Since I play amateur movie critic here at The Ax people have been asking me for my impressions of Sunday's Oscar ceremony. In fact, I haven't watched the Academy Awards straight through since 1999, when "Shakespeare in Love" beat out "Saving Private Ryan" for Best Picture. It was then I finally succumbed to the realization that the whole thing is a scam. I'll peak in on the internet to catch the news wire a few times during the night, but otherwise I ignore the show. In the case of the 1999 awards, I liked "Shakespeare" very much, but I just didn't believe it was in the same league with "Ryan." This is not the first time a great movie was bested by a very good one. The Best Picture for 1941 was famously given to "How Green Was My Valley" instead of "
Citizen Kane". That year the Academy either feared a backlash from the Hearst newspapers or simply loathed Orson Welles. Either way, artistic merit had nothing to do with the final vote. Again, "Valley" is one of my favorite films; I start getting choked up just thinking about the ending, so you can imagine what happens when I actually see it. But whether you like the movie or not, or don't think it has stood up well after seventy years, "Kane" was a ground breaking work that moved the art form foreword. It was clearly the best motion picture of 1941, even if it isn't the greatest of all time, as many critics still believe.
I guess the reason why I really don't put much stock in the Oscars, or any of the big awards given for the performing arts in our country, is that art doesn't have much to do with them. Frank Zappa once observed that since we live in an industrial society that values utility over art, artistic endeavours have to have some other value attached to them to justify their media coverage. He was speaking specifically of pop music in the sixties that became associated with the anti-war movement. It was the imagined social, political or philosophical angles that tended to be covered in the popular press rather than the music itself. To paraphrase Zappa, they were looking for the deeper metaphysical meaning in Jim Morrison's poetry when all he was really trying to say was "Come On Baby Light My Fire." I agree with Zappa to a large extent, but also would argue that the Marxist analysis popular among some intellectuals, that sees reality through economic and political lenses, has something to do with it as well. In the Marxist mindset beauty takes a backseat to political relevance, and in some ways that has crept into the equation as well as good old fashioned American pragmatism. And American consumerism, for that matter; we tend to judge a movie by it's box office receipts more than its style or substance.
What we have lost is a sense of beauty as it's own message. When art is reduced to what is immediate or useful it loses it's link to the eternal. It becomes disposable because what is relevant today often times becomes passe tomorrow and we are left groping for the next "latest thing." Many great artists have used their particular medium to reflect or comment on their times, but truly great art transcends time and place. Charles Dickens and William Blake commented in their work on the harsh conditions of the Industrial Revolution in England, but it was their use of language and their ability to delve deep into human experience that makes their writing hold up after centuries. Even beyond human concerns great art links us to the Source of all creation, to Beauty itself. The great artist is a mystic at heart, linked into a spiritual realm while at the same time being very much a person in the world (T.S. Eliot would have been known as one of the great authorities on international finance had he never written a poem).
I must admit that my thoughts are a bit scattered, but next time out I'll try to put some flesh on all this as I return to my trip to Mexico. I had the opportunity to view some murals by the Mexican artist Jose Clemente Orozco, and I'll have some reflections on him and his contemporary Diego Rivera.
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