Commentary : Rites (and Wrongs) of Oscar

Are the Oscars emblems of motion picture excellence? Or a dubious popularity contest?

They’re both, of course, which is something worth remembering at Academy Award time.

Many Oscar selections look strange after several decades.

Ever see 1929’s “The Broadway Melody,” with its bulbous chorus, dopey jokes and stock-still camera? Or DeMille’s elephantine circus melodrama “The Greatest Show on Earth”? (That one beat out “High Noon,” “The Quiet Man” and the unnominated “Viva Zapata!” and “Singin’ in the Rain.”)

Some winners hold up magnificently: “How Green Was My Valley,” “Casablanca,” “On the Waterfront,” “Lawrence of Arabia,” and “The Godfather I & II.” But it’s the omissions that always seem most onerous. The four top sound-era studio directors through the ‘60s were probably John Ford, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock and maverick Orson Welles. Yet only one won a directorial Oscar in open competition (Ford, who made up for the others by taking home four--and two more for documentaries).

The Academy has used career Oscars to catch up with overlooked people such as Lillian Gish, Cary Grant, Charles Chaplin, Groucho Marx and many others. And, although writers such as William Faulkner, Graham Greene, Nathanael West, Tennessee Williams and Samson Raphaelson were active in movies, they too were Oscarless.

Why does this happen? Why do movies like “Oliver!” and “Ordinary People” beat out movies like “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Raging Bull”? There are a number of reasons, not all of them obvious. Here are a few.

Genre movies rarely win: This isn’t an ironclad rule. More than a few musicals were Oscar winners--including the abominable “Broadway Melody”--but the majority have been the big, prestigious Broadway adaptations, rather than the Fred Astaire, Judy Garland or Gene Kelly pictures that were the genre’s glory. Not many comedies win--and fewer horror movies, thrillers, action movies or soap operas. Notably, none of Western specialist Ford’s six Oscars were for a Western--and “Dances With Wolves” won only after the genre had been declared dead.

Most often, Oscars go to social dramas, historical films, huge extravaganzas or adaptations of prestigious literary or dramatic properties: movies thought to have elevated subject matter, ambition and tone. Using only that criteria, the favorites for this year’s Oscar ought to be “The Prince of Tides” or “JFK” and not horror movie “Silence of the lambs,” crime picture “Bugsy” or cartoon musical “Beauty and the Beast.”

Unsympathetic characters rarely win: In 1951, the Academy voters gave Oscars to almost the entire core cast of “A Streetcar Named Desire”--Vivien Leigh, Karl Malden and Kim Hunter--but ignored the performance that became one of the famous and influential in movie history: Marlon Brando’s Stanley Kowalski. Was it because the voters, subconsciously, reacted to Brando as Kowalski: punished him for being a callous, sexy brute, while rewarding his “victims”? (That year’s Oscar went to Humphrey Bogart, as “The African Queen’s” likable slob Charlie Allnut--after Bogart was repeatedly ignored himself for his classic tough guys of the ‘30s and ‘40s.)

Something similar happened to Paul Newman in 1963’s “Hud”: He was bypassed, while “victims” Patricia Neal and Melvyn Douglas took home Oscars. Actors who play bad or flawed characters rarely win, unless they are redeemed (like William Holden in “Stalag 17”) or are split personalities (Fredric March in “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”) or are nice people despite their criminality (Brando in “The Godfather”).

But if the villains are short-shrifted, film’s bad ladies fare somewhat better--the Bette Davises, Shelley Winterses and Louise Fletchers--and they fare best of all if they’re wildly off-type. Shiny-clean Donna Reed and Shirley Jones both won for playing hookers.

There’s a kind of right-the-wrongs mentality that often takes hold of Oscar voters en masse. Traditionally, they like to reward persecuted victims: Joan Fontaine in “Suspicion,” Ingrid Bergman in “Gaslight,” Jodie Foster in “The Accused.” And they’re always on the lookout for saints--Spencer Tracy won for playing lovable priests and fishermen rather than more flawed or corrosive roles--but they’re suspicious of sinners. Several years ago, Morgan Freeman, as the sadistic pimp in “Street Smart,” copped nearly every critics’ prize in sight and then was beaten in the best supporting actor category by quintessentially likable Sean Connery’s martyred cop in “The Untouchables.”

That would seem to bode ill for the three villainous best actor nominees--Warren Beatty, Robert De Niro and Anthony Hopkins--and well for the favorite: redeemed hard guy Nick Nolte.

The winners are usually the kind of movies voters feel should be getting made, rather than the kind that usually are: If you wanted to name a typical American studio movie of the 1980s, it would not be a realist drama such as “Ordinary People” and “Terms of Endearment,” an epic biography such as “Gandhi,” a literary or dramatic adaptation such as “Out of Africa,” “Amadeus” and “Driving Miss Daisy” or a revisionist Western such as “Dances With Wolves.” That all these movies won partially recalls Louis B. Mayer’s motives back in the Academy’s formative period: the industry putting its best face forward at a troubled time.

The irony is that Hollywood’s classics are often its genre movies. And many of its greatest performances are by the comedians, dancers and tough guys and gals who are always getting ignored. Except, of course, by movie fans. And history.

“The 64th Annual Academy Awards” begin Monday at 6 p.m. on ABC.