For several months my oldest son has been watching all the movies, nearly a century of them, to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. The plan is to write up his findings in time for this year’s Oscars. I’ve never paid much attention to the awards and neither has he, until now. One assumes, as with the Nobel Prize for Literature, that most winners are worth avoiding, but even the Oscars get it right on occasion – Casablanca, The Best Years of Our Lives, the first two Godfather pictures. Over Thanksgiving, Josh and I watched two of the winners – Marty (1955) and Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960). The latter is especially good.
My son’s exercise has revealed
several things about my own changing relationship with movies. Seeing them in theatrical
release has never been less central to my experience, and that’s a shame because I once
loved not just movies but the seductive ritual of moviegoing. The last
Oscar-winning film I saw in the theater was Million Dollar Baby (2004),
which was awful. The most recent Best Picture winner I’ve seen is No Country
for Old Men, from 2007, and that was by way of a streaming service. The winning
movies for the 2010’s are a void. I sense movies are no longer made primarily for
adults. And yet, there was a time, as an undergraduate, when I saw five or six
films each week – in film classes, in free films shown on campus (Duck Soup,
Boudu Saved from Drowning, Psycho) and in the two commercial
theaters in my university town.
My moviegoing would seem to have more in common with earlier generations. L.E. Sissman was born twenty-four years before me. In his second book, Scattered Returns (1969), the second section, “A War Requiem,” is arranged in five movements with thirty-two subsections. The poem’s scheme is a forty-year sampler of American life starting with the Great Depression, thematically bracketed by World War I and Vietnam. The scaffolding of “A War Requiem” is Sissman’s American life. He was born in Detroit on New Year’s Day 1928.
In the sixth poem of the
first movement, “Rosedale Theater, 1938,” he captures what I remember as the romance
of movies. In it, he sees the original production of Mutiny on the
Bounty, with Charles Laughton, which won Best Picture in 1935:
“Waves
Of raw sensation break
upon each white
Face that reflects the
action, and our ears
Eavesdrop upon the
commerce of a more
Real world than ours.”
2 comments:
Make sure your son has medical help handy when he watches DeMille's best picture winner, The Greatest Show on Earth.
Patrick, watch Paul Thomas Anderson's 'There Will Be Blood' if you haven't - it is the best American film from the last two decades and, almost inevitably, it did not win Best Picture. As for the 2010s, 'The Artist' is good, elegant fun, and I doubt the kids were flocking to see Haneke's 'Amour' (nominated but didn't win).
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