Oscars ephemera

A quick e-mail yesterday from the web commentary editor of the New York Times led to a 300-word piece on the connection between artistry and the Academy Awards.

Los Angeles has been buzzing these past days – print, radio, television – with Oscar talk. Everybody has an opinion … democracy at work, as the said NYT forum shows.

Since I jotted down a few comments about international cinema and the Oscars, the editor titled my paragraphs … "Kurosawa in Hollywood".

Below is what I wrote.

French writer and cultural minister André Malraux once noted that cinema is an industry that sometimes disguises itself as art. The paradox at the heart of film — an object manufactured for mass consumption as well as a thing of beauty capturing the human experience — is also one embedded in the Academy itself.

The Oscars have always helped familiarize American audiences with foreign cinema.
It is after all a trade organization founded in 1927 to counter the notion that Hollywood was a purely business proposition.

There is no mathematical formula to gauge the economic impact of an Oscar nomination or win on a given film. Similarly, it is difficult to argue that the Academy Awards promote artistry and experimentation, since there are so many other factors at play when a member casts his vote.


In the case of foreign cinema, the Oscars have always helped familiarize American audiences with films and directors embraced by critics — Kurosawa, Fellini, Bergman, Buñuel and an illustrious list of contemporary artists. If anything, Oscars for foreign films show that Hollywood is not provincial.

Foreign film winners tend to show a balance between the tried-and-true approach and the innovative, both in subject matter and style. And this becomes evident if you quickly peruse the list of winners since the category began in 1947.

However, who can predict if on Sunday the more “standard” Argentine nominee, El Secreto de Sus Ojos (The Secret in Their Eyes), a TV-style crime narrative with a twist, will win over two visually innovative, stark dramas laced with social and political commentary — Das Weisse Band (The White Ribbon) and Un Prophète(The Prophet) — which are artistic nuts more difficult to crack?

Maria Elena de las Carreras, a Fulbright scholar from Argentina, is a visiting professor at University of California, Los Angeles and Cal State Northridge. She is a regular collaborator of the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival and the Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles.



The link for the NYT Room for Debate forum:

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/do-the-oscars-undermine-artistry/