The bad news in a ‘serious’ mood
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IT’S hard to say what the most examined, scrutinized and analyzed event in the civilized world might be, but around this time of the year in this part of the country it’s got to be the Academy Awards. If we as a nation had paid even a fraction of this much attention to the prewar situation in Iraq, a lot of things would be different right now.
But even focusing on a situation doesn’t guarantee that observers will get things right, with those Oscars being a case in point. Despite all that’s been written about the films that have been nominated and why, much of it feels off the mark, the product of wishful thinking more than wise analysis.
It’s indisputable, of course, that this year’s nominees, especially in the best picture category, are for the most part smaller pictures with a serious world view. Whatever anyone’s personal take on “Brokeback Mountain,” “Capote,” “Crash,” “Good Night, and Good Luck” and even the larger-budgeted “Munich,” none of them will be mistaken for “Singin’ in the Rain.”
If there was a party line coming out of Hollywood about what this means, it’s that in the post-Sept. 11 world Oscar voters were drawn to films with meaning and substance. As recorded in Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, here’s what a random sample of that theorizing sounds like up close and personal.
“We’re in a cycle when attention is being paid to smaller, serious films,” said Michael Barker, co-president of Sony Pictures Classics. “It harkens back to the 1970s, when quality, lower-budget films prevailed.”
“The pendulum has swung back to movies about politics,” said Bobby Moresco, “Crash’s” co-writer. “People want films that have something to say; they’re tired of fluff.”
“It’s definitely a reflection of our times,” said Mark Gill, president of Warner Independent Pictures. “We find ourselves in crises over foreign policy, healthcare and civil liberties. People feel like something needs to be said about it.”
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Indies by default
WHILE there is definitely some truth to this line of thinking, there is also a dose of traditional Oscar season self-flattery, a desire to say, “Hey, we’re not hiding our heads in the sand, we of the industry are concerned citizens of the world even if we do have private screening rooms.”
That theory, however, also enables everyone to ignore a darker reality, one that is starkly visible during Oscar season and does not reflect as well on those concerned. For the hard truth is that the movie business has changed profoundly in our lifetime. The major studios, which once had a mortal lock on the Academy Awards, have just about completely abandoned making the kind of movies for adults that Oscar voters traditionally favor.
Ballots are cast for the likes of “Good Night, and Good Luck” and “Capote” not just because they are worthy, not just because people feel the cold chill of Abu Ghraib on their souls but because there is precious little coming out of the majors that they can turn to as an alternative. Academy members are voting the way they do, are abandoning studio product, because the studios have abandoned them in turn, giving them almost nothing appropriate to vote for.
What Oscar balloters in their right minds are going to vote for “Stealth,” “The Island,” “The Legend of Zorro,” “XXX: The State of the Union,” “Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo,” “The Dukes of Hazzard,” “Aeon Flux,” “The Pacifier” or “Herbie: Fully Loaded.” And that’s just scratching the surface.
You could say these are films picked at random, but in fact there is nothing random about them: They absolutely reflect the direction 21st century studios are going.
With movies costing the earth and the 25-and-younger crowd dominating theatrical audiences, the studios, with fiscal prudence as well as aesthetic timidity, have all but abandoned intelligent big-budget movies made with quixotic adults in mind in favor of catering to a faithful youthful demographic.
For while adults pick and choose, young people go early and often. While newspapers trumpet this or that release as “the No. 1 film in America,” that statistic is fatally misleading. The film is only No. 1 among the hardly representative group of people who turn out. Yes, the horror item “When a Stranger Calls” was the top film a few weeks ago, but a close reading of the box office stories reveals that a full 55% of its audience was female and younger than 21. Similarly, the audience for the high-grossing “Date Movie” was a whopping 79% younger than 25. Hardly anyone’s idea of a cross section of America.
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Token efforts
OBVIOUSLY, studios still make what they consider to be Oscar-worthy films for adults. But they do so in strictly limited numbers, often putting all their eggs in literally one or two baskets, an “if we build it, they will come” strategy that backfires in several ways.
For one thing, it is so hard for executives to get adult fare through the system that studios fall in love with the precious few that do make it, and they’re correspondingly oblivious to their faults. Universal, for instance, blind to what a morose, unhappy piece of business “Cinderella Man” is, kept pushing it for major Oscar consideration like it was the second coming of “The Sound of Music.”
The studio specialty divisions, whose bread and butter is films for adults, have more practice in picking and making quality product. The majors make so few of them, they’ve simply lost the knack of how to do it. It’s a situation reminiscent of one of the most poignant moments in Anton Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” (by chance currently at the Mark Taper Forum). Firs, the old family retainer, says there used to be a method to turn the orchard’s plentiful cherries into a delicious jam. Now, he says, “nobody remembers the formula.” They’ve forgotten the formula in Hollywood too, and no one’s likely to remember it any time soon.
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Turan is a Times film critic.
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