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Whose Oscar?: Academy Award Selection Process Leaves Room for Improvement
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12729 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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3 / 1987 |
2,413 Words |
| Author
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Martin S. Dworkin
Martin S. Dworkin, critic and writer, lives in New York City. |
The Academy Awards for films have raised mixed feelings among show-business people from their beginnings. Each year, a sizeable repertoire of cynical anecdotes is rehearsed in print and broadcast commentary, as if to proclaim that the professionals, especially the journalists, do not take the clamorous ritual of self-worship seriously. Stories are told and retold about winners using the Oscars - as the little statues symbolizing the Awards are commonly known - as door-stops (writer Ben Hecht is supposed to have been the first to do so), or paperweights - or as even less prestigious utensils: for cracking nuts, say, or straightening bent fenders.
Lost Enthusiasm
Such stories have not lost credibility following recent displays of minimal enthusiasm by recent big winners - which have not helped movie-business efforts to hold up the Awards, to itself and to the public, as the best and biggest trade show of them all. In fact, George C. Scott's refusal to accept a "Best Actor" Oscar for his 1970 role in Patton came across as a gesture of contempt, for all the publicity given to his expressed dissatisfactions with the production. And Marlon Brando's dispatch of a genuine American Indian princess to turn down his 1972 Award for the title performance as The Godfather was clearer as an actor's disrespect for the panoply of his profession that as a protest against continuing injustices to the first minority of the Americas.
But it was left for that professional non-hero, Woody Allen, who was voted no less than three Oscars for his 1977 film, Annie Hall, to make the grandest anti-gesture so far, disdaining the 1978 ceremonies in favor of his
... (1995 of 14818 Characters)
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