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The Oscars as Looking Glass Ben Wiseman
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/opinion/sunday/the-oscars-as-looking-glass.html


      By FRANK BRUNI   

MITT ROMNEY’S real problem? He’s a candidate for president instead of best picture — and his super PAC isn’t the Weinstein Company, which knows how to drag an imperfect contender toward, and possibly across, the finish line.        

Earl Wilson/The New York Times

For the past several months the company has been dragging “The Artist,” and the movie’s experience as a front-runner has been less herky-jerky than Romney’s, despite certain shared handicaps. “The Artist,” like Romney, doesn’t speak with noteworthy grace, inasmuch as it’s almost entirely silent. “The Artist,” like Romney, has a retrograde aura, its black-and-whiteness harking back to a simpler time. Aspects of its provenance, like Romney’s, are a touch exotic. He’s Mormon; it’s more or less French.        

Yet it barrels toward Oscar night as the favorite, on the strength of more than its virtues. It’s propelled by the strategizing, needling and spending of the Weinstein Company and its irascible agitator, Harvey Weinstein. He represents a celluloid analogue of sorts to the likes of Sheldon Adelson (Newt Gingrich’s benefactor) or Foster Friess (Rick Santorum’s). With the Oscars as with elections, it helps to have a willful, well-funded partisan behind you.        

Perhaps because the 84th Academy Awards fall smack in the middle of an unusually dizzying stretch of the presidential campaign, the parallels between our cinematic and political sweepstakes have come into bold relief. And though Hollywood often sees itself — and is regarded — as a bastion of liberalism, the kinship of the Oscars with the Republican primaries is particularly striking.        

Both pointlessly bloated, the two contests showcase a slew of options without a single one that inspires outsize passion or commands any real consensus. There are nine best picture nominees, and if you put away all reference materials, closed your eyes and tried to name them, you’d probably come up with no more than four, overlooking, for example, “The Tree of Life,” whose box-office haul isn’t much bigger than Callista Gingrich’s monthly budget for hairspray.        

“The Tree of Life” had the distinction of actually repelling viewers, many of whom stormed out of theaters midmovie, baffled by dinosaur cameos in a family drama set in the Texas of the 1950s. Although the Academy’s goal when it upped the number of best picture nominees from five a few years back was to assure that television viewers would have multiple movies on the slate that they could relate to, only one of this year’s aspirants, “The Help,” qualifies as a bona fide hit that a sizable fraction of Americans actually saw.        

The Republican field also began with a bevy of possibilities. Remember Rick Perry? Herman Cain? Such a sprawling buffet, so many empty calories.        

Academy officials and Republican leaders are both grappling with a pronounced enthusiasm deficit, and you have to wonder if both groups’ demographic profiles are partly responsible for their failure to connect. Like the G.O.P., the Academy isn’t as heterogeneous as it could be. The Los Angeles Times published a widely discussed story last weekend that estimated that the Academy’s 5,765 voting members are nearly 94 percent white and 77 percent male, with a median age of 62. This easily explains the triumph of “The King’s Speech” over “The Social Network” last year, along with this year’s invitation to Billy Crystal to return — yet again — to host. By the yardstick of Academy membership, he’s wickedly au courant, verging on edgy.        

What we have here are two hoary institutions flailing for relevance, failing to find it and responding in ways that merely exhaust the audience. Although viewership for the Oscars telecast plummeted from about 55 million in 1998, when “Titanic” cleaned up, to 37.6 million last year, the movie industry’s curious response has been to make the Oscars feel more redundant and anticlimactic than ever. Yes, the ceremony in recent years has occurred on an earlier date than in the past, when it was often in late March. But the industry has conversely teased out and tarted up the buildup to the big night by quadrupling the amount of publicity that each nominee does, larding the calendar with luncheons and parties and trumpeting all the mini- and demi-Oscars like the Screen Actors Guild Awards, now treated as must-see TV in their own right. Whole sections of greater Los Angeles are carpeted in red, so that gowns can be donned and poses struck at a moment’s notice.        

Last year I saw so much of Natalie Portman from December through February that I essentially lived her pregnancy with her, was braced for her to deliver on the stage of the Kodak Theater on Oscar night, and wondered if I was on the hook for a baby gift — and what it should be. Itty-bitty ballet slippers? Stuffed swan?        

This year the overexposure honors go equally to Octavia Spencer, a best supporting actress nominee for her work in “The Help,” and Uggie, the Jack Russell terrier from “The Artist.” A few Hollywood insiders I talked to griped about the way the pooch was popping up everywhere, Weinstein’s wire-haired bid for awards favor. One told me that the principals involved in “The Artist” rehearsed Uggie’s trot with them up to the Golden Globes stage in case the movie won best comedy or musical honors at the event, which of course it did. Uggie obediently trotted.        

“The joke around Hollywood is that the only way to stop ‘The Artist’ is to have that dog admitted to the hospital for exhaustion,” the insider said, then mentioned another best picture nominee and the name of the epically anthropomorphized beast at its center. “The rest of the joke is that if Uggie’s in the hospital and the ‘War Horse’ people are smart, they’ll have Joey go and visit him.”        

The Republicans, likewise, have just about wrung our interest and patience dry. Watching the 20th debate on Wednesday night, I realized that these forums had begun long enough ago, and been sufficiently frequent and taxing, that the surviving participants were looking or acting appreciably older; Gingrich with more jowl, Romney with more crease, Ron Paul with more stammer. Only Santorum appeared unchanged, and I’d be tempted to say he cut a deal with the devil were it not so clear where he stands on matters satanic.        

The debate foursome’s catchphrases and cadences were so familiar that I found my mind drifting to a game of mix-and-match between the whole of the Republican primary field, including the dearly departed, and the titles of best picture hopefuls.        

“EXTREMELY Loud and Incredibly Close” is pretty much how I imagine Michele Bachmann at a cocktail party, drink or no drink. “The Descendants” calls to mind Romney and Jon Huntsman, scions of a privileged stripe. Then again it’s hard not to link Romney with “Moneyball,” a good term for the sport that he and Restore Our Future, the super PAC supporting him, are playing. Tens of millions may not buy you love, but they sure do buy you scads of ads that denounce Gingrich as an ethical abomination with a crush on Nancy Pelosi and slam Santorum (a “War Horse” for sure, though no thoroughbred) as the sweater-vested emperor of earmarks.        

The Oscars are often a political mirror and sometimes even a prognosticator. In 2008, the year of the last presidential election, the top prize went to “No Country for Old Men.” Nine months later, Barack Obama trounced John McCain, who had a quarter century on him.        

This year, the movie and political spheres are in peculiarly felicitous alignment. Whether evaluating Oscar contenders or presidential ones, many of us are asking the same plaintive question — is this really the best we have? — and gripped by the same sense that the selection process somehow winnows out or wards off many better alternatives.        

Marketing plays a greater role than merit, as one set of ads bludgeons Academy voters into submission and another set does the same with the electorate. Stagecraft is crucial. Did you know that for a special academy screening of “The Artist,” Weinstein recruited and paraded two of Charlie Chaplin’s granddaughters? Progeny as campaign props: how very political. How very Romney.        

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