NY Times Review of Inside Oscar

1927/28 through 1997
Post Reply
Big Magilla
Site Admin
Posts: 19318
Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 3:22 pm
Location: Jersey Shore

Re: NY Times Review of Inside Oscar

Post by Big Magilla »

Precious Doll wrote: It's funny that only yesterday I was thinking about what books am I going to rid myself of during an upcoming decluttering of the house. I have so many books I could open up a second hand bookstore and the time has come to let some of them go. I am taking 12 months worth of annual leave and long service leave from work from November so I will have plenty of time to decide what is to go. (Planning on going back to work for 6 to 8 weeks after that and then I'm going to retire - I can afford to, so what the hell).
That's a great plan. I retired early ten years ago and have never been as busy as I am now. I have been editor of my community newspaper since last October and I just finished bringing a community website on line. Keeping both up-to-date will be my new challenge.
User avatar
Precious Doll
Emeritus
Posts: 4453
Joined: Mon Jan 13, 2003 2:20 am
Location: Sydney
Contact:

Re: NY Times Review of Inside Oscar

Post by Precious Doll »

That's a great review of the very best book and most definitive book ever written about the Oscars.

It's funny that only yesterday I was thinking about what books am I going to rid myself of during an upcoming decluttering of the house. I have so many books I could open up a second hand bookstore and the time has come to let some of them go. I am taking 12 months worth of annual leave and long service leave from work from November so I will have plenty of time to decide what is to go. (Planning on going back to work for 6 to 8 weeks after that and then I'm going to retire - I can afford to, so what the hell).

I have two copies of Damien & Mason's book. The first edition in hardback and a later edition in paperback. Needles to say I'm keeping both.

The book(s) have given me so much pleasure over the years and some of the quotes are hilarious. The review below also reminds how much I miss Vincent Canby and a host of other film critics now long gone.
"I want cement covering every blade of grass in this nation! Don't we taxpayers have a voice anymore?" Peggy Gravel (Mink Stole) in John Waters' Desperate Living (1977)
Big Magilla
Site Admin
Posts: 19318
Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 3:22 pm
Location: Jersey Shore

NY Times Review of Inside Oscar

Post by Big Magilla »

Hard to believe this was more than thirty years ago.

FILM VIEW; OSCAR NIGHT CASTS ITS MAGIC SPELL
By Vincent Canby
Published: March 23, 1986

Like it or not, the odds are that tomorrow you'll be spending at least part of a long evening in front of a television set watching the 58th annual Academy Awards ceremonies (on ABC, starting at 9 E. S. T.). Any insurance man's actuarial tables will tell you so. You might tune in to see whether, after eight nominations, Geraldine Page finally wins her first Oscar (for ''A Trip to Bountiful''), and whether Steven Spielberg, who wasn't nominated, will show up to support his ''Color Purple'' colleagues, who were. It could be that your interest is in who gets the sound recording award. Possibly you're at home only because there's no one around to go bowling with. Whatever the reasons, you're part of the show's dizzy ratings.

Ever since the first Oscar telecast from the Pantages Theater on March 19, 1953, Hollywood's annual tribute to itself has drawn one of each year's biggest viewing audiences. Over the last three decades, movies have changed in size, shape, manners, cost and impact. Indeed, they aren't even the mass entertainment medium they once were - television is. Yet we continue to watch the Oscar show with an anticipation not always seemly in someone old enough to drive a car.

For years I've been wondering why the appeal has endured. I'm still not sure, but a new, deceptively unpretentious, fact-packed book called ''Inside Oscar'' helps point the way. Published by Ballantine Books at $24.95, the 850-page ''Inside Oscar'' is a giddy social history of our place and time, full of statistics and the kind of utterly trivial details that, taken together, somehow assume significance, like centuries-old graffiti scratched onto the base of the Sphinx.

Mason Wiley, co-author of ''The Preppy Handbook,'' and Damien Bona are the authors of the book, which spans the years from 1929, when the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences was incorporated, up through 1984. (It's in a footnote to 1984 that we learn that ''supporting actress nominee Geraldine Page [ is ] married to a cousin of actress nominee Sissy Spacek, Rip Torn'' - something you probably wouldn't know unless married to another cousin of one of the principals.) ''Inside Oscar'' is not Proust, though it weighs almost as much as Proust-in-paperback. It's possible to start it at the beginning and read through to the end, though this would be to miss its method and to remove all the fun. It's best read on the spur of the moment. ''Inside Oscar,'' however, isn't a coffeetable book. It's more like an encyclopedia of Pop.

Opened at random and read either forward or backward from the point of entry, this collection of names, dates and quotes immediately evokes the kind of recollections one associates with the Oscar telecasts themselves, and even with those Oscar nights one wasn't around to take note of. One remembers not only movies rewarded and movies overlooked, but also the temper of the times that produced them.

When, in their introduction, Mr. Wiley and Mr. Bona describe ''Inside Oscar'' as ''a history of Hollywood as reflected in the Academy Awards,'' they're short-changing movies, if not themselves. Hollywood's public and private follies have become a part of our collective subconscious. What madeleines were for Proust, movies are for us.

The authors divide each Oscar year into two chapters, an introductory overview of the year's major events, including the hit films and the flops, and the announcement of the Oscar nominees, followed by a chapter devoted to what actually took place on Oscar night in sometimes awfully minute detail: ''The star who caused the biggest stir in the bleachers outside the Pantages Theater was Elizabeth Taylor, fresh from her divorce from Nicky Hilton. . . .'' (1951).

