Star Wars

Jesse Walker | March 20, 2002

In the last week before the Oscars are awarded, critics and gossips are declaring this year's campaign one of the dirtiest in Academy history. A Beautiful Mind is, or was, the frontrunner for many awards, and so its rivals have carried on a not-so-covert war against it -- leaking word to Matt Drudge, for example, that the schizophrenic Nobel laureate John Nash, hero of A Beautiful Mind, is actually an anti-Semite. Meanwhile, the man who played Nash -- Russell Crowe, who won the Best Actor award last year for fronting the ponderous swords-and-sandals romp Gladiator -- is being pilloried for accosting the TV producer (or, in Crowe's words, the "fucking piece of shit") who he blamed for not broadcasting all of the speech Crowe made at a British awards show. This, apparently, is considered poor comportment for a thespian.

But while this year's race may be nastier than past Oscar contests, no one is asserting that it is unusual for studios to campaign for their movies, let alone that the statuettes would otherwise go to the "best" pictures and performances of the year. Most people understand that tastes are subjective -- and that even if they weren't, a given year's best movies and performances probably wouldn't be recognized by the union-busting scheme turned industry circle-jerk that is the Oscar ceremony. If it were up to me, the Best Picture award would go to Mulholland Drive or The Man Who Wasn't There, but neither was nominated. Another viewer might pick A.I. or Pearl Harbor or Glitter -- one man's godawful mess is another man's nirvana. But does anyone pretend that this somehow demeans the movies, or that some profound injustice is being done?

Compare this to last month's already half-forgotten battle over Olympic figure-skating, in which two Canadians whined their way into sharing a gold medal with the Russians. For all the instant-expert declarations that the Canadians "obviously" won, the ensuing arguments were really about national loyalties and subjective taste, not any sort of objective standards. Mock the Oscars all you want: At least no one has the poor sense to take them so seriously.