‘It’s a town built on a rock-solid foundation of insecurity...’
What better way to chronicle the history of something as ubiquitous and sprawling as Hollywood than through the one night of the year that sums up the glitz, glamour, hope and crushing disappointment of Tinseltown – the Oscars. With Oscar Wars, celebrated film journalist and New York Times staff writer Michael Schulman takes us on a journey from the Oscars’ humble beginnings at the dawn of the sound era through to Will Smith’s infamous slap. Ladies and gentlemen… this is the movies…
We begin in the era of Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford, through the Golden Age of Hollywood in the ’40 and ’50s, through the Hollywood blacklist, to New Hollywood, the Miramax era and beyond. Despite ostensibly only being about one aspect of the movie industry (the Oscars), Schulman’s book (subtitled: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears) serves as a solid film history book and a strong starting point for anyone wanting to know more about cinema. While much of this was stuff I’d heard before (namely the blacklist debacle and the Weinstein era), it was fascinating to hear about the Academy members purge under Gregory Peck, the disastrous 1989 Oscars ceremony under the stewardship of Allan Carr and the clusterfuck at the 2017 ceremony that saw La La Land announced as Best Picture, only to be stripped of its title less than two minutes later in favour of Moonlight. The book’s best section comes towards the end, however, when Schulman takes us on a journey through every winner of colour. It’s a fascinating insight into the inner machinations of the Hollywood machine and how, for decades, it perpetuated white dominance until the #OscarsSoWhite scandal began to change the dial in 2015.
Oscar Wars is a great starting point for anyone wanting a concise and compelling chronicle of the first 100 years of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.