Oscar: good, bad, and ho hum

Press, 9 May 1980, Page 7

Oscar: good, bad, and ho hum

“Kramer vs Kramer,” 1980's award winning film, will screen soon in Christchurch. Towards the end of this month city film fans will be able to see the performance that won Sally Field the best-actress award, as "Nonna Rae.” In “Film Comment,” the American cinema critic and author, ANDREW SARRIS, reviews the academy's record.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was conceived by Louis B. Mayer and his cohorts as the ideal guild-busting company union.

Through the 1930 s and early 1940 s there were many hard feelings on the subject

The first Academy Awards banquet took place on May 16, 1929, to honour the best achievements of 1927-1928. Not until 1934 did Oscar begin spanning the full calendar year.

This was but one of the many signs of the hasty improvisation that characterised the early years of the institution.

It can be aruged that "Cimarron” (1930-31) is the worst film ever to , win an Oscar, the Academy Award statuette. Ironically, RKO studios was represented in the Oscar annals by “Cimarron” rather than by “Citizen Kane” a decade later. And “Cimarron” turned out to be the only Western ever to wint he bet film award. Then there were the Oscar pictures that could be considered both massive productions and artistic . achievements: 1 “All Quiet on the Western Front” (1929-30), “Rebecca” (1940), “How Green Was My Valley” (1941), “Mrs Miniver” (1942), “The Best Years of Our Lives” 1946), and “Gentleman’s Agreement” (1947).

“It Happened One Night” (1934), “Casablanca” (1943), and “Going My Way” (1944) were lightly regarded sleepers that were unexpectedly embraced by the public. .

If one divides the award-winning films into

“heavy” and “light” entertainments, the heavies out-number the lights by almost three to one. When in doubt, the Academy prefers serious and even solemn drama to comedy. Yet it is usually the sentiment of an era that dates more badly than the slapstick. In its first year, the Academy tried to compensate for its bias against comedy by instituting a special award for Comedy Direction. Lewis Milestone won for the conventional “Two Arabian Knights” over Charles Chaplin (for “The Circus”) and Ted Wilde (for the Harold Lloyd vehicle “Speedy”). The award was discontinued after the first year. Chaplin’s unique talents were presumably taken care of with a special award. The Academy resorted to this device with increasing frequency over the years to honour its most original and most unclassifiable talents —

Chaplin, Garbo, Disney, Astaire, et al.

These special prizes served as both a reward for genius, and a rebuke for not making regular movies like everyone else. The early acting awards provided an even more vivid illustration of the Academy’s preference for tears over laughter. Eleven of the Oscar-winning actors’ roles ended in death.

Thus, a tradition of favouring heaviness was established through the 1930 s and 19405. It persists to this day. If a close contest ever comes down to a movie that makes people cry and a movie that makes people laugh, bet the family jewels on the one that makes them cry.

Endless suffering was also the lot of’the best actress roles, from Jane*. Gaynor in “Sunrise.” and “Seventh Heaven,” to the young Jane Wyman as a

deaf mute in “Johnny Belinda.” Against all this toil and travail there was the very occasional twinkle, in the

style of Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in “It Happened One Night.” From the beginning, the Academy was dedicated to

the ideal of technological progress. This was reflected not only in a steadv stream of citations for industrial innovations, but also in the Academy’s determination to usher out the silent era as quickly as possible.

Charles Chaplin’s “City Lights." and F. W. Murnau’s “Tabu.” the two best films of 1931, were not even nominated for awards. They represented a regression to the obsolete art of the silent film.

Nor was Chaplin's pre-

dominantly non-talkie “Modern Times” nominated for best picture in 1936. It was not until Chaplin began talking in earnest in “The Great'Dictator” in 19-10 that he reentered the competitive lists.