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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
The Academy Awards have grown sloppy and corrupt. Here are five proposals to fix them.
Mar 23, 2002 | He's a dirty boy, Oscar.
Now the time has come for his parent, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, to give him a head-to-toe delousing. It's the only thing to do as the foulest Academy Awards campaign in motion picture history ended this week.
The Enron scandal finally pushed Congress to get serious about campaign finance reform. So, too, should this year's swill of charge and countercharge, whisper and counter-whisper and counter-counter-whispers of "They're whispering!", plus gay-baiting, Jew-baiting, race-baiting, studio-baiting and media-baiting -- no matter if the issue was "A Beautiful Mind's" biographical accuracy or other controversies -- all force the motion picture academy to enact Oscar campaign reform.
At stake is the integrity of a process that purports to honor Hollywood but that now dishonors everyone and everything associated with it. Even on its own Web site, the motion picture academy bizarrely boasts about "Oscar Fever" as "an election campaign commencing that rivals, at least in Hollywood, the passions and sometimes the excesses of the quadrennial race for the nation's presidency."
Given the gazillions of dollars spent to make and market the world's most exportable cultural product, the film industry's governing body owes a guarantee of a fair and honest contest to the estimated 1 billion people in as many as 150 countries who will watch Sunday's 74th annual Oscar telecast.
But it's only entertainment: Who cares?
Evidence is abundant that the worldwide moviegoing public is not just aware of this Academy Award campaigning thanks to the Internet but consumed by it. A startled Canadian newspaper columnist covering this year's pre-Oscar scandals recently wrote about receiving a deluge of e-mails and letters from as far away as Taiwan.
Even in this country, there was a national howl over the 1950s corruption of the TV quiz shows. Yet as the motion picture academy allows its international awards spectacle to be increasingly manipulated by a small clique of movie and media professionals, its own outcry is barely above whispering level.
True, the academy every so often amends its rules to try to contain an ever more creative series of cunning and calculated Oscar campaign maneuvers. But this is at best a Band-Aid approach. What's needed from the academy is more the regulatory equivalent of a full-body cast.
Here are my suggested reforms, which could be enacted immediately by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to untarnish their golden boy.
