Whatever irritating, immediate outcomes that result in the
upcoming post-Oscar whinge, the most lamentable omission from Sunday night’s
gala ceremony is arguably that the Academy Awards’ longstanding “Lifetime
Achievement Award” recognition has already transpired at a separate event with
little fanfare. Audiences will miss out on a deserved, long-time-coming Spike
Lee acceptance speech. The annual “Governors Ceremony,” which took place in
November, had a big crowd of Academy members honoring the controversial
filmmaker of “Do the Right Thing,” “Malcolm X” and “The 25th Hour,” with
just weeks to go before the tragically-limited release of his best film in
years, “Chi-Raq,” a ferocious satire in rhyme that very well could have gained
some of its own warranted awards momentum had the contingencies of its exhibition
been different. While #OscarsSoWhite dominated on nomination day, viewers could
scrounge YouTube for audio of Lee’s enlivening and hopeful speech from two
months before, along with an often hilarious introduction by three of his key
performers: Denzel Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, and stealing the show with a
prolonged accented anecdote, Wesley Snipes.
On YouTube, as with on the Oscar telecast, what we couldn’t
see were Lee’s images. As Spike Lee’s absence from the Academy ceremony has
been problematic for years—there was much press in 1990 of presenter Kim
Basinger decrying “Do the Right Thing’s” absence as a Best Picture nominee (Lee
received a nod for his screenplay) or how a powerful epic like “Malcolm X”
received merely two nominations in 1993 (for Washington’s starring performance
and Costume Design)—how terribly fitting his 15 minutes of recognition should
occur when the Lifetime Achievement Award has become a ceremony footnote,
linked with the more esoteric scientific and technical awards which receive
some curt lip service during the big show? The same moment was able to serve as
the concluding send-off for Richard Attenborough’s 1992 bombastic biopic of Charlie Chaplin and several affecting Oscar moments over the years. The images for which a
filmmaker like Lee is responsible, as an independent African-American director
pulling no punches and laying out conflicts and histories hidden from so many affluent
American households, remain incendiary, urgent and powerful. One may not agree
with his positions, as either an outspoken social commentator or as a
filmmaker, but as a black voice who broke into the mainstream while maintaining
idiosyncrasies, he’s a pioneer and anomaly. And that status as anomaly, as
#OscarsSoWhite makes clear, has to end.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is devoted
to the “preservation, restoration, exhibition and study of motion pictures.”
With every year containing flagrant snubs, surprises, and milquetoast winners
that will probably be forgotten sooner than the empty-handed peers,
commentators whine about its insignificance and middle-brow attitudes: the
Oscars don’t matter. And sure, they don’t. The amped volume of Oscar
electioneering, the expensive campaigns that accelerated with Harvey
Weinstein’s strategies in the mid-1990s, has all but dismantled serious contemplation
of the movies. There are loud prognosticators aping Nate Silver, desperately
trying to figure out the science of the Oscar, as hype migrates from Cannes
through critics/guild awards to late February’s finale. They’re like alchemists
trying to finally crack the code, fishing for minnows while sitting on a whale,
as worthwhile mainstream motion pictures are reduced to the accolades for which
they qualify, and more eccentric offerings are given a cursory tip of the hat
as they’re shuffled away as sustenance for Criterion-buying specialists.
Preservation, restoration, exhibition and study feel a
little lost in the noise. What about the films? What about Spike Lee and how “Do
the Right Thing” still stings more than ever today, 26 years later? Or for that
matter, as the bearer of Lifetime Achievement continues to work in his seventh
decade, consider how “Chi-Raq,” filmed only just last summer, distills the sorrow
and absurdity of a violent, segregated nation as an audacious alarm bell where
documentary and affected satire tremulously rub against each other, and where
tears of laughter and sadness almost become indistinguishable. And from
previous years, what about other lifetime honorees? This last year Lee was
joined with actress Gena Rowlands, while in recent years the Academy has
selected Hayao Miyazaki, Jean-Claude Carriere, Steve Martin, Hal Needham, Dick
Smith, Jean-Luc Godard, Gordon Willis, Lauren Bacall and Gordon Willis.
That’s a lot of rousing assemblies of footage, and maybe the
quantity is an argument for moving Lifetime Achievement to November’s Governors
Ball. While Bacall, game changing cinematographer Willis, pioneer B-movie
producer Roger Corman, and iconic animator Miyazaki aren’t particularly
surprising, before 2009 would the Academy take the time to give Oscars to Eli
Wallach, Angela Lansbury, and Steve Martin, cherished though they are? It’s
hard to say. Meanwhile, by moving the Lifetime Achievement awards off the big
Oscar broadcast, the Academy can say they honored a paradigm shifting
iconoclast like Godard while not enduring the awkwardness of his inevitable
absence. But Godard’s absence and cavalier attitude regarding the Academy is
totally in character, and by God, to be a child introduced to Godard through
the medium of splashy American broadcast television, budding minds warped by
clips from “Breathless,” “Band of Outsiders,” “Contempt,” “Weekend,” “Hail Mary”
and “In Praise of Love”—what a sweet, ironic victory for everyone involved.
