The Oscars: Why they matter

It takes a lot to postpone the Academy Awards. Though this year might prove an exception, historically, having a war on has never been a good enough reason to cancel or even put off the annual event.

The Oscars have been postponed -- for an L.A. flood, for Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination and for the attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life. But though the 1942 Oscar ceremony took place less than three months after Pearl Harbor, neither World War II nor subsequent conflagrations in Korea and Vietnam were considered big enough deals to put a stop to the proceedings.

Which is not to say that war hasn’t had its effects. According to Mason Wiley and Damien Bona’s book “Inside Oscar,” the academy board decreed that women were not to wear orchids in 1942 “but donate the money they would have spent for them to the Red Cross.” There was some discussion of either canceling the event or holding it in an auditorium instead of a banquet hall (at the suggestion of academy president Bette Davis), but those ideas were shelved, according to Robert Osborne, author of “70 Years of the Oscar.” The board also considered serving food “similar to that served soldiers and other servicemen,” but that idea was also voted down, though formal attire was discouraged and there were no searchlights in the skies above the Biltmore Hotel in downtown L.A., where the event was held.

The following year, the proud gold-plated bronze Oscar statuette did make the ultimate sacrifice and switched to a plaster core for the duration.

With yet another war and its inherent chaos now providing a sobering context, questions that must have come up in 1942 and later inevitably reoccur: Can the Oscars possibly matter at a time like this; what, if anything, makes them special; and why should we be concerned enough to care whether they go on or not?

Actually, it’s possible those questions did not come up the same way in 1942. For one thing, even without the boost of coast-to-coast ads and nationwide television exposure for the Oscars, most people went to the movies considerably more often then, and the theatrical experience and all that went with it were more central to the lives of Americans of all ages than they are now. When Franklin D. Roosevelt said he wanted people to go on with their normal lives, the academy did not argue.

For another, Hollywood’s products, when they did travel abroad, were looked on more benignly and not often seen, as they are in certain parts of the world today, as invasive interlopers forcing violence, immorality and different values down the throats of reluctant and powerless cultures. The idea of studio movies as spawn of the devil is a relatively new one.

Still, some of the same reasons it was thought important that the Oscars go on as scheduled in 1942 still hold more than 60 years later. It was precisely because World War II was such a cataclysm that the Oscars were seen worldwide (Wiley and Bona mention press comment from as far away as Australia) as an essential counterweight, something that could give a needed dose of normality and escapism. It wasn’t as if anyone suggested the Oscars as a subject for the celebrated “Why We Fight” series, but the tradition and continuity the award represented were something regular people cared about.

The search for meaning

But these are the obvious reasons, the ones we hear all the time. Is there more to why the Oscars matter than meets the eye? Pondering that, I remembered T. Texas Tyler’s classic 1948 country song “Deck of Cards,” in which a humble GI, busted for spreading out his cards in church, explains to a dubious superior the hidden religious symbolism of the deck (“when I see the trey I think of the father, the son and the holy ghost; when I see the four I think of the four evangelists who preached the gospel,” etc.). Were there, I wondered, any sub rosa meanings in the Oscar proceedings, encouraging things about America and its values not immediately apparent to the naked eye that the event was saying to those apocryphal 1 billion viewers around the globe?

I came up with a few ideas.

Let’s start with one of the wretched excesses that might be absent this year along with the red carpet: the stars in their borrowed Harry Winston diamonds and I-didn’t-pay-for-it gowns and the whole aura of conspicuous consumption.

Yes, the gasoline wasted by idling limousines is not going to make Bill Maher or Arianna Huffington happy, but on another level you could posit that what this is all about is the classically American phenomenon of the living out of dreams. Inside every one of these folks is probably a child who watched it all on television and wished (and worked, and schemed ... ) so hard for it to happen to him or her that it finally did.

The other thing about the Oscars is that they are a meritocracy of a sort. No, that obviously doesn’t mean that the best work wins, not even close. What it does mean is that, even when the industry’s noticeable nepotism is factored in, who your parents were or what they earned or whether anyone in your family was within hailing distance of the Mayflower has little to do with whether you win an Oscar. The mobility and relative egalitarianism of American society is something we tend to take for granted, but it is one of the qualities much of the world envies.

Finally, there is the awards show itself. Unruly, chaotic and overly long, prone to unplanned events like streakers and unscripted political protesters, it is the despair of clock-watchers, tidiness advocates and TV executives.

Yet in its sublime near-anarchy, the Oscar extravaganza speaks to our society’s toleration for dissent and our embracing of all sorts of freedoms, even the ones that get in the way of predictability and order. The Oscars do not run on time and probably never will, but I’m not sure a society that made sure that that happened would be as worth living in as the one we have today.

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Kenneth Turan is a Times film critic.