voting? Who knows? Who cares?

As journalist Chris Ayres continues putting the fracas in context, we encounter this worthy point:

While it might be argued that the academy’s ruling is more about generating publicity for an event whose television ratings have collapsed by a third over the past decade, the organisation has previously disclosed its fears that if the awards become viewed with cynicism — as they did a decade ago, when claims emerged that studios were “buying” Oscars — the world’s most famous showbusiness brand could be ruined.

Nevertheless, by historical standards of Oscars campaigning, Chartier’s offence looks relatively tame — especially when compared with the tactics of the veteran Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, who become both feared and admired in the 1990s for his ability to win statues for what many critics thought were mediocre films, such as Shakespeare in Love.

Weinstein's antics reached this low point, which is so over-the-top one wonders why Chartier's minor gaffe even warranted the Academy's attention. Ayres continues:

Mr Weinstein’s most infamous ruse involved using a column by the former academy president and twice Best Director winner Robert Wise to praise Martin Scorsese’s 2003 Best Picture contender Gangs of New York. Miramax then began to reprint the column in its own advertisements and publicity material, even though it was revealed that the article had in fact been ghost-written by the studio’s publicist — who was also advising the academy on matters of public relations. All this came only a year after Miramax had been suspected of encouraging rumours that the subject of the film A Beautiful Mind, the mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr, was an anti-Semite.

The studio denied any such whispering campaign.

So, we can safely write off the Academy Awards as nothing more than a tool of the Hollywood ATM. The awards mean nothing, not even in their limited context of "Hollywood-driven American movies of sufficient budget to merit inclusion," except more cash to the winners.