Whenever the Oscars
come around, I'm reminded of this article written by Raymond Chandler in March
of 1948. By the way, in 1948, the Oscars were broadcast on radio. I hope
he will forgive some editing for brevity. The highlights are mine, of course.
Oscar Night in
Hollywood
By Raymond Chandler
It isn't so much
that the awards never go to fine achievements as that those fine achievements
are not rewarded as such. Technically, they are voted, but they are not decided
by the use of whatever critical wisdom Hollywood may possess. They are ballyhooed,
pushed, yelled, screamed, and in every way propagandized into the consciousness
of the voters so incessantly, in the weeks before the final balloting, that
everything except the golden aura of the box office is forgotten.We elect
Presidents in much the same way, so why not actors, cameramen, writers, and all
rest of the people who have to do with the making of pictures? If we permit
noise, ballyhoo, and theater to influence us in the selection of the people who
are to run the country, why should we object to the same methods in the
selection of meritorious achievements in the film business?
If you think most motion pictures are bad, which they are, find out from some initiate how they
are made, and you will be astonished that any of them could be good. The point
is not whether the average motion picture is bad, but whether the motion
picture is an artistic medium of sufficient dignity and accomplishment to be
treated with respect. Those who deride the motion picture usually are satisfied
that they have thrown the book at it by declaring it to be a form of mass
entertainment. As if that meant anything. Greek drama, which is still
considered quite respectable by most intellectuals, was mass entertainment to
the Athenian freeman. So was the Elizabethan drama. It might reasonably be said that all art
becomes mass entertainment, and that if it does not it dies and is forgotten.
Not only is the
motion picture an art, but it is the one entirely new art that has been evolved
on this planet for hundreds of years. In painting, music, and architecture we
are not even second-rate by comparison with the best work of the past. Our
novels are transient propaganda when they are what is called
"significant," and bedtime reading when they are not.
Show business has
always been a little over noisy, over dressed, over brash. Actors are threatened
people. Before films came along to make them rich they often had need of a
desperate gaiety. Some of these qualities have passed into the Hollywood mores
and produced that very exhausting thing, the Hollywood manner, which is a
chronic case of spurious excitement over absolutely nothing.
If you can go past
those awful idiot faces on the bleachers outside the theater without a sense of
the collapse of the human intelligence; if you can stand the hailstorm of flash
bulbs popping at the poor patient actors who, like kings and queens, have never
the right to look bored; if you can glance out over this gathered assemblage of
what is supposed to be the elite of Hollywood and say to yourself without a
sinking feeling, "In these hands lie the destinies of the only original
art the modern world has conceived "; if you can stand the fake
sentimentality and the platitudes of the officials and the mincing elocution of
the glamour queens; if you can do all these things and not have a wild and
forsaken horror at the thought that most of these people actually take this
shoddy performance seriously; and if you can then go out into the night to see
half the police force of Los Angeles gathered to protect the golden ones from
the mob in the free seats; if you can do all these things and still feel next
morning that the picture business is worth the attention of one single
intelligent, artistic mind, then in the picture business you certainly belong,
because this sort of vulgarity is part of its inevitable price.
Perverse fellow that
I am, I found myself intrigued by the unimportant part of the program. I was
intrigued by the efficiently quick on-and-off that was given to these minnows
of the picture business; by their nervous attempts via the microphone to give most
of the credit for their work to some stuffed shirt; by the fact that technical
developments which may mean many millions of dollars to the industry, and may
on occasion influence the whole procedure of picture-making, are just not worth
explaining to the audience at all; intrigued most of all perhaps by the formal
tribute which is invariably made to the importance of the writer, without whom,
my dear, dear friends, nothing could be done at all, but who is for all that
merely the climax of the unimportant part of the program.
If the actors and
actresses like the silly show, and I'm not sure at all the best of them do,
they at least know how to look elegant in a strong light, and how to make with
the wide-eyed and oh, so humble little speeches as if they believed them. If
the big producers like it, and I'm quite sure they do because it contains the
only ingredients they really understand—promotion values and the additional
grosses that go with them—the producers at least know what they are fighting
for. But if the quiet, earnest, and slightly cynical people who really make
motion pictures like it, and I'm quite sure they don't, well, after all, it
comes only once a year, and it's no worse than a lot of the sleazy vaudeville
they have to push out of the way to get their work done.
But that is the real
point, isn't it?—whether these annual Awards, regardless of the grotesque
ritual which accompanies them, really represent anything at all of artistic
importance to the motion picture medium, anything clear and honest that remains
after the lights are dimmed, the minks are put away, and the aspirin is
swallowed? I don't think they do. I think they are just theater and not even
good theater.As for the personal prestige that goes with winning an Oscar, it
may with luck last long enough for your agent to get your contract rewritten
and your price jacked up another notch.