Screen
O'Brien, Tom
SCREEN OSCAR STEPS OUT STUDIOS VS. THE INDEPENDENTS In his recent collection of essays. Writing in Restaurants, playwright David Mamet declares that America retains only two genuine national...
...now it is the country's number one money earner...
...You would think that, by now, commentators with axes to grind realized that such positions had frozen hard and fast...
...16...
...Only Children of a Lesser God got studio support (at Paramount) and that was a modest $ 12 million compared to the $18-million average for studio films...
...Despite the disappearance of the old-fashioned movie moguls like the Warners and Mayers, films have never before been viewed so thoroughly as industrial products...
...The "industry," in short, recognizes as its best artistic products the innovative work of outsiders...
...Even' 'quality films'' must have a designer label (e.g., Meryl Streep, Jack Nicholson, Robert Redford, and other studio versions of great intellects...
...Time magazine used it as a cover article...
...But every year, the Oscars are less and less an ordeal for "folks who live up on the hill...
...According to Aristotle's Poetics, every tragedy has six aspects on which its quality depends: plot, character, speech, spectacle, melody, and mind...
...But it's there, sort of...
...He simply tells us what happened, without caricature of the American experience (as in Apocalypse Now or the upcoming childish, neo-Strangelovian satire by Stanley Kubrick, Full Metal Jacket) and without heroic fantasy (as in Rambo II or John Wayne's Green Berets...
...Thus, Platoon lacks the trite, liberal selfrighteousness and anti-Americanism that drives today's young males away from moral thought about war, and that, in effect, delivers them to Stallone and, beyond him, to Reagan...
...Similarly, Hannah and Her Sisters and The Mission were independently and inexpensively produced...
...for "character...
...Hollywood is actually less hypocritical than schizophrenic about "art...
...Oliver Stone (see, for example, his Salvador and its treatment of the murder of Archbishop Romero) is left-wing...
...Platoon, the best film made on the war in Vietnam, had to be financed with English money...
...Best Actor and Actress and their supports...
...The first was simply respect: having served in Vietnam, Stone wanted to let the experience of the common soldier speak for itself—to give the dead their due—without imposing on it any ideological bias...
...The market does too...
...Paul Newman has been nominated as Best Actor for an adequate job in the equally poor The Color of Money, for which he will receive the Oscar he should have won five times in the past...
...But when he made Platoon he had several reasons to eliminate overt political statements...
...Ivditing, and Special Kffects...
...Moreover, no nominee for Best Picture this year is a major studio big budget release...
...Best Score...
...Of course, none of the movies cost that much: A Room with a View, for example, only $3 million, with total sales and rentals in 1986 alone at $24 million...
...It says something both of the relevance and obsolescence of a classic, perhaps, that there is no Oscar tor "mind...
...The nominated films, directors, and actors are taken, to an unprecedented degree, from non-Hollywood projects...
...Without Paul Newman, Best Actor would go to Bob Hoskins in Mona Lisa, repeating Hurt's coup from the outside last year...
...The actor Brian Dennehy once commented that everyone forgets the second word in the description of Hollywood: " It's a film industry," he said, "and never forget it...
...Best Cinematography...
...Stone wanted to reach the American public —in this case, the young male public that goes to war films...
...Jane Fonda has received an undeserved, insider nomination for Best Actress 13 March 1987: 147 (in the awful The Morning After...
...Any one of this year's Best Picture nominees could have won Best Picture in the intervening years, over such Hollywood projects as 1983's Terms of Endearment...
...The ostentatiously prolonged suspense throughout Oscar night, Mamet then reflected, reveals an unconscious urge to watch the glamorous squirm...
...No film has taken Hollywood more by surprise than Oliver Stone's Platoon...
...Platoon has none of the dismissive irony that promotes, here as in Weimar in the twenties, reactive stupidity...
...Best Song, and so forth...
...This year, there are exceptions...
...The second reason for excluding politics is the key to the market success of the film...
...Increasingly, the fat cats aren't even in the competition...
