Lights. Camera. Oscars.
Outside the Hollywood & Highland Center (the Kodak Theatre, for all intents and purposes), a raucous sea of reporters and cinephiles parts for Hollywood’s red-carpet parade, camera flashes cresting like whitecaps.
In fact, one might easily be reminded of watching the infamous climactic scene of Oscar-winner “The Ten Commandments,” where Israelite A-listers narrowly escape the Egyptian paparazzi across an effects-laden Red Sea.
In this sense, the formal proceedings at the Oscars — the boring stuff, basically — might be akin to Hollywood’s wandering around in a barren desert wilderness.
Worshipping golden idols.
It’s true there’s a certain pyrite inauthenticity to the affair. A certain behind-the-back L.A. duplicity. An elemental impurity in the Oscar statuette.
Studios’ promotional marketing, for one.
New York Times columnist Frank Bruni humorously mused, for example, that Mitt Romney’s real problem is his candidacy for president instead of Best Picture.
“His super PAC isn’t The Weinstein Company (TWC), which knows how to drag an imperfect contender toward, and possibly across, the finish line,” he quipped.
The Weinstein-distributed film “The Artist,” the imperfect contender to which Bruni alluded, was the frontrunner for the Best Picture Oscar, favored to become the only silent movie to garner the award since the first Oscar ceremony 83 years ago.
Male lead Jean Dujardin was the favorite for Best Actor, in turn, while Michel Hazanavicius was the preference for Best Director. In all, the black-and-white silent film received ten award nominations.
But like Romney, it’s imperfect.
“He’s Mormon; it’s more or less French,” Bruni joked.
The film does have its flaws, in all seriousness.
Sure, it’s nostalgically charming, like a rickety St. Charles Avenue streetcar.
But good cinema — Oscar-winning cinema — is more than a wistful homage to past historical epochs.
I love the Crescent City’s streetcars, by comparison, but hesitate to heap lavish praise upon the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority.
Such praise can be bought, though: free fares, for instance, would buy mine.
Likewise, “The Artist” sputtered to an Oscar not on its own wheels but rather towed by TWC — Hollywood’s Riverside Towing, in this sense.
“The Artist” is tugged, as Bruni said, by the “strategizing, needling and spending” of TWC. And with the Academy Awards, as with elections, it’s necessary to have deep-pocketed, fleet-winged angels like Newt Gingrich’s benefactor Sheldon Anderson — and Harvey Weinstein.
But much like Riverside Towing’s operation, Hollywood studios’ Oscar propaganda campaign leaves victims in its wake.
Oscar-worthy films like “The Tree of Life,” Terrence Malick’s experimental drama, and “Midnight in Paris,” Woody Allen’s romantic comedy won’t receive the recognition they rightfully deserve, aesthetic casualties of the practice.
Despite this, though, the Academy Awards is a commendable affair.
The glass is always half-full in Hollywood. The Oscars is ultimately the last bastion of artistic American filmmaking, protecting audiences from such films as “Mars Needs Moms,” “Season of the Witch” and “Big Mommas: Like Father Like Son.”
I won’t ascend Mount Sinai and destroy my copies of “The Artist” and “The Help” because of the industry’s idolatrous rituals, in other words.
But if the cinematic Yahweh should cast a plague or two — or 10 — upon Sunset Boulevard and Tinseltown, I’d let it Passover.
 
Phil Sweeney is a 25-year-old English senior from New Orleans. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_PhilSweeney.
 
____
Contact Phil Sweeney at [email protected]