On Screen
SIMON, JOHN
ON SCREEN By John Simon The Oscar Is Wild At last year's Oscar ceremony, Bob Hope remarked that the Oscar was filmdom's most coveted award because it was given by experts. It is, he said, like...
...There are exceptions to this...
...Still, I suppose, there are honest votes, too????the honest votes of the culturally and mentally underprivileged...
...not to Antonioni who, even in Blow-Up, is a pathfinder and a master...
...This presents the stars with a terrible dilemma: Should they rattle off the gags by rote, and appear to be dolts...
...But look at the main awards: the Oscar to the best actress could not be given Anouk Aimee, superb in Lelouch's film...
...It may be worth adding that the songs competing for the Oscar????not very good to begin with????were suffocated by vulgar production numbers, contorted into not just un- but anti-musical arrangements, and caterwauled by tone-deaf pop singers...
...There is no need to dwell on the garishness of the sets...
...But to return to Hope's analogy: Though bricklayers may know about walls, what do they know about buildings, architecture, art...
...Most of them try for a middle course?You know that this isn't impromptu, and I know that you know, but isn't it fun my pretending I can fool you and your enjoying it enough to go along with the pretense...
...Oscars are largely a business proposition, adjudged by some of the world's most uneducated, tasteless, and inbred people, as like as not buddies, business partners, bed partners of the winners...
...They were for Eastern Kodak, and they kept encouraging people to go out and take snapshots and make movies, when only a moment before or after we were made horribly aware of what it all leads to...
...Surely a performance that rose out of the endless and simplistic surrounding trash (and in a role neither well-written nor sympathetic) to the heights of complex human grandeur deserves an Oscar and a half...
...and so on...
...And ss it goes...
...and the Nation, in turn, feels at one with Hollywood...
...It is, he said, like praise for a wall not from random passers-by but from bricklayers...
...True, this year there was no Sound of Music winning the supreme accolade...
...on the actresses' hairdos that, in an age when the most elegant hair is allowed to fall naturally to the shoulders, are veritable stairways to the stars...
...And what of Max von Sydow in Hawaii, who was not even nominated...
...The English are sometimes allowed to squeak by because they speak a language that Hollywood, in its naivete, takes to be its own...
...The best supporting actor turned out to be Walter Matthau, whose work in The Fortune Cookie was indeed brashly clever and raffish as the part required...
...on the actors' toupees, like rain forests of the Amazon...
...Movies may or may not have been getting better, but they certainly have been getting longer...
...For one night, Hollywood can splash about in the drool of 65 million stargazers, feel that it is the Nation...
...True, two Oscars went foreign: one to Paul Scofield, and one to A Man for All Seasons...
...but Robert Shaw, as Henry VIII in A Man for All Seasons, went well beyond the requirements of the part, dizzy-ingly evoking the seething depths of a soul...
...On second thought, that's too true and too sad to be funny...
...Shelley Winters', for example, not so much a dress as an environment...
...on the soporific orchestra under the multiple Oscar-winner, Johnny Green...
...nor to the worthy Ida Kaminska...
...yet the awards, with very few exceptions, stink unto heaven, or however near heaven the Hollywood smog permits...
...This year's two and a half hours were made even bleaker by the fact that the commercials provided no welcome respite...
...The very term falls upon the ear rather as Call Girl College would, not because motion pictures are not to be taken seriously, but because Hollywood isn't...
...The answer is the Oscars...
...He explained that the clips from the films nominated for best picture would no longer be shown en bloc but scattered through the program and separated by commercials, "so that you should know what they'll look like on television...
...My mind wandered to the million dollars Hope pays out annually to his gag writers, and I tried to calculate just how many thousands of dollars' worth of wit were being wasted on me every minute...
...It would be a perfect communion of souls, if only there were any soul in it...
...I am occasionally asked whether I have ever made a movie, or, failing that, worked for, on, or in one ????or, at the very least, watched one being shot...
...But it is equally sure that the gilded Oscars do not deserve a golden Max...
...It is a cheap trick even to have opened the Oscars to international competition and made the awards look ecumenical when the prizes actually go to homegrown hacks...
...As in past years, the dreariest part was the jokes exchanged by award-announcing actors between themselves, or in repartee with Hope...
...Above all they are people for whom salability matters: The Oscar-winning film is not only one that will make pots of money after it is chosen, but also one that, usually, has already been raking it in when it was nominated...
