The degeneration of Oscar.

Well it’s been over a year since I last posted – a severe case of writing block re movies. But somehow I have managed to rise from my slumber and have conjured this up.

In Jean Cocteau’s marvellous 1950 film Orphée the poet asks what he should do. “Astonish me”, he is told. Today’s movies never do that, certainly not in the sense that a great work of cinema can make you wonder how its creation was ever accomplished.

Not that long ago, say 15-20 years ago, there was a time where you could actually enjoy watching the Oscars as the films being honoured were generally well acted, excellently crafted, told an interesting story and were invariable popular or at the very least, had an audience that actually saw them.

Not anymore . . .

Hollywood award shows have gone from fun showcases of talented actors and movie technicians with real star power to network televised lectures, in which the most privileged and pompous people on the planet talk down to and insult the audience who helped make them rich.

With rare exceptions, actors and celebrities have always been self-involved narcissists. If you think about it, in a way, the profession demands it. But what’s changed over the last 15-20 or so years, and this has coincided directly with the death of the movie star, in that celebrities now dine out on their self-involved narcissism.

What creates a long career is holding on to the public’s goodwill. And you earn that goodwill by being likeable. In real life, you might be a bastard. Plenty of movie stars during the Golden Age were bastards. But in public, they were humble, grateful, and self-deprecating.

So the broadcasting of the Academy Awards (Oscars) has produced a rapidly declining audience every year now. An audience who no longer care about award shows that feature movies that they have not seen or even wish to see. They simply don’t give a damn anymore.

And onto Anora this years winner of Best Picture . . . which joins the ever growing list from the last 15 years of Best Picture winners that are simply forgettable and/or straight out ghastly – Everything Everywhere All At Once, CODA, Nomadland, Parasite, Green Book, The Shape Of Water, Moonlight, Spotlight, Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue Of Ignorance) . . . let alone the other mediocre and dire movies that have been nominated in the last 15 years.

Last year though Oppenheimer was the unique exception for a Best Picture winner in that it was an outstanding biopic that was superbly made and acted whilst being pretty faithful to the facts as known; in addition to displaying a rare intelligence in treating its audience as adults.

So over the last 50 years I have always made it a point to catch-up and watch the Best Picture winner but after less than 30 minutes I’d had enough of Anora. A sleazy, tasteless and talentless film that is supposed to be a romantic comedy-drama about a sex worker who marries the son of a Russian oligarch. Spare me . . . I must have missed something.

So instead I re-watched, for the umpteenth time, a real classic Best Picture winner in The French Connection (1971), starring the late and great Gene Hackman in his career defining role as Popeye Doyle, a New York narcotics cop who is vicious, obsessed and a little mad. 

The French Connection is routinely included on the short list of movies with the greatest chase scenes of all time.

The movie is all surface, movement, violence and suspense as the story line involves a $32 million shipment of high-grade heroin smuggled from Marseilles to New York hidden in a Lincoln Continental. A complicated deal is set up between the French criminals, an American money man and the Mafia. Doyle, a tough cop with a shaky reputation who busts numerous street junkies, needs a big win to keep his career together. He stumbles on the heroin deal and pursues it with a single-minded ferocity that is frankly amoral. He isn’t after the smugglers because they’re breaking the law; he’s after them because his job consumes him.

Director William Friedkin constructed The French Connection so surely that it left audiences stunned. And I don’t mean that as a reviewer’s cliché: it is literally true. In a sense, the whole movie is a chase. It opens with a local detective keeping the French criminals under surveillance, and from then on the smugglers and the law officers are endlessly circling and sniffing each other. It’s just that the chase speeds up sometimes, as in the celebrated car-train sequence.

It was a great film in 1971 and 54 years later it’s still a great film.

Gene Hackman left us with an outstanding body of work to revisit and enjoy from an era when Hollywood made excellent films with rich characters and compelling stories. He will be greatly missed.

Enjoy.

and the tease for my next post . . . That zither music.

Ongoing it may not be a weekly post, probably fortnightly, although I have mostly completed the next post so that will appear next week.