It happens every year, as sure as the changing of the seasons. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announces their slate of nominations, and much to the good-natured chagrin of writer Michael Schulman, the irresolvable debate over whether the Oscars still matter is reignited. “I think the Oscars are a lot of fun!” the New Yorker staffer tells the Guardian. “It’s funny to me how people keep questioning the purpose of the Academy Awards; you never hear anyone doing that with the Super Bowl, you know? No one ever asks whether the Super Bowl is ‘important’. It’s enough to just be something people like that keeps happening!”
His new book Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears makes the case for Hollywood’s biggest night as more than a self-evident good time, however. In an exhaustively detailed history oriented around a dozen or so pivotal ceremonies, his astute analyses reveal these glam-a-paloozas to be telling case studies integral to understanding the past and gaining perspective on the present. In each telecast, campaign, snub and upset, students of show business can seemingly learn about everything: America’s shifting social mores, upper-echelon economics of the industry, the influence of new technologies. Touched by war, the red scare, counterculture, and the constant tug-of-war between liberalism and conservatism, the evolution of the Academy and its glitzy annual blowout doubles as a potted history of 20th-century politics.
With his slew of colorful mini-biographies and juicy Tinseltown anecdotes, Schulman poses a sharp retort to the nagging question of why we bother keeping the Oscars around. Who in their right mind would want to give them up? “I like going to Oscar parties and having a themed cocktail,” he says. “When people say this is all stupid because they never give the awards to the best movies, it’s like, OK. Yes. If you look to the Oscars as a pure barometer of artistic worth, you’re going to be disappointed or perhaps enraged. It’s its own little world! It’s a way to tell how the industry sees itself. The Oscars can be completely absurd, but they can also be meaningful flashpoints for the culture.”
Schulman conducted more than 150 original interviews in the course of his research, 40 for the chapter on Harvey Weinstein alone, and made the Academy’s Margaret Herrick library a second home while writing about eras too far gone for living eyewitnesses. (“You can read telegrams between Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks!”) He outlines the institution’s messy genesis as a bargaining chip in tense negotiations between studio bosses and the exploited actors they held under draconian contracts, the “awards of merit” program an afterthought only enacted with the third ceremony in 1929. “So much of the politics around the Academy in its first decade had to do with labor and unionization and industry PR in a time of scandal and censorship,” he explains. “It’s fascinating to understand how the Oscars emerged out of that mess as the thing that’s lasted.”
The power struggle between management and talent forms is just one of the book’s connecting threads to the current state of the moviemaking union. Schulman sees a parallel between the divided Hollywood of the late 60s, when the studio old guard clashed with independent iconoclasts, and the recent infiltration of the best picture race by startup outfits Neon and A24 alongside streamers Netflix and Apple. We can trace a direct line from his breakdown of the campy, widely reviled 1989 opening number produced by over-the-top showman Allan Carr to Ariana DeBose’s polarizing rap at last month’s Baftas. “I thought it was incredibly funny and amusing!” he laughs. “I didn’t know why people were angry about it. Awards season opening numbers are supposed to be out there, maybe a bit schlocky. If Allan Carr’s opening number had been around in the age of social media, it would’ve gotten an even bigger reaction. Can you imagine the memes?! There would’ve been a Snow White’s headdress account on Twitter within the minute.”
Consulting Academy sage Schulman – as many do; his publicist pumped him for betting-pool picks earlier that week – one realizes any Oscar happening from 2023 can be explained by looking backward. Andrea Riseborough, for instance, confounded everyone by securing a best actress nod for the little-seen To Leslie through a targeted strike on Twitter and Instagram. “She’s in a little indie movie short-circuiting the traditional campaign route, doing something low-budget and highly effective through social media,” Schulman says. “I still can’t believe it worked. Though it does remind me a little of Miramax in the 90s. They came on to the scene as an indie studio based in New York, and Harvey Weinstein saw himself as an underdog who had to take any measures possible to get attention at the Academy Awards. He wrote the playbook that the entire industry adopted, and that’s where the modern cottage industry of awards campaigning begins. What’s interesting about Riseborough’s campaign is that it’s also an underdog, but it skipped the Weinstein playbook and its big budget.”
The final sections see Schulman joining the action as on-site press during the defining cataclysms of the Moonlight/La La Land mix-up in 2016 and Will Smith’s slap last year. In addition to providing context for these moments, both their racial implications and their place in the instant-reaction hot-take complex, he offers a candid vantage on the experience itself. “The Oscars are held in a mall,” he laughs. “When you enter on the red carpet, everything’s swathed in shimmering gold curtain, but then you can peek through a little crack and see a Sunglass Hut. It’s very strange in that way. There’s a huge swarm of people pressed up against a chain-link fence, and one year, I tried to walk from where I was staying to the ceremony. I was in a tux, standing next to a woman with a sign that said ‘Satanic Hollywood elites eat babies’. It’s a weird scene.”
Bizarre, unpredictable and occasionally calamitous is just how Oscar devotees like it, and leaning into that could be the future of a precarious brand. Revisiting the issue of the program’s longevity as its hundredth year fast approaches, Schulman urges the Academy to embrace itself instead of catering to non-viewers that won’t tune in anyway. “The Oscars always attract these questions of relevance, and they’re timely, because the Academy really is going through an identity crisis,” he says. “It’s so much harder to get the whole country to watch something on TV now than it was 30 years ago. We’re not going to get back to the high-water mark of the Titanic year, for no other reason than that people aren’t all tuned into ABC any more. We don’t have that monoculture. It’s fragmented now, and that applies to TV viewing as well as movies.”
The Academy may have no choice but to loosen its grip on the mainstream, but it will never lose purchase with the obsessives who appreciate it as an edifying microcosm for showbiz on the whole. As a reliable indicator of trends, its decline in ratings and word-of-mouth awareness hints at a broader downturn for the art form; as goes movie prom, so go the movies themselves. If the days of best picture winners with event-level ubiquity have ended, it’s only because we’re not making ’em – or watching ’em – like we used to.
“It’s rare that we have a movie that unites all of America in conversation right now,” Schulman says. “Hollywood is very bifurcated, where you have movies like Avatar, Top Gun, the Marvel movies, things that everyone’s going to see, and then you have little indies in the Oscar conversation that people have trained themselves to wait for on streaming. They’re not doing huge business at the box office, and we’re missing this middle area of mid-budget studio productions, adult dramas like Kramer vs Kramer or Terms of Endearment. Those weren’t superhero blockbusters, but they weren’t low-budget either. Those were typically the glue that held the Oscars to popular culture. Everyone saw them and talked about them, so when the nominations came out, people knew what was going on. Now we have a stranger situation, where people who aren’t devoted movie watchers wind up scratching their head and wondering what Triangle of Sadness and Women Talking are. That’s not the fault of the Oscars for nominating the wrong things. This is all about the structure of the movie business.”
Oscar Wars is out now
