Oscar mire

This year, though, the Oscar nominations are too erratic to blame just on the hallowed incompetence they share with the electoral process. Most egregious, of course, are the slates for the Best Picture and Best Director categories. At least three critically acclaimed likely nominees for Best Picture -- Dead Man Walking, Leaving Las Vegas, and Georgia -- failed to show. Of those that were nominated, two fell into the category of films-that-direct-themselves; neither Ang Lee of Sense and Sensibility nor Ron Howard of Apollo 13 received a nomination for Best Director. And then, of course, there's the mind-boggling Babe factor.

Clearly the Academy voters are suffering from ambivalence, if not downright split personality. And that's because this election year Hollywood is not just a diversion but an issue. With Bill Clinton and Bob Dole set to face off in November, the film industry may find itself a scapegoat caught in a bipartisan squeeze. Dumping on the movies will be these candidates' only surefire strategy; certainly it'll be safer than confronting hard realities. Look at the record: Clinton's biggest legislative victory has been the V-chip bill censoring TV, and Dole's only resonant rhetoric has come when he denounces "the nightmare of depravity."

Given the three-hours-plus air time before a couple of billion viewers it will enjoy on its upcoming Super Monday broadcast (March 25), the Academy -- which has never been more than a PR adjunct of the studios anyway -- is going to make sure it presents a good case for itself. More so than in most years, image and ideology rather than excellence or integrity will determine the victors, as they did the nominees. This year's celebrations will feature the requisite glamor, stars, limos, gowns, and excess, but it will also demonstrate the industry's commitment to sobriety, family values, patriotism, government downsizing, and the propriety of men wearing skirts.

This politicization of Oscar -- or is it the Oscar-ization of politics? -- is nothing new, especially in years of crisis or critical elections. The first Academy Awards were an offshoot of the union-busting, image-preserving Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences concocted in 1927 by Louis Mayer. Like the industry's self-censoring Hays Office, the Awards would promote an image of the industry as wholesome, cultural, and conservative, in the face of increasing attacks on Hollywood morality by religious and political groups.

Over the next decades the Academy grew in stature and power, weathering political challenges with a mixture of self-righteousness, cowardly compromise, and hypocrisy. For 1952, as the House Un-American Activities Committee thrived, the Cold War chilled, and Eisenhower and Nixon moved into the White House, the Academy chose Cecil B. DeMille's bloated blockbuster The Greatest Show on Earth over the critically acclaimed, anti-McCarthy-ite High Noon directed by activist Stanley Kramer and penned by blacklisted writer Carl Foreman.

For the 1967 awards, with the ceremony postponed three days to accommodate the funeral of Martin Luther King, the Academy pinned its tepid liberal heart on its sleeve by giving the Best Picture Award to the whitewashed In the Heat of the Night, snubbing the more stylistically and politically radical Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate. In 1970 it followed the tenor of the times by picking Patton over M*A*S*H, then Rocky over Taxi Driver in 1976. Most recent was last year's Pulp Fiction-versus-Forrest Gump controversy. In the wake of congessional elections in which born-again Republicans initiated their Contract on America, it was no surprise that Gump's passive, free-enterprise imbecility and moral impeccability won over Pulp's amoral bravado.

Still, it seemed that this year there'd be a rematch between the forces of pap and Pulp, with the battle being joined between Sense and insensibility. But none of the dark, harrowing films that delved into the margins of human experience (such as Leaving Las Vegas) made the Best Picture cut. Instead, we're left in most categories with a choice between the least of five evils. The winners this year will be those films, filmmakers, and performers who offended the least, who are, in the worst sense, politically correct.

So, on to Best Picture. Let's say you're Dole or Clinton wooing the voters of Iowa. Which picture would you choose to associate yourself with? Apollo 13 seemed a safe choice when released early this year; its spotlight dimmed after director Ron Howard and star Tom Hanks failed to get a nomination, then brightened with Howard's Director's Guild award. On the surface, its politics seem impeccable. A trio of all-American family men (white, crew-cutted, and just good buddies) challenge the last frontier of space, encounter a "problem," and through sheer, ingenuity, determination and special effects heroically solve it. A natural, right? Unfortunately, the real problem with Apollo 13 is the mission itself; in this year of downsizing government, spending billions on a fuck-up is not going to win votes. NASA is barely more respectable than the NEA these days.

How about Braveheart, whose 10 nominations surprised even Mel Gibson? The story of an all-Scottish, red-blooded (despite the skirt and face paint, he is a fag basher) family man and patriot who resists the intrusion of British Big Government into clannish affairs by arming and raising his own deadly militias, it looked a lot better before Buchanan crashed and burned on Super Tuesday. It has a chance still, but I think the film's adolescent delight in military mayhem -- which is one of its prime virtues -- might do it in with the V-chip crowd.

