Cheshire on Film | Godfrey Cheshire

The Oscars

By Godfrey Cheshire

If memory serves, the first time I tuned into to an Academy Awards ceremony was in 1963. I was 11 years old. Not allowed to watch TV on a school night, I smuggled a transistor radio into bed and pulled the covers over my head, hoping to escape detection by roving parental patrols.
Though I’d been a confirmed movie nut for some time, there was a reason I was particularly interested in the awards for 1962: I had a favorite.

I saw David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia at the Village Theater, then the sleekest of Raleigh’s few suburban cinemas (it was later horribly divided to become the Village Twin, a fate only slightly less tragic than its eventual demolition). From Maurice Jarre’s opening overture through its nearly four hours of desert vistas, spectacular battles and Peter O’Toole’s mesmerizing performance as the most resplendent of agonized anti-heroes, Lean’s Technicolor epic left an ineffably indelible mark on my prepubescent psyche even as it instantly expanded my definition of what a movie could be.

I listened to the Academy Awards rooting for Lawrence to win and was duly rewarded: It took home Best Picture and a number of other trophies. But as would so often be the case in my future experience of Oscar, this satisfaction was undercut by the sense of recognition denied in other areas.

Truth be told, Lawrence of Arabia was only my second favorite movie of 1962. I’ve written before that the film that definitively set me on the course to being a critic was The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, an extraordinary classic western, which for the first time prompted me to note a certain end credit: “Directed by John Ford.”

When the Oscars rolled around, I was chagrined that Liberty Valance received only a single, insulting nomination for Best Costumes. Beyond deserving nods for Best Picture, Director and Screenplay, Ford’s late masterpiece boasted terrific performances by two of Hollywood’s legendary stars, John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart. And where was the Supporting Actor nomination for Lee Marvin’s electrifying bad guy? Or the Best Song recognition for the title tune, a radio hit for Gene Pitney?

No doubt, Ford’s film suffered for being perceived as conventional (a Western!) and passé, a throwback to an earlier era’s penchant for stagecoaches and saloon brawls. Ironically, that condescending view was itself about to be rendered passé.

The same year I encountered Liberty Valance at Raleigh’s old Colony Theatre (now the Rialto), Andrew Sarris published “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” perhaps the most influential essay in the history of American film criticism. Importing the French notion of the director as the “auteur” (author) of a film, Sarris ineluctably upgraded the reputations of many Hollywood veterans. Directors like Ford, Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks went from being mere entertainers — old-fashioned ones at that! — to ranking as the American cinema’s premier artists.

In the succeeding years, Sarris’ ideas had a profound impact, laying the groundwork for an auteurist appreciation of newer filmmakers, such as Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen and Spike Lee, and giving renewed credibility venerable genres including Westerns, gangster films and screwball comedies.

But if Sarris’ viewpoint influenced the way Oscar-givers looked at the art of moviemaking, it did not essentially transform it. From the time the Academy Awards were founded, when silent films were giving way to talkies, the movies nominated and chosen for Oscars have reflected no single aesthetic or commercial criterion but a whole slew of agendas and factors: everything from box-office impact to studio priorities to critical acclaim to the imponderables of popularity, fashion and star power.

The result is a smorgasbord of choices and decisions that often mirror the mix of fascination and frustration I experienced back in 1962. Over time this has led me into a wildly seesawing relationship with Oscar. Some years the nominations strike me as so dismal that I ignore the whole event and threaten never to return. Other years, even when I don’t have a favorite to root for, I’m drawn back by the race’s way of acting as a telling barometer — a very flawed one, to be sure — of trends and changes in the movie climate.

In the 2009 contest, the most striking fact going in is that there seems to be so little contest in the Best Picture nominations. Though I write this before the nominations are announced, an industry-wide consensus predicts that they will be for David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon, Gus Van Sant’s Milk and Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire.

The fact is, serious dramatic movies of any sort are now an endangered species, and part of Hollywood’s recent strategy has been to stretch Oscar’s aesthetic parameters to include movies that formerly would have not been considered Best Picture material. Thus the nomination for The Dark Knight, a mega-budget cartoon action picture of the sort the studios would like to see taken seriously because it earns their keep.

Benjamin Button is a curious case indeed. It’s also a hugely expensive — and fashionably dark — F/X fantasy picture, but one that (as most reviewers neglect to point out) is also unbelievably turgid and tedious, with a hero so monotonously passive it’s hard to imagine anyone watching him except for the knowledge that he morphs into Brad Pitt.

Though it’s assuredly no Lawrence of Arabia, Frost/Nixon is my personal favorite among this bunch, not only because it engages fascinating issues of character, politics and media, but also because it contains a genuine dramatic dialectic; rather than good guys and bad, it offers moral shadings and complexity. But those virtues are almost never fashionable at Oscar time, which is why I don’t expect Howard’s film to win.

The two remaining films are not just the odds-on favorites, they also crystallize the struggle in Hollywood’s current self-definition between New and Old, the trendy and the traditional. Slumdog Millionaire, the kind of flashy stunt the industry often falls for, offers a breathless capitulation to hyperkinetic but vaporous TV-ad stylistics while flattering Western notions of the picturesqueness of Asian poverty.

Milk, though championing the untraditional cause of gay rights, is a much more traditional movie, an old-style Hollywood message film put across with intelligence, nuance and solid craftsmanship. Certainly its claims on art are limited by the polemical simplifications of its political vision, just as its chances on Feb. 22 are enhanced by Hollywood outrage over last fall’s ballot-box success of Proposition 8. Still, Van Sant’s film involves real people and real issues and aims astutely at smart adult viewers, something that can be said of too few Hollywood movies currently.

Finally, my own relationship with Oscar got personal this year. In the spring, folks at the film department of New York’s Museum of Modern Art told me they thought my film Moving Midway deserved an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary and urged me to submit it. The submission was duly made, but the film did not make the Oscar shortlist. A surprise? Not at all. Documentary and foreign film are notoriously the categories where worthy films are overlooked and mediocrities rewarded. If anything, I’m honored to consider myself in the company of non-nominees like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. And I got a smile when Sarris, who named Ford’s film the best movie of 1962, named Moving Midway the second best nonfiction film of 2008, right behind Martin Scorsese’s Shine a Light. Now that’s an honor.