a very personal view by Slarek [2 March 2005]

So it's been and gone and the speeches have been made and all the backs have been slapped and despite the hard to avoid news of Eastwood's third Best Director win and Scorsese's fifth rebuff, I still haven't even bothered to check who else won what. Why? I really, truly, honestly don't care. Once I used to. Really. In my innocent youth. But not any more. In the past couple of decades things have changed. OK, I've always found it possible to find a whole bucket of films that I think are better than the film that bags the Best Film gong, but recently a fair number of such winners have struck me as sitting somewhere between drearily mediocre and offensively awful.

In my time I have known plenty of seemingly sensible people who have stayed up late to watch the Oscars. They say that they don't care who wins, but apparently sit there shouting at the screen like fanatical soap stars in front of a Eastenders special. This is hardly surprising given the modern obsession with the cult of celebrity, the shallow over the meaningful and the populist over the genuinely inventive, and you would be pushed to find a more self-indulgent and crass expression of celebrity culture than Oscar night.

Repeatedly hyped as a celebration of the greatest achievements of the movie year, it should be remembered that though in theory any film released in the preceding twelve months can win an Academy Award, it is essentially an American prize for (largely mainstream) American movies, with a special category set aside for a film in which the actors do not speak God's language. Given that the most daring, most adventurous, most entertaining and most groundbreaking films are almost never American mainstream movies these days, the selection is inevitably going to be a compromise collection at best, especially as the American films that really do matter - usually the low to medium budget independents - are rarely even considered, being thought of as the scruffy urchins of the film world and sidelined to Sundance and Raindance. If such a work does catch the public's imagination and make the necessary dollars, then it may get a token nomination in one or two categories, and if not then the Academy can always reward the big budget remake, or wait until the director goes mainstream and makes something less 'quirky'.

It's hard for independents to qualify anyway - the Academy prefers big films about big themes with big names, and preferably American themes and American names, though they will tolerate a few Brits as long as the subject matter is appropriately 'universal' and there is not too much controversy attached. Genuine controversy scares the Academy, though it goes hand in hand with financial success then chances are sometimes taken, as with Michael Moore's financially successful Bowling for Columbine, but his notorious acceptance speech soon sorted that, and despite making over $100 million and becoming the most financially successful documentary of all time, Fahrenheit 9/11 was excluded this year on a technicality to avoid any more trouble from Big Mike. I have a sneaking suspicion that some of the votes for Eastwood this year were prompted in part by his very public threat to kill Moore if he ever pointed a camera at him.

That's not to say that US mainstream cinema is not capable of producing great films, even if this an increasingly rare phenomenon. Take Curtis Hanson's magnificent L.A. Confidential for example, a film that was rapturously received on its release and as looks set to attain classic status in the course of time. It boasted two superb central performances from Russell Crowe and Guy Pierce, phenomenal lighting photography and masterful direction. It did win for its screenplay, which was also excellent, but the only acting award went to Kim Bassinger, who for me was far and away the film's weakest component. The big gongs of Best Film and Best director went to....wait for it....Titanic, a godawful, overblown nightmare of a movie whose status has slipped alarmingly in the past few years, with even many of those who initially sang its praises admitting that it was actually a load of old tosh. But it was a BIG film with a BIG story, it was about a real historical event rather than L.A. Confidential's fictional and noirish tale of cops and corruption, it had lavish sets and gargantuan effects, and it had Leonardo De Caprio, a rising and good looking young American star who had already bagged an Oscar for What's Eating Gilbert Grape?, whereas L.A. Confidential featured two Australian actors who had yet to prove their worth on the US circuit. Of course, that would soon change.... And let's not forget, that though L.A. Confidential did make a profit, more than doubling its $35 million budget on the US circuit, Titanic is estimated to have cost a ludicrous £200 million and went on to make three times that in the US alone and a truly terrifying amount in worldwide receipts and TV and video sales.

There are a whole number of reasons a film will be up for the top gong, and quality is rarely at the forefront. Box office business appears to be the key qualification - the mighty dollar has replaced the mighty visionary as the major requirement for award recognition. Lead acting gongs are usually (although not always) reserved for the already famous, and you can take just about any Best Actor or Actress winners in recent years and find a more committed, daring or compelling performance elsewhere. Look at Ellen Burstyn in Darren Aronofsky's extraordinary Requiem for a Dream, an astonishing and bravely unflattering performance in a dark, dangerous and semi-experimental film, one too risky for the Academy - she may have got the token indie nomination, but what chance did she stand against superstar Julia Roberts as plucky, determined Erin Brockovich?

The slide into mediocrity has been a steady one that followed the now well-documented move from creative film-making to formula works that score big bucks in their opening weekend following the huge success of Jaws and Star Wars. In the 1970s the Best Film Oscars were often awarded to genuinely breakthrough and sometimes boldly realised works such as The French Connection, The Godfather and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. It should be noted, however, that another 70s film that has achieved genuine classic status, William Friedkin's The Exorcist, despite being widely nominated and setting the box office on fire, only won in a couple of technical categories. Sorry, but that's another general rule for the main awards: dramas are fine, but genre works - horror, science fiction, comedies, thrillers - are somehow considered to be unworthy, at least until a genre film achieves rare and unexpected mainstream respectability, as did Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs in 1992, which landed Anthony Hopkins a Best Actor Oscar for a colourful performance in a role that had been played with considerably more menace by Brian Cox in Michael Mann's Manhunter. Thus despite being one of the most daring, exciting, frightening and brilliantly made films of all time, The Exorcist lost out to The Sting, an entertaining but otherwise unremarkable work that nonetheless had the good sense to avoid including a scene in which a possessed young girl bloodily thrusts a crucifix between her legs and shouts "Let Jesus fuck you!"

