To Pursue Youth, Even Mainstream Tries to Be Cool

Conventional wisdom is that the Academy Awards, the 72nd edition of which will be held tonight, don’t honor the best film of the year. Like the equally blindered Grammies that marginalize daring, original music while favoring the middle of the road, the Oscar goes to the best mainstream film of the year, the most acceptably artistic without also being disturbing. That’s why “How Green Was My Valley” won over “Citizen Kane,” why “In the Heat of the Night” won over “Bonnie and Clyde” and, more recently, why “Titanic” won over “L.A. Confidential.” The rule of thumb has been that a complex, challenging film will lose out to a simpler, more earnest one that advertises its seriousness in every frame.

But this may be changing. The most earnest films among this year’s nominees, “The Green Mile” and “The Cider House Rules,” will almost certainly not take home the statuette, though one probably would have been the winner even five years ago. Instead, this year’s likely winner is “American Beauty,” which is certainly serious but isn’t heavy-handed about it. It wears its seriousness lightly.

Cynics may chalk this up to an aberration: an unusually strong film in an unusually weak field. But aesthetics have never governed the Academy Awards, or, put another way, aesthetics in Hollywood have never been about aesthetics as taught in college. While the Oscars are intended to reward merit and present Hollywood’s best face to the public, they are, above all, a calculus of the things Hollywood values socially, which then get transformed into artistic values. But this year there is something new in Hollywood’s social calculus: hipness.

Not just in Hollywood but throughout America and virtually the entire Western world, hipness is in. Everywhere, people of a certain social standing find enormous cachet in showing they are with it: They know who and what is hot; they have the right ironic attitude; they don’t buy into tradition unless they do so self-consciously, to make some statement; they are, in effect, above it all or, rather, beyond it all. Hip is suddenly hip.

No doubt much of this is an extension of the ever-intensifying obsession with youth. Part of being young has always been about being hipper than everyone else, and now, for aging baby boomers, hipness is an elixir that makes you seem young. Yet, the new hipness is not just a matter of youth. It is a matter of the whole postmodernist ethos that, after decades of deception and inauthenticity, only fools take things at face value. From this perspective, which permeates our lives, the world is a kind of joke. Either you get it or you don’t, which is to say, either you’re hip or you’re not.

Hollywood has long fancied itself as hip, but in the past there were other, more important considerations that came into play, and continue to come into play, when the academy selected the Oscar winner. In a community in which money has always meant power, a winner invariably has to have scored at the box office to demonstrate that it connected to the audience. But, with a few exceptions like “Titanic,” when a movie has made too much money, it is likely to be viewed as vulgar and playing to all the worst preconceptions about the movie industry. A domestic box-office gross of around $100 million--about where “American Beauty” is--seems right.

Then there is artistic pretension. In a community that likes to think of itself as high-minded and not merely mercenary, and one in which cinematic genius is almost as totemic as money, a winner invariably has to have won admiring reviews to prove its artistic pedigree and confirm the academy’s own taste. But here, again, a movie that is too intellectual or too difficult can be perceived as artsy and off-putting and likely to alienate the academy from the general audience. A movie that is accessible but serious--what the conservative cultural critic Dwight MacDonald called “midcult” after “middle culture”--is the appropriate level for a best-picture candidate.

For a long time, the Oscars were basically a balancing act between money and midcult, an attempt to find the film that best satisfied these two social imperatives. Occasionally, the academy felt the need to display its social conscience with a film like “The Life of Emile Zola” or “Gentleman’s Agreement,” but it wasn’t until the 1970s, in the aftermath of the civil-rights movement and in the heat of the Vietnam War, that social consciousness became a factor in the Oscar calculus. A community that saw itself as socially committed now preferred movies that were socially committed, too--big, noble, movies like “Gandhi” or “Dances With Wolves” that showed how engaged this supposedly superficial group actually was. It was as if the academy weren’t giving Oscars but the Nobel Peace Prize.

In effect, these aesthetic standards only confirmed what wags had long said about Hollywood: It is high school with money. Like high school, Hollywood is riddled with insecurity, fraught with anxiety, obsessed with status and focused on perception, and the Oscars, the industry’s most conspicuous honor, were also the most tangible expression of things that conferred status: money, talent, commitment. That was the Hollywood trifecta.

But last year’s Oscars indicated the old calculus had been upset. The film that had the most respectable box office, most admiring reviews and greatest social conscience was clearly “Saving Private Ryan.” This was just the kind of film the academy had loved to reward in the past, so it was startling when “Shakespeare in Love,” with a more modest box office, good but less gushy reviews and virtually no social conscience, took home the Oscar for best picture. The rapier had beaten the cannon.

In some ways, that was the point. What “Shakespeare in Love” had that “Saving Private Ryan” didn’t was hipness. It was clever where Ryan was square, light where Ryan was heavy, ironic where Ryan was literal, modern where Ryan was a throwback to old World War II movies. It spoke not to past generations but to the current generation, and it demonstrated that Hollywood was not some collection of fogies longing for the good old days but a group on the cultural cutting edge that knew the difference between a cool movie like “Shakespeare in Love” and an uncool one like “Saving Private Ryan.” In short, the Oscar proved that Hollywood was hip.

In Hollywood, the cachet of hipness has been growing by leaps and bounds recently. Part of it is in the nature of American life generally. With the Internet, cable television and the proliferation of fashionable magazines, hip moves more quickly from the margins of the culture, especially from the black margins, to the center. It is far harder to be square when you are surrounded by hip. Part of it is in the fragmentation of film audiences. With fewer films able to satisfy everyone, movies are increasingly divided between those that are cool, usually targeted to the young, and those that aren’t, usually targeted to children or an older audience. And part of it is just the demographics of the industry. As it keeps getting younger, its aesthetic values change, including its definition of what is “cool.”

But the main reason hipness has been incorporated into the Hollywood aesthetic has less to do with demographics than a spiritual change in the social community. New technologies have Hollywood scared. Executives see the power of the Internet in launching something like “The Blair Witch Project” or they see the rewards of the Internet going to young pups operating at the cultural frontier, and they know they have to compete or be tossed on the ash heap of history.

There’s a cool new world out there, not just of technology but of fashion, ideas and art, and there is a higher premium in the film industry than ever before on showing that you are part of it, that you are ahead of the curve. The effort is rapidly turning Hollywood into a community of self-conscious hipsters trying to prove they are with it.

And that’s why “American Beauty” is almost certain to win this evening’s best-picture Oscar over more old-fashioned entertainments like “The Cider House Rules,” “The Green Mile” and even “The Insider.” Though it may actually be Frank Capra with an edge, “Beauty” will win because it is the hippest movie of the bunch.

It should consider itself lucky, though. The day may not be far off when a truly offbeat movie like “Being John Malkovich,” which would have been completely off Hollywood’s radar even two or three years ago, will win the Oscar. Now that would be hip.