It might not come as a shock to
those of you who read my blog to know that long before I had an unhealthy
obsession with the TV awards industry, I had an unhealthy obsession with the
Academy Awards. ‘Unhealthy’ is actually harsh – even at its height, I never took the Oscars nearly as seriously as
I’ve cared about the Emmys. Probably because even at the age of thirteen, it
was really hard to care about an awards show that took itself this seriously.
That said, my interest in the
Academy Awards was one of the back doors that got me interesting into both
classic movies, awards shows and criticism in general. I’ve always had a heavy
interest in classic movies and I had a deep curiosity about the film industry
in general. During my adolescence and teenage years, I ended up reading a huge
number of books having to do with film criticism and Hollywood history.
One such book was Inside Oscar originally
written in commemoration with the sixtieth anniversary of the Academy. Writers Damien
Bona and Mason Wiley did a superb and pretty even handed job of telling the
stories of the origins of the Academy Awards and the tales of the films, the
creative forces and the campaign behind the awards for nearly sixty years. It
was, among other things, non-judgmental about the quality of any of the films
that were either nominated or in the discussion for nominations and awards in
any given year. It never said, for example, that Citizen Kane deserved
to win Best Picture in 1941, more than How Green Was My Valley or that Ordinary
People deserved to beat Raging Bull. Even when the Oscars made some
fundamentally absurd choices – The Greatest Show on Earth in 1952 or Oliver
over Lion in Winter in 1968, Wiley and Bona did not pass judgment on
the wisdom or non-wisdom of the academy. The closest thing that they had that might
pass for a bias was there decision to focus almost entirely as one of the major
precursor for awards The New York Film Critics Association and almost not until
the end even mention other groups such as the Golden Globes.
I’m pretty sure I wore the binding
on that book until it was ragged beyond repair, so when I was seventeen my
parents showed mercy me and got me the 10th Anniversary edition of
the book. This edition gave far more depth to the previous seven years – 1988 to
1994 – than it did much of the previous sixty: 1939 in both books has basically
ten pages for the entire year; 1991 devotes more than twice that to the actual ceremony.
There were also, in hindsight, some signs that they might have been changing
their approach. Whereas the previous volume had not really critiqued any of the
films or directors, the tenth anniversary edition began to show clear signs of
bias to certain films, some justifiable (there are certainly flaws in movies
such as A Few Good Men and Scent of A Woman) some that are very
signs of prejudice. The most obvious ones occur in the story of Schindler’s
List, where Wiley and Bona try everything in their power to downplay the importance
of the film and the work Steven Spielberg did as director. They don’t quite say
outright that they believe Jane Campion and The Piano were robbed but its
pretty much implied if you read between the lines. In the final year they cover,
1994, their bias starts to become downright bigoted, particularly towards two
films that are modern classics Shawshank Redemption and Pulp Fiction.
The latter they are particularly harsh on saying that the tributes that Tarantino
uses in his masterpiece are films infinitely
superior to Pulp Fiction. In hindsight, this should have been a flashing
red light for what came next.
Cut to February 2002. I’m in my
senior year of college and in a bookstore, where low and behold I find Inside
Oscar 2 which covers 1995-2000. I don’t notice that this time the only
author is Damien Bona, and I think I waited maybe all of five second before I
grabbed the book and took it to the cashier. I don’t even think I even bothered
to browse it before I bought it and I certainly didn’t look at this closely. In
retrospect, that was a huge mistake.
While it was simple to devour the
first two editions, this book, while barely 400 pages, was an infinitely harder
read. And honestly, if I’d been a little older, I would have figured out why instantly. Where as the previous two editions of the
book fundamentally seem to be inclined to simply be a narrations of facts and
gossips, Inside Oscar 2 is what only can be described as a ‘labor of hate’,
a book that is so centered on its message that it doesn’t seem to care whether anyone
– including the reader – might enjoy it.
In a paragraph in the introduction,
Bona says that one of the things he wants to illustrate by this book is the decline
in the quality of movies over time. This in itself isn’t a faulty goal, its
almost noble. But the way that Bona decided to do so reminds me very much of
the kinds of screeds that so many fellow critics choose to do when they want to
get their point across. It won’t come as a shock to you that Bona was a critic
(he died in 2012). Wiley, his co-writer, had died in 1994, and perhaps was the
moderating hand that kept Bona from being too harsh in his criticism of movies.
If he had been present, Inside Oscar 2 almost certainly would have been
less heavy-handed.
There are frankly too many examples
of Bona’s judgment clouding his objectivity, so I’ll just use what I think is
the most obvious one: his opinion of Saving Private Ryan.
