Oscar Observations

Chris Matthews joked this past Friday that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was going to cause Republicans to go ballistic by giving Oscars to a French movie and a movie about black people. Well, as it turned out, the latter film - The Help - got only one major award, a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Octavia Spencer. Otherwise, The Help (about black domestic workers in the 1960s South) was ignored by academy members who obviously confused it with an old Beatles movie and wondered why the heck they were voting on it.  :-D  But The Artist - a silent black-and-white movie from France about a Hollywood matinee idol of the 1920s done in by the advent of talking pictures - cleaned up by winning five Oscars: Best Score, Best Costume Design, Best Actor (Jean Dujardin), Best Director (Michel Hazanavicius), and the big one, Best Picture.

My mother wondered how a non-American film could even be nominated for the Best Picture Oscar when there's a separate category for foreign movies. It's because The Artist got a relatively wide release, and also, the foreign film category is for the best foreign language film. The Artist, as a silent film, had no language. Besides, British movies (as you might have guessed) are treated by the Academy as if they were domestic films, so why not give the same deference to a French movie with no language barrier to worry about? The Academy's award in the foreign language movie category, while generally ignored by the American right, still gave them something to fume over; the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar went to A Separation, an Iranian film. And Woody Allen's script for his own Midnight In Paris won the Best Screenplay award - another insult to the sensitivities of conservatives. Because what annoys the right more than honoring a New York Jewish intellectual Francophile who married his ex-girlfriend's adopted Asian daughter? How about Christopher Plummer winning the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for playing a gay man who comes out of the closet late in life in Beginners?

Oh well, Meryl Streep got the Best Actress Oscar for playing Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, so conservatives could take heart in the fact that she won for playing their favorite world figure who isn't Pope John Paul II.

Overall, the Oscars mostly honored movies that were not among the biggest box office successes of 2011 - the top grossing movies of the past year were, as they have usually been for the past thirty years, artistically lightweight blockbusters. Some people have wondered if the Oscars are relevant anymore, confusing relevance with credibility. The Academy Awards are not supposed to honor commercial success; they're supposed to honor artistic achievement. (Not that they always do.)  But the decline in box office business in a trade dominated by adolescent fare - commercially speaking, 2011 was the worst year for movies since 1995 - suggests that more serious movies may soon be, well, taken more seriously by studios and that the blockbuster era George Lucas always gets unfairly blamed for initiating (blaming him for the Transformers movies is like blaming the Beatles for Herman's Hermits) may be coming to a close.

Then again, maybe fewer people are going to the movies because of bedbugs in the theaters. I'll explain later.