In addition to talking to a lot of people who have participated in the Oscar shows in one capacity or another, Mr. Wiley and Mr. Bona also appear to have done a lot of library work.

The Hollywood trade papers, as well as gossip columnists (Louella Parsons, Hedda Hopper, Florabel Muir, among others) are quoted, not always kindly and at sometimes hilarious length. With no sources cited, other quotes must be taken on faith, such as Harry Cohn's initial reaction to Judy Holliday (''that fat Jewish broad'') when it was suggested she re-create her ''Born Yesterday'' role on film, a performance for which she eventually won an Oscar.

''Inside Oscar'' is no ''Scoundrel Time.'' Yet the amused, chatty dispassion with which the authors report the Hollywood ''red scare'' of the early 1950's manages to suggest, perhaps unwittingly, why those times were so scary. Conscience was a matter of business:

''Before 'Born Yesteday' premiered, Judy Holliday was one of 151 members of the entertainment industry listed in a book called 'Red Channels' as having 'alleged' Communist leanings. Harry Cohn breathed easier when J. Edgar Hoover assured him that he had sent his G-men to investigate Holliday and they hadn't come up with anything.''

The 1952 Oscar competition was a worrisome time for Hedda Hopper in her role as defender of the republic. She saw unwholesome political overtones in Fred Zinnemann's ''High Noon,'' written by Carl Foreman, and did her best to sabotage it, though its star, Gary Cooper, ultimately did win. This was a repeat of her 1950 campaign against Jose Ferrer, the star of ''Cyrano de Bergerac,'' whom she thought to be pinko. ''I have talked to no one yet,'' Miss Hopper wrote, ''who was moved by his performance. If he gets the Oscar for the best acting of the year, the Academy has my resignation.'' He did, but she didn't.

Browsing through ''Inside Oscar'' is very much like watching an Oscar show that's running overtime. However, because the rich material is so mixed up with the nonsense, it's not easy to turn away from it. This is true whether it's describing what Joan Crawford wore to the 1963 telecast (a ''beaded silver sheath dress with rocks on her fingers, wrists, neck and earlobes''), or quoting a fulsome editorial by W. R. Wilkerson, publisher of the Hollywood Reporter, on behalf of the 1943 Oscar nominee, ''The Song of Bernadette'':

''Now that this industry has reached a perfection that affords a 'Song of Bernadette,' ANYTHING is possible for it to accomplish. No concern is too deep, no sky is too high for it to reach out and select great thoughts to contribute to the thinking - and betterment - of this world.''

Such in-house support was not especially rare, but Mr. Wiley and Mr. Bona also come up with some other, more unlikely movie hucksters. In 1956, the members of the Los Angeles City Council ''unanimously'' endorsed Cecil B. DeMille's ''Ten Commandments'' in a resolution stating that it ''will bring happiness to millions for years to come and everlasting inspiration for the entire family.'' Two years earlier, M-G-M's ads for ''Seven Brides for Seven Brothers'' had quoted President Eisenhower as advising his fellow Americans, ''If you haven't seen it, you should see it.'' From a taciturn President, that's a rave. ''Inside Oscar'' chronicles Hollywood's curious attitudes toward things and persons ''foreign,'' the membership of the academy frequently being more generous and outgoing than the people who spoke for them. When Laurence Olivier's ''Hamlet'' won the Oscar as the best film of 1948, the Hollywood Reporter reported: ''Hamlet's ghost stalked Hollywood last night and, in the most ghoulish 75 minutes the picture business has ever experienced, waltzed off with a flock of golden Oscars.''

For a while that year it looked as if the major companies would withdraw their support from the academy, but they had second thoughts. The Hollywood Reporter's Wilkerson stayed furious as only he could: ''Have we a bunch of goofs among our academy voters who, like many of the New York critics, kid themselves into believing that Britain is capable of making better pictures than Hollywood?''

If you have a strange feeling that you've grown up listening to or watching Bob Hope on the Oscar show, rest easy - it's not just a feeling. According to ''Inside Oscar,'' Mr. Hope made his first appearance at the Academy Awards ceremonies in 1939 and has never been long away from it since. In a typical 1939 gag, which he continues to recycle, Mr. Hope glances at the table holding the Oscars and comments, ''It looks like Bette Davis's garage.''

That same year George Bernard Shaw was awarded an Oscar as the ''original author'' of ''Pygmalion,'' something that didn't sit well either with him or with the novelist Lloyd C. Douglas (''Magnificent Obsession''), who announced the award. Said Douglas, ''Mr. Shaw's story now is as original as it was 3,000 years ago.'' Said Shaw when informed of the award, ''It's an insult for them to offer me any honor, as if they had ever heard of me before - and it's very likely that they never have. They might as well send some honor to George for being King of England.''

If it's any comfort to you tomorrow night, ''Inside Oscar'' makes it quite clear that the Oscar ceremonies have been boring people virtually nonstop since the first Oscar dinner was held at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel on May 19, 1929. The 1931 Oscar dinner began at 8 P.M. but no awards were given out until midnight, and these were the scientific and technical awards. When radio came on the scene, the academy dropped the windy political speakers who'd been featured earlier. Television changed the look and pacing of the ceremonies, but the show still seems designed to offend at least part of its audience most of the time. Wrote the columnist Mike Connolly in 1958, ''Less folk songs - more gams!''

It's easy to make fun of the Oscar show. In ''Inside Oscar,'' Mr. Wiley and Mr. Bona have found just the right tone for writing about this most particular of American phenomena. Though they are amused and skeptical, they are delighted by every banal minute of it.
Post Reply

Return to “The Damien Bona Memorial Oscar History Thread”