Imagine being an adolescent whose movie preferences don’t
extend beyond “Star Wars,” Indiana Jones, Tim Burton’s “Batman” and “Bill and
Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” and then, suddenly, as happened in March of 1992,
witnessing this otherworldly, entrancing moments from “The Apu Trilogy.”
Satyajit Ray, accepting the Lifetime Achievement award from what appeared to be
his deathbed, did not exist for me before that moment. A year later, I was
flung into a circus of bizarre and dreamlike moments from films with titles
like “La Dolce Vita,” “8 ½,” “Satyricon,” “Juliet of the Spirits,” “La Strada,”
“Roma” and “Intervista.” With that, I was introduced to Federico Fellini (who
would also pass away mere months later). In both cases it would be years before
I ever got around to watching films by either Ray or Fellini, but seeds were
planted and those pictures and sounds settled inside of me, upsetting a pretty
basic, bubbled ecosystem. This wasn’t an inception given at a class or in a
library, but amidst the glamor and tackiness of an awards show (and indeed, the
inception led to pursuing these subjects, and infinite branches extending and
related to these subjects, in classes and libraries for countless hours).
Subsequent formative years for me saw Deborah Kerr, Kirk
Douglas (boldly accepting while recovering from a recent stroke), Michelangelo
Antonioni, Stanley Donen and Andrzej Wadja. In the 21st century, the
picks were artists whose work I was now familiar with: Sidney Poitier, Peter
O’Toole, Sidney Lumet, Blake Edwards, and then so triumphantly, Robert Altman,
the rebel with whom I first became familiar with “The Player” coming to stage
he lampooned so memorably in that film to collect on the legacy that included “MASH,”
“McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” “The Long Goodbye” and “Nashville.” There was
something poignant seeing Altman there, for the first time disclosing a recent
heart transplant, still active and ever more influential as an electrifying
montage of his films were exhibited for a billion people.
The recognition of Charlie Chaplin (in 1971) is precious
because it acted as amelioration for what happened to Chaplin throughout the
1940s and 1950s, as a filmmaker subject to scurrilous Hedda Hopper gossip
columns and communist accusations. But few Oscar moments are so troubling and
affecting as Elia Kazan’s acceptance in 1999, where a half-century later, in
addition to encountering the force of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “On the
Waterfront” and “Baby Doll,” many of us for the first time encountered the
palpable toll and of the Hollywood blacklist, privy to how the warranted
bitterness endured. Kazan, who infamously named names to HUAC, stumbled on his
speech as audience members like Nick Nolte and Amy Magidan sat on their hands.
It’s a difficult, even wrenching thing to watch, and yet when Kazan turns
around and is embraced by presenter Martin Scorsese, it’s an unlikely note of
absolving grace, almost in step with the younger filmmaker’s long-running theme
of the Catholic paradox of forgiveness swimming in his work, so influenced by
the elder (certainly when we think about the concluding moments and biblical
post-script of “Raging Bull”).
That tension with the past, along with the substance of the
past and the industry, is muted with the absence of the Lifetime Achievement
segment and speeches. The present becomes boxed off from its lineage and the
show threatens to become exactly what its detractors say it is: a spectacle of
its own self, subject to haranguing tweets and trivial analysis while a blurry
rat race of expensive studio campaigns transpires. The Oscars can have more
value for film than any other event on broadcast television, and it should
fight to preserve its place at this time when cinema is in such a propitiously
transitory state. The abundance of choices through on-demand streaming
(evidenced by the growing difficulty for a critic to complete a top ten list in
recent years) proves that quality moviedom is far from dead, but what’s worrisome
is how few of those films are embraced beyond an entrenched and limited
cinephile audience. Luminaries of the past can guide us forward, but for their
art to affect change we need the work to be visible, even in the briefest of
segments and limited of contexts.
Considering one of the more upsetting snubs from this year,
Michael B. Jordan in Ryan Coogler’s “Creed,” we can witness first hand the
past’s vitality as images (and dead franchises) are appropriated and
resurrected by a younger generation. Last year’s ceremony briefly had host Neil
Patrick Harris dancing in front of classic movies, tightly circumscribed to the
background, while the rest of the show was clear of any past movie montages and
played host to a tawdry gabfest. It would be beneficial for the Academy to
reconsider how it honors cinema legacies, bringing Lifetime Achievement back to
the mid-show forefront and taking a deep breath of retrospective pause and
contemplation as it exhales forth. The outcome will be healthier for moving
pictures as audiences take sight of fresh worlds, propitiously leading to a
more inspired and diverse future.