Bona makes it clear in his criticisms
that he fundamentally think the premise of the film is absurd, which does have
some merit. His criticism of the plot being reminiscent of so many 1940s and
1950s movies is frankly far more judgmental and petty but by far his biggest
blindness is his cavalier dismissal of the landmark opening sequence.
Considered then and now one of the greatest accomplishments of filmmaking, he
goes out of his way to dismiss it, bad-mouthing it as ‘Spielberg being Spielberg’
(Bona clearly has no use for Spielberg) and also by outright lying, saying that
all the sequence does is introduce us to Tom Hanks, while leaving out the fact
that we basically meet all eight of the characters we will follow throughout
the movie.
Now considering that this was one
of the most universally loved films in history, Bona has to really stretch to
find critics who agree with him. Pretty much the best he can manage is digging
up Vincent Canby (who dismissed it outright) and two other low-level critics,
one of who’s judgment I severely doubt because he thought the minor animated film
Small Soldiers was a better film that Saving Private Ryan. It
also shows what has become a clear pattern for Bona, basically dismissing any
critic whose opinion runs counter to his own as being a hack or naïve (Owen Gleiberman’s
rave for the film he dismisses with the complex sentiment: “Whatever.”
The clearest sign of his bias comes
when he compares it to the film Bona clearly thinks should have won Best
Picture Terence Malick’s The Thin Red Line. He clearly believes Malick
is a genius because his films are ‘artistic’ and Spielberg’s ‘commercial.’ He
spends nearly two full pages talking about Malick’s making up the film, celebrating
it for not being ‘conventional’, ignoring the fact that he had a six hour cut
of the film when he finished and then many of the actors – including Adrian
Brody – were basically cut out of it.
And when the critical response to The
Thin Red Line is nowhere near as appreciative as it to Saving Private Ryan,
Bona basically goes out of his way to dismiss almost every critic who didn’t
get it while highlighting the few who did. And in retrospect, Bona’s opinion of
filmgoers in general couldn’t have been clearer with his final paragraph: “While
Saving Private Ryan was the highest grossing film of 1998, The Thin
Red Line was simply too cerebral for mass acceptance.” I’m not sure I
understood the meaning of that line until recently. It’s critics for: “the
average movie-goer was too dumb to appreciate it.”
Now if by this point you’ve concluded
that Bona clearly doesn’t have much use for the average film-goer, you’re
clearly smarter than I was at twenty three. Because I honestly questioned that
I might have been wrong to think Saving Private Ryan was a masterpiece,
and spent quite a few years trying to work around this judgment that Bona had
made. Perhaps a less naïve man would have reached this conclusion considering
the similar contempt he holds for such movies as Almost Famous, Fargo, The
Truman Show, As Good as it Gets, and basically every major film that was
considered a masterpiece at the time and now. Hell, I probably should have
gotten in his critique of American Beauty where he highlights a critic
who agrees with his point of view like this: “Why critics like American
Beauty. They’re idiots. Well, all not critics are idiots. Only the critics
who like American Beauty are idiots.” Bona pretty much spelled out his bias
right there, and I didn’t see it.
This contempt by the way doesn’t
extend merely to films. He says that modern master of cinema such as Paul
Thomas Anderson and Cameron Crowe were basically hacks. He finds Julia Roberts
gushing over her sweetheart Benjamin Bratt at the time annoying. He may be the
only person of any kind who thought Tom Hanks’ nice guy attitude an act. And
that’s not considering the contempt he shows for some of the winners. When Mira
Sorvino accepts her Best Supporting Actress Oscar, he makes a dig both at the
understandable joy her father Paul had at the moment as ‘hammy’ and that if
he'd known the kind of career his daughter would have, he’d really have
something to cry about.”
Bona also spends a lot of pages in
the book berating previous Oscar winning pictures without even being asked.
When Robert Zemeckis makes Castaway, he not only badmouths Forest Gump
but throws in a dig by comparing it just as unfavorably to Dances with
Wolves. When Dino De Laurentis is given the Thalberg awards, he mentions that
one of his movies is Red Dragon, ‘the first and by far the best of the
movies about Hannibal Lecter’, which basically slams Silence of the Lambs without
saying so directly.
But surely this hatred is only to
the box-office pablum that Hollywood makes. He loves independent films, right?
Wrong. In 1996, which was the year of the independent film, he seems very
dismissive of Fargo when Gene Siskel claims “there won’t be a better
made in 1996.” (Bona clearly detests both Siskel and Ebert, which I’ll get to
later on.) When Mike Leigh gives an
acceptance speech for Secrets and Lies he says: “But then again, his
films are considered too long and self-important.” He shows some admiration for
movies like Gods and Monsters and Boys Don’t Cry but just as often
he’s inclined to bad mouth those films that manage to win Critics Awards. (He
dismissed Laura Linney and Kenneth Lonergan’s wins for You Can Count on Me, as
being part of a drama that would have been cliched in the 1970s.) Clearly a
good independent film doesn’t need awards to be good.
