How good are Oscar-winning movies, artistically? More specifically, applying the dimensions of timeliness/timelessness to Oscar’s history, two issues are pertinent. First, how many of the Oscar winners were artistically decent when they were made and honored? And second, how many of the celebrated pictures have withstood the test of time, the ultimate criterion in any art form, be it painting, music, or literature.

Over the past two months, I have watched all 76 Best Picture winners, many of which are available on DVD, often in Special Editions, such as the recent Warner collection of The Broadway Melody, The Life of Emile Zola, and Chariots of Fire. Sadly, what was meant to be a pleasurable exercise in nostalgia turned out to be a more painful experience than I had expected. (Levy’s Oscar best and worsts)

Let me explain:

• Has anyone watched lately Mrs. Miniver (1942), one of the worst films to win Best Picture?
• Are there any artistic merits in The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)?
• Is there any reason to revisit Around the World in 80 Days (1956); last year’s terrible remake just proved how futile the whole idea was.
• Have Braveheart (1995) and Gladiator (2000) done anything to revitalize or reinvent the sand-and sandals epic beyond Quo Vadis and Ben-Hur, fifty years ago?

The aforementioned movies are among Oscar’s big turkeys, except that they are not served on Thanksgiving, instead masquerading as universal artistic achievements, blessed with the Academy’s seal of approval.

I had watched all Oscar-nominated pictures for my book, “All About Oscar: The History and Politics of the Academy Awards,” first published two decades ago under the title of “And the Winner Is.” And, over the years, dozens of Oscar films for various university classes. Hence a class on film noir would includeDouble Indemnity or Crossfire, a course of “Hollywood’s Social Problem Films” would inevitably show The Lost Weekend (about alcoholism), The Best Years of Our Lives (adjustment of WWII soldiers to harsh civilian life), Gentleman’s Agreement (anti-Semitism), In the Heat of the Night (racism).

History courses on the musical genre includedBroadway Melody, MGM’s first very musical,American in Paris and Gigi, and even My Fair Lady, an uncharacteristically stiff George Cukorpicture, made in 1964, a year that signaled the end of classic Hollywood musical and announced the arrival of the Beatles and their then “revolutionary” musical films.

However, watching the Oscar winners over a short period of two months in the order they were made, revealed one sad conclusion. Artistically speaking, most Oscar-winners are truly and incredibly mediocre, boasting a middlebrow, often therapeutic sensibility, exemplified in such “sociological” pictures as Best Years of Our Lives, Kramer Vs. Kramer, Ordinary People, and A Beautiful Mind, to mention a few

The majority of Oscar winners do serve as socio-historical documents that reflect the zeitgeist, and exemplars of mainstream mass entertainment. Nonetheless, most of Oscar pictures have little to offer by way of film art. Genre by genre, it’s possible to demonstrate that Oscar-winners have celebrated the mediocre rather then the best films.

Musical: Broadway Melody, The Great Ziegfeld, American in Paris, Sound of Music, and Chicago have all won the top Oscar, but Meet Me in St. Louis and The Band Wagon (both by Minnelli) and Singin’ in the Rain, arguably the greatest musical of them all, were not even nominated.

Western: With the honorable exception of Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven – one of the few Westerns for the ages, and one of the best films to win the Oscar – the best work in the genre failed to win any Oscar.John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) was nominated but didn’t win, and Ford’s undisputed masterpiece, The Searchers (1956), was not even nominated. One of the most influential films ever made, The Searchershas shaped the careers of Scorsese, John Boorman, Paul Schrader, who all paid tribute to this film in their own work (Taxi Driver, The Emerald Forest, andHardcore, respectively)

Comedy: Again, Capra’s It Happened One Nightnotwithstanding, the comedies celebrated by the Oscars are mediocre – to say the least – failing to represent the best efforts of the genre’s specialists. Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town is superior to hisYou Can’t Take It With You, the winner of the 1938 Oscar. Wilder’s serio-comedy The Apartment won the 1960 Oscar, but Some Like It Hot, for many Wilder’s funniest, was not even nominated.

Melodrama: The masterpieces of the genre, aka “weepie,” “women’s picture,” and “four-hankie,” all denigrating terms, have been vastly underrepresented in the Oscar race. Minnelli was nominated for his musicals, but not for The Bad and the Beautiful, Some Came Running, and Home from the Hills. Douglas Sirk, who contributed to the genre more than any other filmmaker, was never nominated, and so his Universal melodramas, All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind, and Imitation of Life, are not in Oscar’s annals-except for some acting nods and awards.

Homages to the genre, such as Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven, a tribute to Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, swept the 2002 New York Film Critics awards, but at Oscar time the picture got nods for acting (Julianne Moore) and technical merits.

Suspense/Thriller: Hitchcock, the master of suspense, was nominated five times, but never won a legit one. The reason, as he knew all too well, was that he worked in a “debased” genre, known for its cheap frills and thrills. The Gothic melodrama, Rebecca, Hitchcock’s first American effort, won the 1940 Picture, but none of his masterworks were even nominated, including Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), North By Northwest(1959), and Psycho (1960), the first postmodern horror picture.

I could go on and claim that even directors who win the Oscars, don’t win the award for their best work. Sydney Pollack will forgive me for saying that Tootsie, which was nominated but did not win in 1982, is far superior to his 1985 boring Oscar-winning epic,Out of Africa. In Hollywood, as the “king of the world” (you know who) declared in his 1998 Oscar speech, “size matters,” and big is more beautiful and Oscar worthy than small. Even so, to favor Gandhi over Tootsie?

Roughly speaking, the 76 Oscar-winners can be divided into three groups: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, to borrow from Clint Eastwood’s flick, or The Bad and the Beautiful, to use the title of Minnelli’s melodrama.

Of the 76 winners, only a dozen or so are truly good. Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather, Part Two (1974), but not The Godfather, Part Three, have held up extremely well. Perceived by critics as two of the best American films ever made, past or present, they do Hollywood–and the Oscars–proud.

February 22, 2005
E-mail Emanuel Levy

Samuel Butler once observed that, “Every man’s work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.” About Emanuel Levy …

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