This anti-genre snobbery ensured that industry demiGod Steven Spielberg would not win for his finest film, Jaws, or two that are held in almost equally high regard (not by me, it has to be said), Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T., but he scored for Schindler's List, partly on the basis that, like Titanic, it was a big film about a big true story. And it has to be said that Holocaust tales, no matter how exploitative, often find favour with the Academy, hence the very unusual three nominations for Roberto Benigni's non-English language Life is Beautiful. Horror films are still held in low regard and horror films with yucky effects especially so. And so the slickly made but somewhat saccharine study of how divorce affects a young child caught in the middle that was Kramer vs. Kramer (social issue, respected writer/director, two big name actors in the leads) was voted Best Film in 1980, yet David Cronenberg's powerfully realised and genuinely disturbing but very low budget and visually nasty horror take on the same subject that was The Brood was almost universally dismissed, an injustice that at the time was only discussed at all by genre writer John Brosnan.

The family issues of Kramer really fired the Academy up, and the following year we had more big name actors pretending to be down-to-earth, ordinary folk with big family and relationship problems in Robert Redford's Ordinary People (social issues, ordinary Americans, big star names, big director) and a couple of years later with the equally wearing Terms of Endearment (ditto). In between Colin Welland announced that the Brits were coming with Chariots of Fire, an annoying tale of plucky personal triumph and public school notions to honour that appealed to both American sentimentality and their view of just what they believe England is really like. Ken Loach's powerful social dramas don't tend to even get a mention to Academy members. But then he's a great director.

Scale and reputation also played a key role in the Best Film shouts for Richard Attenborough's Gandhi and Milos Foreman's Amadeus, both fine films that were nevertheless both historical dramas that had BIG on their sides in every respect, as did the lushly shot and overblown commercial for the African Tourist Board that was Out of Africa and the beautifully costumed but rather staid history lesson of Bertolucci's The Last Emperor.

It was then that things really started to slip. Barry Levinson's Rain Man felt like a film specifically designed to grab Oscar attention - big stars giving 'serious' performances, the highlighting of a not-that-well-known social issue, a famous and respected ex-indie director who had moved into the mainstream and the chance for an actor to play one of those roles that just everyone is going to remember him for. The result? One of the most tiresomely over-regarded films of the decade. But parts of it were at least watchable, which is more than can be said for next year's winner, the utterly wretched Driving Miss Daisy, which was memorably shat on by Public Enemy in their excellent 'Burn Hollywood Burn'.

Now this is my idea of an award ceremony

Big star Kevin Costner made a big film about a big (American historical) subject with Dances With Wolves and won in 1991, and three years later Spielberg made his big holocaust film and won, but it was 1995 that things hit rock bottom with awards piled on what remains for everyone I know one of the most nightmarishly awful experiences they have every had in a cinema: Forrest Gump. This is the film that most perfectly illustrates where the Oscars have ended up: it was a big film in every respect, covering decades of a man's life and (this is very important) key events in American history; it starred Tom Hanks, who was on his way to becoming the country's most popular star; and it featured then gasp-inducing special effects that placed the lead actor alongside a number of famous figures, the perfect melding of historical America with the fakery of La-La Land. And it was absolutely fucking unwatchably awful. You don't agree? Tough, I don't care. One of the most satisfying moments in any film in recent years for me was when the title character in John Waters' cheesily enjoyable Cecil B. Demented led a group of self-styled film terrorists onto the set of Forrest Gump 2 and, during a reprise of that awful, awful "box of chocolates" speech, machined gunned every single bastard on set to death.

Size continued to be everything with the wearily over-rated Braveheart and the primly tiresome The English Patient, but peaked again the following year with the wretched Titanic. Many would argue that Ridley Scott's sword, snot and sandals tale Gladiator (also a size-driven winner in 2001), as a historical epic, successfully melded the scale of the setting and effects with a genuinely gripping story, but you'll not find much sympathy for that view here - stand Gladiator next to Spartacus and it frankly pales. As for A Beautiful Mind and Chicago - the less said about them the better.

Perhaps the most dispiriting aspect of the awards is that the selection is so narrowly focused. The Internet Movie Database lists almost 15,000 films that were released in 2004, yet there is a sense that each year a mere handful of them are chosen and then the available awards divided up between them. And even then that handful has not been selected through careful consideration of thousands of hopefuls, but as a result of relentless lobbying by the studios.

The question is, of course, does it matter? For many it's not about the films at all, but the glitz and the glamour, the pleasure of watching emotionally insecure performers make ridiculous acceptance speeches and burst into tears at the drop of a tiara. But it also represents everything that is superficial and hollow about American mainstream cinema, a gigantic firework display with no substance that serves to illustrate all to clearly why film is still held is such low regard in some quarters, and not taken remotely seriously as an art form.

Big Oscar winners nowadays are the high school jocks of the movie world - well built, good looking, hugely popular, in all the magazines and on all the TV shows, but contributing virtually nothing to the development of the art. That is the job of the outsiders, the scruffy independents and the foreign language movies that most western viewers simply won't watch. They'll wait for the remake, the big budget Hollywood version in which actors they recognise play to a formula they feel safe with in a language they themselves speak.

As a final thought, ponder on a few of the names that have never won a Best Director Oscar, despite making films that are widely recognised as classics: Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Howard Hawks, Sidney Lumet, Robert Altman, Oliver Stone and Charlie Chaplin. Nowadays, that's a badge these gentlemen, or at least those still surviving, should wear with pride. They are in good company.