![]() In “Oscar Wars,” Schulman describes how he became a regular Oscar viewer as an adolescent in the early 1990s, the era of frequent host Billy Crystal’s comical musical medleys like the one that went, “And not an ounce of smut/ It ain’t called "Howard’s Butt"!/ They call it “Howard’s End.” Right now, this year, we see Hollywood trying to grapple with new technology, which is streaming, and trying to figure out what a movie even is anymore and how people watch them.” “Back then, it was the breakthrough of the talkies and the end of the silent era. Today, Schulman sees parallels between the inaugural Oscar ceremony in 1929 and the upcoming 2023 one. It traces Harvey Weinstein's shameless, bullying tactics for Oscar victory and reflects on behavior that was decried many years before the former movie mogul was convicted of rape and sexual assault.Īnd there is a vivid account of the notoriously over-the-top opening number at the 1989 Oscar ceremony that featured Rob Lowe and Snow White, among others, and ruined the career of Allan Carr, the producer responsible for what has come to be known as the worst Oscars of all time. Schulman perceptively notes that Welles, who believed in making films that were one artist's vision, was "a weapon pointed at the entire business model" of the studio system."Īnother section gives a riveting account of 1999’s contest between “Saving Private Ryan,” considered the surefire winner coming in to the evening, and "Shakespeare in Love,” which scored an upset win that night. There is a chapter in “Oscar Wars” on the campaign waged against the Orson Welles masterpiece “Citizen Kane” before the 1942 Oscars (the same year Fontaine beat out de Havilland, her sibling, for the best actress trophy). They also are “a battlefield where cultural forces collide and where the victors aren’t always as clear as the names drawn from the envelopes.” On matters ranging from the labor movement of the 1930s to the Red Scare of the 1950s to the continuing struggle for inclusion and equity in terms of race and gender, the Oscars reflect the social and cultural movements and divisions of the nation at large. ![]() ![]() ![]() find the meaning within these pivotal years,” says Schulman, a staff writer at the New Yorker who’ll be appearing at a virtual event Thursday night hosted by the Dearborn Public Library.Īs Schulman puts it in his book's introduction, the Oscars are a multitude of things all at once, including a fashion show, a horse race and “an orgy of self-congratulation by rich and famous people who think too highly of themselves.” I really wanted to just choose about a dozen stories and go really deep on them and …. “There are a lot of Oscar books that tell you every year who won, who lost, what records were set, what jokes were told. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |