Of Horse Races and Academy Awards

Judy Garland as Vicki Lester, holding the Oscar Garland should have won for this film. (Img. from A Star is Born ~ Warner Bros., 1954)

Yesterday I wrote of my disdain for the horse race the annual Academy Awards® make of the attempt to honor the year’s best contributions to film-making.

I understand the practical and financial reasons for making it a contest, but let’s not be coy and pretend it isn’t (“and the Academy Award goes to…”) and let’s not pretend the the Oscars® represent the BEST of anything, shall we? (Titanic might have been the Best Picture^TM of 1997, but it wasn’t exactly the best picture, now was it?)

How, for example, can one say that Hitchcock’s Rebecca is a better film than John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, or, for that matter, George Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story?

Yet that’s exactly what the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences decided in 1940.

While we’re at it, how could Rebecca have been the BEST picture of the year when John Ford was deemed the BEST director, and Jimmy Stewart (The Philadelphia Story), Ginger Rogers (Kitty Foyle), Walter Brennan (The Westerner), and Jane Darwell (The Grapes of Wrath) were the BEST actor/actress and supporting actor/actress of the year, respectively, and the BEST screenplay (adapted) was Donald Ogden Stewart’s The Philadelphia Story?

Can one really compare Judy Holliday in a comedy (Born Yesterday) with Bette Davis in a campy drama (All About Eve)? Apparently, the Academy thinks you can, since they gave the bald, naked statuette to Holliday and not Davis in 1950.

And how could it be that the astonishing Judy Garland never got to walk away with a full-sized Oscar® (she got the “Juvenile Award” at age 17 for 1939’s The Wizard of Oz)? I guess singing doesn’t count as great acting unless you’re doing it unexpectedly (à la James Cagney in 1942’s Yankee Doodle Dandy).

If I ran the world—or at least that portion of it that lies at 8949 Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills, California—I would institute a new awards system that would go something like this:

1. Whenever an Academy member sees a movie he/she thinks represents an outstanding bit of film-making in one or more disciplines, he/she submits notice of same to the Academy with a brief explanation of why it’s so fab. (And yes, there would be an app for that.)
2. There are no limits to the number of submissions that can be made in any category.
3. The Academy totals up the number of submissions made in each category, and gives awards to the top, say, 5% in each.
4. The Academy reserves the right not to bestow any awards in a given category for a particular year if the number of submissions, or the percentages earned by each nominee, don’t meet a certain baseline. (Let’s face it: some years just suck.)

Oh, and the perpetrators of Titanic would have to give the awards they won for directing, original song, and best picture to Leonardo DiCaprio, whose performance almost saved the movie.

Almost.