A chat with Mr. Oscar

Damien Bona talks about "American Beauty" and Warren Beatty, "Titanic" and Roberto Benigni and more than 70 years of the academy's hits and misses.

By Bill Wyman

Mar 24, 2000 | In the library of books published on Hollywood and the movies, few combine scholarship and voyeurism to the thrilling degree of "Inside Oscar." Poring through the press of the time, charting the progress of favorite sons and dark horses and then gleefully dissecting each year's ceremony, authors Mason Wiley and Damien Bona crafted arguably the most potent history of Hollywood's love affair with itself. The result is a compulsively readable, fascinatingly detailed and endlessly amusing chronicle of our best-loved annual confluence of celebrity evanescence.

Bona and Wiley met in college -- they both wrote movie reviews for the Columbia University Spectator. Bona eventually became a lawyer, but retained his affection for the movies and their excesses. "We both had Oscar books," he recalls, "but they were all sort of straightforward and dull. We thought that someone should do a fun history of the Oscars." The first edition was published in 1982; it's now in its fifth. (Sadly, Bona's friend Wiley died in 1994.)

Bona graciously accepts compliments on the book's thoroughness and commitment to accuracy: "We thought if you set out to do something, you can't do it half-assed." I conducted the following e-mail exchange with the accommodating author over a period of three days the week before the Oscars. He said he would spend Sunday night as he usually does: hosting a party, watching with friends and taping the show for his archives.

I have to compliment you on your book, "Inside Oscar." It seems to be a history of the Academy Awards, but it's actually a secret history of Hollywood. Each chapter follows the year's releases -- which were acclaimed, which were not, which made money and which did not. Then comes the nominations, and then the big night. Did you intend for it to be quite as epic in scope when you started?

When Mason and I began "Inside Oscar" back in 1982, we didn't really have a clear idea of the form it would take. What we intended to do was to create a humorous history of the Oscars that gave background information, included gossip and conveyed a sense of the personalities involved.

As we began work on it, we also decided we wanted to communicate a sense of why the various results occurred -- not simply who and what won, but the reason they won.

To accomplish this, we realized we had to give an overview of an entire year's worth of movies. And on top of that, to some degree we needed to elucidate what was going on in American society at a given time -- how the movies reflected society and vice versa. So, before we knew it, we were actually writing something of a social history.

Originally, we thought we'd just be covering the period from the announcement of the nominations to Oscar night, but it didn't take us long to see that such a book would be lacking in detail and insight.

I suppose the result for us today is so interesting because the week-to-week -- indeed, the day-to-day -- coverage of Hollywood has become such a staple of pop culture. We tend to lose perspective. It's nice to be reminded of something like "Wilson" [a two-and-a-half-hour biopic of Woodrow Wilson, the pet project of mogul Darryl Zanuck], the most-talked-about movie of its time and of Oscar night, but then aced out of the main awards and since forgotten. Is history fair to movies like that? Will "Titanic" last?

One of the nice things about the Oscar nominations lists -- and it's one reason we included all of the nominations in "Inside Oscar" -- is that they make you remember films that are otherwise forgotten, and to get an overview at what was popular at a given time. For instance, in one of the "minor" categories, who today would ever guess that "Singin' in the Rain" would have lost best score to "With a Song in My Heart" -- a forgotten movie biography about a forgotten singer, Jane Froman? But in 1952, "With a Song in My Heart" was huge (and made a star out of Robert Wagner).

And from 1944, the year of "Wilson" and the big winner, "Going My Way," the two films people today think of most fondly are probably "Double Indemnity" (nominated for best picture) and "Laura" (not up for picture, but nominated for director and screenplay).

In "Inside Oscar," we also have lists of eligible movies that were not nominated. Today, the two films of 1958 that are generally considered the greatest of that year are [Alfred] Hitchcock's "Vertigo" and [Orson] Welles' "Touch of Evil." Neither was up for best picture. In fact, "Touch of Evil" received no nominations; "Vertigo," only for sound and art direction (and not a nomination for Bernard Herrmann's score!). Although three of the best picture nominees from '58 are remembered fondly and are still well liked ("Auntie Mame," "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" and the winner, "Gigi"), two of the nominees are hard to sit through today: the painfully earnest gimmick film "The Defiant Ones" and the stodgy "Separate Tables."

Other notable films not nominated for best picture include "Breakfast at Tiffany's," "Thelma and Louise," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," "The Searchers," "Rear Window," "Psycho," "Victor/Victoria," "2001: A Space Odyssey," "McCabe and Mrs. Miller," "Laura," "Gods and Monsters" and "The Shop Around the Corner."

Next Page: "Titanic": "A ludicrous movie that's an embarrassment to Oscar annals"

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