What a Statuette Rewards

On 16 May 1929, a few hundred people sat down to dinner at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel for the first presentation of the Academy Awards. The ceremony is usually said to have lasted about fifteen minutes. There was no suspense whatever: the winners had been announced several months earlier. The awards covered films released in 1927 and 1928, and the top prize went to Wings, a First World War flying picture. A separate award for unique and artistic production went to F. W. Murnau's Sunrise, and was never given again. Emil Jannings, the first Best Actor, had already gone home to Germany.

Nobody knows for certain why the statuette is called Oscar. The most repeated story belongs to Margaret Herrick, the Academy's librarian and later its executive director, who is said to have remarked that it looked like her Uncle Oscar. Bette Davis claimed she named it after her first husband, Harmon Oscar Nelson. The columnist Sidney Skolsky claimed he coined it in print. Each account comes from the person who benefits from it, which is a pattern this subject keeps meeting. The Academy adopted the nickname officially by the end of the 1930s, and the question of who gave it has remained open ever since.

Festivals came a little later. Venice held the first major film festival in 1932, as part of its art Biennale. Cannes was planned for September 1939 as a response to Venice, which had become a showcase for Mussolini's Italy; the war began on the very day it was due to open, and the festival was cancelled, and it was not held until 1946. Its top prize has been called the Palme d'Or since 1955. Where the Oscars are an industry voting on itself, the festivals are juries, small rooms of filmmakers and critics, and the two systems often disagree.

Occasionally they agree. Parasite, Bong Joon-ho's 2019 film about two families and one house, won the Palme d'Or and then, at the Oscars in February 2020, became the first film not in the English language to win Best Picture. It was a genuine landmark for an awards body that had treated foreign-language cinema as a separate category for most of its history.

The records are tidy and easily memorised. Ben-Hur (1959), Titanic (1997) and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) won eleven Oscars apiece. Katharine Hepburn won four acting awards, all for leading roles, across nearly half a century, and never attended to collect any of them in person. The mishaps are memorised too. In 2017 Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway were handed the wrong envelope, a duplicate for Best Actress, and announced La La Land as Best Picture. Its producers were midway through their speeches when the error was caught and the award handed to Moonlight.

And the speeches get misremembered. When Sally Field won her second Best Actress award in 1985, she said, "I can't deny the fact that you like me, right now, you like me!" It has been quoted for decades as "You like me, you really like me", usually with a sneer it did not deserve. The polished version is better known than the real one, which is how most film quotations travel.

The more interesting question is what all this rewards. Look down the list of acting winners and a pattern appears. Real people impersonated. Weight gained or lost. Prosthetic noses, accents, illness, disability played by actors without it. The roles that win are very often the ones where you can see the work, where the distance between the actor and the character is visible on the screen and in the publicity. Comedies rarely win. Nor do most genre films, nor most performances in which an actor appears simply to be listening.

That is not a conspiracy. It is a measurement problem. Good screen acting, as the rest of this book argues, is often a matter of doing less and letting the cut and the frame do their share, and work that hides itself is hard to vote for. Effort you can see is easy to recognise and easy to praise. A statuette is a rough instrument for detecting something whose best examples look like nothing at all.

Watch the awards, by all means. Just remember that they tell you what an industry finds easy to admire, which is not quite the same as what is good.