The Oscars: A Tension Between Art and Commerce
Every year in February when the Oscar ceremonies emerge, the usual questions are asked about films that are lionized versus those overlooked. Some might wonder, for example, why so often the Best Picture Oscar goes to “lesser” films such as Annie Hall when it won over the original Star Wars in 1978, or when The Hurt Locker beat out Avatar in 2010. Or contrarily some might wonder why sometimes the box office champ such as Titanic would beat out the more daring L.A. Confidential in 1998, or how on earth did Oliver win best picture in 1969 while 2001: A Space Odyssey — a film that became a more permanent fixture in our culture — was not even nominated?
Few, however, ask a more vital question: “Why do we even have the Oscars to begin with?”
The basic answer is that the Oscars are an annual ritual that amounts to a charade, a communal game of pretend by industry figures, filmmakers, critics and audiences alike. For one night every year (and during the weeks preceding with the usual predictions and controversies), everyone pretends that the age-old tension between art and commerce is not a problem for what has always been the most expensive art form in human history. In other words, this is a result of a collective discomfort, a collective denial that in the end this is not really about money, but that somehow art transcends mammon, even if temporarily. The Oscars are, in other words, a collective form of make believe.
To be fair, this is not unique to cinema, but can be found in just about every art form. James F. English has written the definitive book on this phenomenon called The Economy of Prestige where he traces a modern and global cultural economy of prizegiving back to the Nobel Prize for literature first given out in 1901. Starting with the Pulitzer Prize in 1902, which was supposedly making up for something lacking in the Nobel the year before, since then there has been what English call “a logic of proliferation,” where every cultural prize almost immediately spawns a large number of counter prizes that supposedly make up for a deficiency in its immediate predecessor. Yet all prizes eventually end up engaging in what he terms as “differentiated imitation.”
Moreover, this prize-granting phenomenon spreads to nearly every possible cultural field, including cinema, starting with the Oscars. Today we not only have the Golden Globes, the SAG awards, the DGA awards, the Indie Spirit Awards, et al., but we also have thousands of film festival prizes around the globe that all followed the original Mussolini Prize (now thankfully the Golden Lion) that began in the 1930s at the world’s oldest film festival in Venice. The Mussolini Cup itself was an attempt to provide a counter award to the Oscars that had just begun in the 1929.
What is striking here is not only how new “counter” prize come to resemble what they are supposedly going against — and that no new prize ever supplants an original, but only complements it — but also important is the critical role of controversy.
Scandals are not to be avoided by prize-granting organizations; they are to be embraced.
The Oscars this year is beset with legitimate questions about a lack of diversity, but such a controversy does not hurt the Oscars one iota, for it reinforces in everyone’s mind, including its detractors, that the Oscars still matter. Moreover, when artists claim that prizes do not matter to them, and actually sometimes denigrate the prizes they win, they are in fact playing a game that reinforces this globalized cultural economy.
For cinema — and for television — the problems are compounded by the sheer scale and scope of the technology and institutions involved. The Oscars itself is an annual attempt by the industry to remind everyone that this is still an art form, those billions of dollars spent and made every year notwithstanding. Yet the origins of the Oscars themselves belie a not so pretty economic undertow, since the original purpose of the award in the late 1920s was to mete out prestige to workers within the industry in exchange for not having unions. (Unions were foisted on Hollywood in the 1930s by the New Deal in exchange for the government temporarily recognizing their obvious and egregious oligopolistic practices.)
Ever since the Oscars have played that same annual ritual of pretense, and most of us go along for the ride. Even this author, who knows better, still cares about the Oscars when he cares about the main contenders, such as when No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood battled it out in 2008, or even Birdman last year.
For one night, and one night only, this author too pretends that somehow cinema has escaped the surly bonds of money. For the rest of the year he relishes the opposite — in fact, that is the most common lesson he perpetually teaches to students: when it comes to cinema, art and commerce are inextricable.
By James Udden, Associate Professor of Cinema & Media Studies at Gettysburg College
