The Oscars: A Night of Guilt and Redemption

Maybe it’s because it’s so easy to hate the idea of Hollywood that nearly everyone does. All year long, the press bashes Hollywood for its profligacy, greed and amo rality. All year long, commentators from Rush Limbaugh to Janet Reno grieve over Hollywood’s pernicious effect on American values. But for one night each year--tomorrow night this year--Hollywood seeks to expiate its sins. On Oscar night, the whore suddenly transfigures into Mother Teresa, which makes the Oscar ceremony a paradigm of redemption for an industry that is a paradigm of guilt.

To feel guilt, of course, one must first have sinned. Hollywood’s sins seemed to have begun long ago, in the ribaldry of the ‘20s, when the movie industry was thought to be even more awash in sex, drugs and general excess than the rest of reckless America. The moguls at the time quickly intervened to change Hollywood’s image by hiring Postmaster General Will H. Hays, a conservative Indiana Republican, as the industry’s czar and later enforcing a strict production code on what was and was not permissible.

But in attacking the film community’s alleged amoralism, the moguls were on the wrong trail. Hollywood’s gravest offense was not hedonism; it was infuriating the Eastern intellectual Establishment--the antenna from which assessments of Hollywood would be broadcast through the media.

Literate Easterners had good reason to hate Hollywood. With their weekly audience in the ‘20s of roughly 80 million, the movies suddenly had far more effect on style, taste, values, even ideas than the print media--a fact that made Hollywood the new center of cultural power. The movies were so powerful that they soon lured a large cadre of litterateurs from the East, playwrights, novelists and newspapermen, the very fellows railing against Hollywood for debasing the country.

The Easterners were recruited largely because the industry, having converted to talkies, needed people who could write dialogue. And the Easterners came, as they do today, largely because they needed money.

But along with their snappy dialogue they smuggled something else into Hollywood. They smuggled guilt. Hating themselves for turning their backs on their higher callings as artists and succumbing to the temptation of lucre, the writers kept flagellating themselves and their industry. It was the only way they could maintain their self-respect. If Hollywood was a den of iniquity run by morons, then the only heroism was asserting one’s superiority over it.

What is surprising is how much the morons--or rather the moguls--bought into this vision. They had come to Hollywood to make money, but this was not their only motive, nor possibly even their chief one. The movies offered the group of Eastern European Jews who would be the industry’s pioneers a sense of status and cultural power. It had promised them the possibility of being men of influence and refinement--which is why so many of them were personally offended when they were accused of making trash that subverted American values. Hadn’t they bought the best books and plays? Hadn’t they signed the best writers?

In asking these questions, however, they were still trying to propitiate the great Eastern gods of culture, still trying to prove they weren’t as craven and avaricious as the Easterners thought they were, though the writers in the industry provided the East with a fifth column that confirmed just how craven and avaricious the moguls really were. Even the Academy Awards, which MGM head Louis B. Mayer inaugurated in 1927 to dissipate labor tension with a great brotherhood of artists honoring one another’s work, became a way to prove Hollywood’s value and purge the executives’ guilt.

Maybe Hollywood does make films for entertainment’s sake. Maybe not everything it produces is high art. But the Oscars are supposed to demonstrate to the world that Hollywood can recognize good work when it sees it.

If anything, the sense of guilt in Hollywood runs deeper now than it did in the ‘20s, ‘30s and ‘40s. Most of today’s executives are college-educated, and most of them interact with high culture as the boundaries between popular and high blur. They may toil in the commercial vineyards. They may continue to turn out cheap rather than vintage wine. Some of them may even enjoy being regarded as schlockmeisters.

But in an industry that continues to define itself by Eastern standards of value, there is no gainsaying the need for respect. How do we know? We know because the most successful filmmaker in the history of movies, Steven Spielberg, has this year admitted that the commercial successes of “Jaws,” “ET,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “Jurassic Park” would no longer satisfy him. He wanted the imprimatur of art. After the brilliant “Schindler’s List,” Spielberg is even questioning whether he can make another blockbuster thrill machine.

In this, Spielberg is not only expressing one of the dilemmas of Hollywood, but one of the dilemmas of America generally. On the one hand, we Americans pride ourselves on a kind of economic realpolitik . We like making money. We make heroes of financial buccaneers who have accumulated vast fortunes just as we disdain moralists who scold us for our pecuniary culture.

On the other hand, we cannot quite escape the feeling that there is more to life than monetary success. There is honor. One might even say that much of American history, especially in the 20th Century, throbs between these poles of money and honor, guilt and redemption, without ever quite reconciling them.

And perhaps that is why, beyond its obvious appeal of glamour and transport, the Oscar broadcast claims billions of viewers worldwide each year, most of whom haven’t seen more than a handful of the movies nominated. In one grand, vulgar stroke the Oscars provide a celebration of both venality and humility: the venality of a big-budget extravaganza, the humility of honoring art.

Without the venality, there clearly wouldn’t be an Oscar ceremony; there wouldn’t be a Hollywood . But the ceremony exists as an antidote to the self-loathing the venality has created. (That’s why Brits and Hollywood outsiders like Woody Allen win; it’s much harder for the academy, knowing what it knows, to honor its own.)

These are things to remember as you watch Spielberg, if predictions run true, collect his Oscars tomorrow and bask in a tumultuous ovation. At that moment, no matter what Hollywood has done, no matter how much junk it has manufactured, Oscar will wash all its sins away.

Until tomorrow.