![]() ![]() ![]() Don’t the producers realize that the makeup-and-hairstyling winners give fabulous speeches? The category-cutting fracas, though, is best understood as a symptom of a deeper identity crisis. It’s hard to imagine which potential viewers who were disengaged from the Oscars will tune in now that Best Production Design is gone-but, in the process, the Academy sure has succeeded in irritating a lot of people. Photograph by Kirsty Griffin / Netflix / Everett This year, Netflix finally has a front-runner, “The Power of the Dog,” but the film has suffered from a bout of inevitability fatigue. (Ironically, one of the demoted categories is for editing.) This time, it held firm: those eight categories will be presented during an unaired first hour, and the winners’ speeches will be shown in edited form. Three years ago, the Academy tried to banish some categories to the commercial breaks but reversed itself after a similar outcry. Reportedly under pressure from ABC, after years of dwindling television ratings, the Academy gave in-and received weeks of blowback, its detractors including everyone from Steven Spielberg to the excitable entity known as Film Twitter. The central conflict, though, has had less to do with the horse race than with the Academy’s announcement, last month, that eight categories would not be presented during the live broadcast. (Fontaine won.) In the end, the 1942 Oscars went down in infamy for an entirely different reason: it was the year that “ Citizen Kane” lost every award but Best Original Screenplay, whereas the wistful “How Green Was My Valley” won Best Picture.Įighty years later, the Oscars are again taking place amid the outbreak of war, with drama rocking the Academy, a stacked Best Actress category, and a late-breaking Best Picture face-off between a coolly mischievous critical darling (“ The Power of the Dog”) and a tear-jerking family drama (“ CODA”). At the ceremony, much of the attention went to a different kind of war, between the two rivalrous sisters nominated for Best Actress: Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland. Eventually, the Academy decided to go ahead with a dinner, without formal dress (or, in Variety speak, “sans orchidaceous glitter”). has covered his gilded epidermis with a coat of camouflage.” The Academy president, Bette Davis, quit her post in a huff after the board scoffed at her proposal to move the Oscars from a ballroom to a theatre, give the proceeds to war relief, and present wooden statuettes. With America at war and a spirit of austerity at hand, the Academy decided to scotch its ritzy banquet, prompting Variety to declare that “the Golden Boy of Hollywood . . . Take, oh, the Oscars of 1942, which were held two and a half months after Pearl Harbor. Like a good Hollywood screenplay, each Oscar season has burbling conflict, a colorful cast of characters, and a few plot twists. ![]()
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