The Oscars Go Global

Two things are true. One is that the Academy Award show, like a circus or a Doo-Dah Parade, can only be compared with itself. It’s not like anything else. Another truth is that if you’ve seen one Academy Award show, you haven’t seen ‘em all, despite the dread familiarity of the basic format. Each Oscar night acquires a personality of its own, somewhere between chaos and a shiny, limited perfection.

This was the international year, not only in the satellite pickups from around the globe, but, very movingly, in the honoring of Akira Kurosawa, the 80-year-old Japanese filmmaker.

Co-presenting the special Academy Award with George Lucas, Steven Spielberg said, “Most of us think of him as the greatest living filmmaker . . . one of the few true visionaries of film.”

The elegant, erect old man with the gray hair, the dark glasses and the sly sense of humor that even survived translation, drew a standing ovation. The expertly chosen clips from his films, from “The Seven Samurai” and “Rashomon” to his spectacular transliteration of “King Lear,” “Ran,” made clear how well deserved the honor was.

Yet there was another sense in which Kurosawa seemed to belong in the pantheon of the great filmmakers who have had hell’s own time finding the money to make their superb but not invariably profitable films. It is a select group that has included D.W. Griffith, Luis Bunuel, Orson Welles, David Lean, Federico Fellini and other creative giants without whom film history would be poorer.

“Kurosawa can’t get a job in Japan,” Spielberg remarked to a friend not long ago, in a mixture of indignation and astonishment. Indeed, George Lucas was instrumental in helping Kurosawa find financing for “Ran” and Spielberg himself used his own powers of persuasion to get Warner Bros. to back Kurosawa’s latest film, “Dreams.”

The clips demonstrated what a remarkable maker of images Kurosawa is: the sweep of his battle scenes, the intensity of the intimate moments, the humor and the biting despairs. You don’t wonder that “Seven Samurai” became the inspiration for “The Magnificent Seven.” The contests between evil and a badly overmatched good, which nevertheless triumphs in the end, is the stuff of Westerns as well as Easterns, with a touch of irony that was late seeping into Westerns.

The theme that has run through all his 27 films in 47 years (not that many, attesting to his struggles), Kurosawa has said, is “Why can’t people be happier together?” And in settings both ancient and modern, George Lucas noted, Kurosawa has presented his theme in stories and images of awesome and tragic beauty.

Whatever one’s feelings about the Academy Awards--whether it is seen as a minor if lively amusement or as a fascinating reflection of the state of a still-potent medium--this year’s nominations and awards, and the show itself, confirm some trends that have been visible for several recent years.

One is the voters’ increasing picky discretion. The huge winner-take-all sweeps seem quite unlikely to happen in future as they used to. The ever-larger number of voters, now 4,900, admits of too much diversity of thought. The margins of triumph are likely to be as narrow as they were this time, although the best picture will always have the supreme cachet, however many other Oscars support it.

The other trend is in fact the internationalism itself: the voters’ eye for work from elsewhere, in whatever language: witness the nomination for a French actress, an Irish film, an English film, and so on. It may well be true, although not inevitably so, that the home product will have a home-field advantage (not least because it has been more widely seen). But the movies have been growing more international for a long time--pushed abroad in some measure by the competitive pressure of television. Costs were lower abroad, for a while anyway, but what was also true was that as the domestic market shrank, the foreign market loomed ever more important (and still does). That put a premium on international stars and exotic settings, which were also a contrast to the domesticity of television.

What the Oscars argue, of course, is that the epicenter of movies is still Hollywood, gaudy and energetic, optimistic in its story-tellings, capable of sudden sensitivity as well as muscular action.

Who won what begins to blur almost immediately, but the remembered excitement remains. And among the specifics likely to stay in mind about the 1990 show are the quick and large standing ovation for Jessica Tandy, by all odds the night’s most popular winner, and the miracle of his Japanese family and friends, in Japan, singing “Happy Birthday” along with an audience in Los Angeles, to a master of film, standing, pleased and seemingly surprised, with two young masters of film who share his love of the not yet fully grasped possibilities of the medium.