The Oscars are voted on by (harrumph) members of the Academy. In other words, people working in Hollywood. That means they’re ill equipped to judge the films they make, which are mostly not about Hollywood or films. They’re about life out in the world.
It’s people like film audiences who are equipped to judge the films. Why? Because they have more direct experience of the subject matter. Having the skills to make films is no sign you have a platform from which to evaluate them.
So nominee Ryan Gosling, one of Hollywood’s Canadians, may’ve pushed the envelope by saying Barbie’s star and director “pushed the envelope and made history,” and deserved nominations. Personally, I found the earnest messaging in Barbie, like the “iconic” speech by (nominee) America Ferrera, tedious.
On the other hand, the depictions of superficiality were eloquent, as was Barbie’s existential dismay at her sudden awareness of death and emptiness. Hollywood has always been astute about the hollowness of the kind of success it peddles.
It made me think of another Hollywood Canadian, director Norman Jewison, who died last month. He made many Oscar-winning films with solemn social cred, like In the Heat of the Night (1967), about race and justice in Deep South.
The Black writer, James Baldwin, ridiculed it in great detail, including what he called “the obligatory fade out kiss” between a Black northern detective (Sidney Poitier) and a white southern sheriff (Rod Steiger). Anyone who lived through any of it would’ve found it absurd, but it’s what Hollywood wanted to believe.
I’ve come to think of Baldwin as America’s greatest writer, perhaps rivalled only by Mark Twain, who also made race his subject. Interestingly, Twain wrote scathingly on a 19th century equivalent to Hollywood films, the novels of James Fenimore Cooper (Last of the Mohicans), and how idiotic their specifics were. (Hostile “Indians” hide in trees above a long houseboat passing down a river. The first jumps too late and misses his target so the next five do the same!)
Baldwin was strikingly empathic about the idiots who made Hollywood films on race in his time: “It is not that the creators of [In the Heat …] were inspired by base motives, but that they could not understand their motives, nor be responsible for the effects …” he wrote.
He felt they, too, were victims in a tragic situation, which left them fearful and deluded, unlike Blacks, who couldn’t afford to get it wrong, since for them it was truly about life and death. But given the right — i.e., awful — circumstances, any of us could’ve become anything.
For both writers, Baldwin and Twain, the fatal component in the unfolding U.S. disaster was its rise as an imperial global power. Twain was disgusted by its early version (Cuba, the Philippines) in the late 1800s. It made him lose his formidable, nay incomparable, sense of humour in his final writings.
Baldwin, who died in 1983, said he loved his country but could not respect it. So he said about the characters in In the Heat of the Night, that they could be “considered moving and pathetic only if one has the luxury of the assurance that one will never be at their mercy.”
What a chilling test to impose on figures in a film, like Steiger’s white sheriff, or the widow of the murdered factory owner. Then Baldwin added: “And that no one in the world has the luxury of this assurance is beginning to be clear: all over the world.” He was writing in the final days and aftermath of the horrific U.S. onslaught against southeast Asians.
Sadly, the same effects of American power continue to play out 50 years later, in Gaza and elsewhere, including, of course, the U.S. itself.
I’ve always felt Canadians — like Gosling and Jewison — are positioned to offer Americans some useful insight and perspective about themselves. We’re near enough to see almost everything happening, yet not part of it. Still, it’s clearly best not to get too far out over our skis on these matters.
This column originally appeared in the Toronto Star.
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