...for "melody...
...The Oscars," he writes, "celebrate both secrecy—devotion to tradition—and surprise, a healthy fear of God...
...But that is because, as an "industry," Hollywood has devised the crudest, not always the most profitable, approach to merchandise...
...But last year William Hurt won for Kiss of the Spider Woman and Geraldine Page for The Trip to Bountiful— both odd roles in small, inexpensive, literate, and independent productions...
...or ad nauseam...
...Yet 1986 was, relatively, an excellent film year, even from an "industrial" point of view...
...Besides the Oscar nominees, my ten-best list would include Mona Lisa, The'rese, Desert Bloom, Peggy Sue Got Married, and (admittedly peculiar) Extremities...
...For his "plot...
...He seems to have understood that the only cure for Rambo was a film that portrayed young American males with a sympathetic understanding of their predicament and personalities...
...the New York Times has written several editorials and columns on its success...
...Stone's third reason for excluding politics was the best...
...To make people wary of war, all you need to do is show what happens...
...A Room with a View, a comedy of manners from E.M...
...Each Oscar night, he writes, "just as in another time we might have met around the cracker barrel, we are meeting around the TV to talk about them folks who live up on the hill...
...for "spectacle...
...Writing in Restaurants, playwright David Mamet declares that America retains only two genuine national rituals: the Oscars and the Super Bowl...
...and for this and other, better reasons, it will and should win Best Picture (see review, Commonweal, Jan...
...Forster, is Anglo-Indian...
...But Aristotle's list of "aspects" is interesting in itself...
...And this year, the ritual of Oscar night will involve backhanded respect for "mind...
...The end of monopoly in Hollywood has not meant increased production variety, but anxious me-tooism among mini-moguls, and hence the increasingly brazen appeals to the largest merchandising market, teenagers...
...Allowing for dramatic license and America-bashing, there is some truth in the comment, especially given Mamet's emphasis on the anthropological element in ritual, what he sees as its "celebration not of excellence but ordeal...
...Mamet is right about the Super Bowl: the current format is designed not just to make would-be champions squirm but lose catastrophically, perhaps feeding a national urge for ritual humbling and separation of men from boys, sheep from goats...
...The nominations for acting, directing, and technical awards run parallel...
...Hollywood rewards a film with Best Picture...
...The artistic quality of these films is considerably better than in many years—perhaps since 1982 and its crop of The Return of Martin Guerre, Tootsie, Sophie's Choice,Gandhi, and The Verdict...
...not humbling of the rich "folks who live up on the hill " They have already humbled themselves tom o'BRliN 13 March 1987 149...
...You would hope that they might be touched by the film's artistic achievement, which was to raise our memory of Vietnam to a level beyond such dogmatic argument...
...No industry analysts expected an Anglo-Indian comedy of manners to do that well...
...With the cost of films so high, and studio capital relatively limited compared to the past, executives have become risk averse, and concerned mainly with finding the least common denominator...
...Platoon has even dominated discussions on "Night Line" and other talk shows, unfortunately occasioning grotesque rehashes of hawk and dove positions an Southeast Asia...
...It 148: Commonweal prophesies the Oscars...
...Although utterly American in feel, it was denied studio support for ten years...
...Once, Mamet confesses, he joined the rich folks awaiting the outcome of a nomination for his wife, actress Lindsay Crouse...
...Aristotle expands on each of these, creating a hierarchy between them and declaring his famous, often misunderstood judgment that plot is more basic than character...
...for "speech," Best Screenplay, original or adapted...
...The process bears out de Tocqueville's fear for American culture in general: equality can induce imitation, not individuality...
...All nominees for Best Picture have made enormous profits, some as high as 700 percent...
...And even the number of such films (Out of Africa, The Color Purple, Places in the Heart) declines, leaving Hollywood in the hands of agents, MBA's, Eddie Murphy, Sylvester Stallone, and the "brat pack" of Rob Lowe, Judd Nelson, et al...
Vol. 114 • March 1987 • No. 5