Then he’s one of those critics who
like foreign films. Again, this is very subjective. He has a very clear hatred towards
Life is Beautiful, for which I don’t blame him. But when he mentions Central
Station, one of the films that competed against it, it’s far less about its
quality than the fact it’s not Life is Beautiful. Crouching Tiger, Hidden
Dragon he does seem to think has some good qualities, but even there it
seems there’s a bias towards critics and audiences who like this film so much.
I was never a fan of this movie, so I can’t say whether his critique is merited
there, but I think this is part of what both movies have in common – they set
records for the highest grossing foreign film at the time. Based on Bona’s dismissing
of so many Oscar nominated films that make money – not just Saving Private Ryan,
but also Titanic and Gladiator – you get the feeling he was
one of those critics who thought that profitability had nothing to do with what
a great film was. The fact that films like American Beauty and Erin Brockovich
ended up making so much money may be in part why he is inclined to dismiss
them.
So what films does Bona like? The closest
glimpse we get to his opinion comes in the entry in 2000 when one critics
mentions certain movies that he thought were superb. Among them, Edward Yang’s Yi
Yi, the story of a middle class Tai Pei family, Abbas Kiarostami’s The
Wind Will Carry Us (an Iranian film shot entirely from the back seat of a
car) and Bruno Dumont’s L’Humanite a
French film by a director known for his emotionless, well shot movies. Bona
follows this with: “Needless to say, none of these films were going to catch the
Academy’s fancy” and you could sense the same kind of elitist behavior that led
to Sight and Sound decided that Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai de Commerce 1080
Bruxelles is the greatest motion picture in the history of cinema.
I have not mentioned the Oscar ceremonies
themselves in this volume, even though nearly a third of the book deals with
them. In all honesty, they were if anything more painful to read than any other
section. Bona’s hatred for the Oscars clearly extends to so many of the hosts:
he clearly hates Billy Crystal, thinks the sequences, and jokes that
entertained millions were wastes of time, he has no use for the dance
sequences, and he barely seems to care about who wins these awards much less
whether the show is entertaining. At the end of the day, the Oscars themselves were
essentially a means to an end for Bona in this volume.
And what was Bona’s end in this
book? Four hundred and fifty pages of contempt and venom towards every aspect
of filmdom. The actors, the creative forces, the publicity campaigns (ok, that’s
fair) and even his fellow critics. Because not satisfied with his own opinion,
he spends a lot of time in his book degrading so many of his fellow critics: he
maligns Roger Ebert and when Whoopi Goldberg paid tribute to Gene Siskel in the
1999 Oscars, decides to piss on his grave. He calls Jonathan Rosenbaum, a clown
of a movie critics, even when he agrees with his point of view. He basically
calls Joel Siegel a moron. I think the only reason he shows any respect to
Vincent Canby is because he agrees with his point of view in this context.
And by extension, he shows contempt
to the people who might have bought Inside Oscar 2 hoping to get some
kind of entertainment and pleasure out of it. But when he decides that so many
of these films that we then and now consider classics – and trust me, I have
barely scratched the surface of his contempt – by extension, he’s saying that
you the reader and filmgoer are just as much an idiot as anyone else he’s writing
about in this book. Respectful people can disagree about the artist merits of Saving
Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line, but when you are told in no
uncertain terms that you’re an idiot for liking the latter more than the former,
well, you could be forgiven for throwing this book in the trash.
To be clear, I wish I had done so
at the time. Because books like this can do damage to how people think. Inside
Oscar 2 doesn’t just cherry pick the facts it finds to fit its narrative,
it essentially takes all of the evidence to the contrary, no matter how overwhelming
it might be, and tells you that the experts are wrong with no proof. The book
has no respect for any part of the institution it says its about. It’s just a
book written by a man with an agenda who will not let the facts get in the way
of his story. And because it’s well written and researched, the untrained eye
might be inclined to think it’s the truth with a capital T and that you might doubt
what you’ve thought all this time.
Now to be clear, Inside Oscar 2 didn’t
do that to the Academy Awards – you can’t destroy something that has always
been broken and that nobody except a few people in the industry take seriously
anyway. But as someone who has chosen criticism as his profession, books like Inside
Oscar 2 do serious damage to every aspect of objective journalism and
criticism.
There are a lot of problems with the Academy
Awards, and their should have been a volume telling us what they were and why
they happened. But Inside Oscar 2 has no interest in this discussion or
even wants to have it. It’s not a history of the Oscar or film criticism; its
little more than a supposed tell-all written by a bitter participant in the
process who thinks he alone knows the truth and that everyone else is at best
unenlightened, or at worst, a complete and utter idiot.
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