...For example, in costume design, Danilo Donati's costumes for The Gospel According to Saint Matthew had an exhilaratingly tactile, homespun, authentic peasant quality, but also, when needed, an arrogant, barbaric brio...
...But the real scandal, as always, were the Oscars themselves...
...The award for the best direction went to Fred Zinnemann, whom Hollywood has adopted just as he adopted it, for A Man for All Seasons, decent unimaginative work...
...Bob Hope was telling jokes again, cleaner than in past years but also less funny...
...The gowns were the last????pleonastic and obsolescent????word...
...nor even to one of the Redgrave girls who, though they did little in Morgan and Georgy Girl to endear them to me, are still not without talent...
...In keeping with the trend, this year's Oscar ceremonies themselves lasted two and a half hours, and may, in due time, last four, with a 15-minute intermission for dinner, taking a walk, or, if one happens to care about film, hanging oneself in despair...
...In the best supporting actress category...
...Present, too, were the usual boners: Candy Bergen rushing forward for an award not being granted her...
...No, it had to fall to that pristine untalent-edness called Elizabeth Taylor for her impersonation of Little Lulu in Virginia Woolf...
...Or by shoe salesmen, dog breeders, or retired sanitation workers????anyone, in fact, except the members of the Motion Picture Academy...
...or pretend to improvise, and appear to be phonies...
...It all testified to the tinselbound insularity of Hollywood, in which Julie Christie with her "contemporary" look seemed to be not from another city but from another planet...
...But these are, at least, English, and the film about Sir Thomas More is a monument to middlebrow culture, to say nothing of spiritual uplift...
...These jokes are, as everyone knows, rehearsed, but are supposed to sound spontaneous...
...Previously, A Man for All Seasons won the first Protestant-Catholic inter-faith film award, even though More helped "heretics" to the stake, and himself preferred death to Protestantism????there's more balm in Hollywood than in Gilead for the healing of ancient quarrels...
...But the Oscars are not given out by bricklayers????would that they were...
...Piero Gherardi provided Juliet of the Spirits (never mind the quality of the film) with art direction that transformed gaudi-ness and tawdriness into a mannerist phantasmagoria, but the Oscar was adjudicated to a piece of American silliness, Fantastic Voyage...
...Hope did have one funny gag, though...
...Olivia de Havilland struggling to read out names as though a choir of nightingales had nestled in her throat and managing to sound perfectly incomprehensible...
...Everyone who votes for them is an expert, and has worked in, around, behind, or under movies...
...The hallmark of the awards is a mixture of bad taste and intense parochialism and xenophobia...
...but for such an elaborate piece of acting, alas, none of them is a good enough actor...
...Still, Scofield deserved an award for his More, even though Michael Caine's Alfie was an equally flawless performance, and one created for a film, not transposed, like Scofield's, from the stage...
...The jokes are mostly in-jokes, which make the on-the-spot audience feel wonderfully important for begetting them, and the far-flung TV viewers wonderfully "in" for getting them...
...Sidney Poitier trying to impress us with his culture by pronouncing the good English name Vivien Merchant with what he took to be a devilishly French accent...
...Again, someone like Sophia Loren will be given an Oscar because she has made enough Hollywood movies to be practically one of us...
...And there was the usual fatuous fun in all those awards named after deceased Hollywood moguls or character actors, which are given for great humanitarianism and world citizenship to mean-looking geezers with ghastly accents, whose names are known only on Hollywood Boulevard and Flatbush Avenue...
...Rare indeed is the gifted foreigner who can snatch an award from the most mediocre domestic contender...
...But the Oscar went to Irene Sharaff, whose costumes for Virginia Woolf were nothing at all...
...even so, the stage of the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium gave off more nauseating farce in one evening than the Three Stooges in a lifetime...
...So this year the award for the best original screenplay went to Claude Lelouch for A Man and a Woman????a French work but patently Hollywood-influenced and ranging all the way from froth to caramel...
...Upon my repeated noes, the scraggly filmmaker or filmy teenager inevitably asks how, then, can I evaluate movies...
...Sandy Dennis, who (again in Virginia Woolf) offered us the crude and sick substitution of private dementia for the creation of a character, was crowned over Vivien Merchant, whose performance in Alfie was delicate, precise, and compelling in its understated suggestiveness...
Vol. 50 • April 1967 • No. 9
