10 Oscars That Make the Academy Look Good

Some years some categories are so very rich. We have to remember how, in a year like 1955, Best Actor was a contest between Spencer Tracy in Bad Day at Black Rock, Frank Sinatra in The Man With the Golden Arm, James Dean in East of Eden, James Cagney in Love Me or Leave Me, and the eventual winner, Ernest Borgmne in Marty. But the contest that strikes me as the most genuinely crowded in Oscar history, a competition in which anyone would have been a worthy winner, happened five years earlier. In the Best Actress category for 1950, one of the "losers" was Eleanor Parker in Caged--not a film seen much nowadays, or an actress that people recall, but Caged was daring stuff then, about a woman in a tough prison, and Parker was astounding. Then you had Bette Davis and Anne Baxter in All About Eve. (All right, you could argue that they deserved a shared award--for they are two sides of the same coin, one extravagant, the other inward, yet dedicated to the same thing, and both of them consumed by the need to act.) And there was Gloria Swanson in Sunset Blvd., a risky comeback performance for a silent screen goddess. How easily Swanson might have seemed as crazy as Norma, but she made Norma touching and vulnerable, and turned Desmond into a household name. Dizzy competition! Yet the Oscar went to Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday for what is, I still believe, the most brilliant, controlled performance of them all.

My next choice is very personal: Jo Van Fleet as the mother in East of Eden, Best Supporting Actress in 1955. Here was an accomplishment against tangible odds. Van Fleet had never made a movie before. Moredver, she was hardly on screen 15 minutes and she had all her scenes with the incomparably needy (and scene-stealing) James Dean. All she had on her side was a good part (Kate, the brothel-keeper who has been found by her abandoned son), the misty setting of Monterey, California, and Elia Kazan as her director. If you've read the book, in which Kate has a much larger place, you can appreciate how much of her character Van Fleet was able to give in so few gestures. Also, she was 40 at the time and playing maybe 10 years older. I'd add this, too: she made Dean look all the better in what are the film's key emotional scenes.

There are many screenwriters who have won Oscars for projects to which they were assigned, projects on which they knew that stronger figures would make the important decisions. Guessing that their efforts would be interfered with, they were writers who, while often liking their work, did not make a helpless personal commitment to it, for to do so would have been risking even greater frustration or humiliation than the system was already loaded with. Yet, if the American movie is ever to make the full journey to maturity, it will depend upon the commitment of writers. In the late '60s and early '70s, we had several films that benefitted from new confidence. I'm thinking of David Newman and Robert Benton's script for Bonnie and Clyde; Walon Green, Sam Peckinpah and Roy N. Sickner's The Wild Bunch; Ring Lardner Jr.'s MASH; Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo's The Godfather; and--maybe the best, the most influential--Robert Towne's Chinatown in 1974.

Towne's script was significantly reworked, in its ending, by director Roman Polanski--for the good of the picture, I believe. Still, Chinatown came from a writer's history and his sense of place, as well as his skill at structure and dialogue. And in 1974, it played off not just the real, cunning origins of Los Angeles, but the more recent corruption of Watergate. It was about America, and it felt like a novel designed for the screen. To this day, we know its characters because they explain our world. The Oscar Chinatown received helped vindicate the idea that a movie might be drawn out of a writer's life and vision, and that inspiration of this kind was not to be meddled with.

There's usually some fuss or other every year at the Oscars. In Towne's year, because Hearts and Minds, which was about Vietnam, won Best Documentary, and its coproducer, Bert Schneider, read a message sent from the Viet Cong, potent Hollywood rightists Bob Hope and Frank Sinatra felt they should speak out. Better stuff given out that year was forgotten, including two awards I'll count as one--the honorary Oscars (or, the How Did We Manage to Forget Him Till Now? award) that went to Jean Renoir and Howard Hawks. Who was Renoir? He was French, the son of the painter, maybe the greatest of all filmmakers (and one of Robert Towne's favorites). Who was Howard Hawks? Well, he was Scarface, Bringing Up Baby, Only Angels Have Wings, His Girl Friday, Ball of Fire, To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, Red River, Rio Bravo--nearly all of them not even nominated. Such belated honors admit that the members of the Academy are focused on now, not history. Yet as the years slip by, and it becomes easier to see that the Academy's most lasting achievement is the Margaret Herrick Library, it is proper that the Oscars make more concessions to the past and to something like accuracy. The flip, startled vanity of a newcomer is one thing to behold; the stricken gravity of a veteran who thought he or she had been forgotten is quite another.

I will end as I began, with a Best Picture Oscar that points ahead and suggests we may be ready now for our new Sunrises. The 1996 Best Picture winner, The English Patient, nearly didn't get made. Enthusiasts of the novel thought it might be unfilmable. Then money evaporated just before shooting started. But Saul Zaentz, Anthony Minghella and company stayed the course and climbed on the Miramax raft, making The English Patient the first Best Picture that could claim to be an independent production. It was also proud to be an art-house movie, way beyond the mainstream. You can question those claims, but The English Patient was different in one respect--it had great fans and avid opponents. It divided people. It was not an obvious Best Picture so much as a film that questioned the nature of pictures.

In the end, that's worthy.

____________________________________________________________________

David Thomson is the author of In Nevada: The Land, the People, God, and Chance and A Biographical Dictionary of Film. Both are from Knopf.

Pages: 1 2