The title alone of Sense and Sensibility is both its strength and bane. This Jane Austen adaptation espouses moderation, reason, and tolerance, but it also evokes images of sissified Hugh Grant types skipping around in stockings in Merchant/Ivory land. Add to that Ang Lee's getting snubbed for Best Director (if you think women and blacks get stiffed by Hollywood, check the record of Asian-Americans) and the cheeky feminism of screenwriter/star Emma Thompson (even Kenneth Branagh, the British Alan Alda, couldn't deal with her, plus she admits to storing her previous Oscar in the loo), and Sensibility as Best Picture doesn't make much sense.

The remaining two films have the rare virtue of starring actors who can't make an appearance at the ceremony. Massimo Troisi of The Postman died shortly after the movie was shot. And accommodating the 61 pigs who portrayed Babe would undoubtedly violate the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion's building code. Both films also embody the trend labeled in a recent Variety article as "bloodless independents," avant-garde-lite offerings designed to challenge formula-jaded viewers but not jar them with any violence, stylistic or literal.

Overwhelmingly promoted by Miramax, whose strong-arm tactics worked for more full-blooded indies like The Piano and Pulp Fiction, The Postman also has the advantage of offering a Forrest Gump-like hero idealizing simple-mindedness and inconsequentiality. But I think the Miramax people may have overdone their highbrow plaudits; with encomiums from the likes of John Updike, aren't they inviting charges of cultural elitism? And certainly some observant voters are going to note that the postman and his mentor, Pablo Neruda, are a couple of goddamn communists.

Which leaves us, as expected, with Babe. Never mind that the film boasts a subtext as twisted as the hero's tale; it's a G-rated feel-good flick delightful for all ages and pushing a theme of aspiration and assimilation that is inoffensive to all parties. Babe not only brings home the bacon, he is the bacon. He overcomes the constraints of the system he's born into even as he vindicates it, which is the highest achievement of both Hollywood and politics.

The victory of a film about non-humans seems to make the remaining categories moot. True, Babe's Chris Noonan did receive a nomination for Best Director, but he'll probably have as much chance as the two who were nominated even though their films weren't: Mike Figgis for Leaving Las Vegas and Tim Robbins for Dead Man Walking. The choice will come down to personalities, not product, with the red-blooded, all-Australian, family man and fag basher Mel Gibson clobbering The Postman's British director, Michael Radford, as decisively as he does Michael's countryman, Edward Longshanks, in Braveheart.

As for the remaining major categories, most, given the dogmatic politically correct standards I've been adhering to, are no-brainers. You're running a close second in Illinois; which of these Best Actor images are you going to lean toward? Nicolas Cage's failed movie exec blitzing himself to death with a whore in Sin City in Leaving Las Vegas? Sean Penn's neo-Nazi death-row inmate whose charm tops out when he tries to put the make on the nun trying to save his life in Dead Man Walking? Dead man Massimo Troisi's paisan with dreams of writing poetry, seducing pretty women, and leading the workers' revolution in The Postman? Anthony Hopkins in anything, let alone Nixon? Or the solid, inspiring mediocrity who endures decades of frustration and minor triumph as a teacher in order to write one bad piece of music. I say it's hello again to Richard Dreyfuss, who will pick up the Oscar for Mr. Holland's opus nearly two decades after he last won, for The Goodbye Girl.

The women are even easier to figure out. Whores have always been Oscar bait, but this year will be an exception. You're Bill Clinton trying to hold onto the South, so whom do you embrace? A whore (Elizabeth Shue in Leaving Las Vegas)? A golddigging drug-addicted vamp (Sharon Stone in Casino)? An unrepentant adulteress (Meryl Streep in The Bridges of Madison County)? A bossy, bebustled Emma Thompson (Sense and Sensibility)? Or a devout, self-sacrificing nun? Her acceptance speech be damned: the Best Actress will be Susan Sarandon for Dead Man Walking.

To do it credit, the Academy is not a completely craven bunch, though it usually reserves its backbone for the categories at the far end of the bench. (Shanghai Triad's Lu Yue for Best Cinematography? Bruce Springsteen's "Dead Man Walking" for Best Song? Dare we dream?) Having sold its soul so thoroughly otherwise, though, the Academy may rebel as high up as the Supporting categories this year. So I'm looking for Mare Winningham in the slighted Georgia (after all, she played the nice sister) as Best Supporting Actress, and the astonishing Kevin Spacey in the most demonic of his many roles this year, in the Tarantino-esque The Usual Suspects, for Actor. Otherwise, 1996 will see politics as usual. In every sense, it's the Year of the Pig.