on a totally unrelated topic

As the Oscars dribble on tonight, I’m doing the seemingly hipster alternative and watching The Oscar, a 1966 film about an actor who stops at nothing to win the eponymous award. I’ve read that it’s one of the worst movies ever made, but that it contains so many awful choices, it’s actually brilliant. And the stars!

Stephen Boyd! Elke Sommer! Milton Berle! Toney Bennett! Peter Lawford! Jill St. John! Jack Soo! Ernest Borgnine! Broderick Crawford! Bob Hope! Frank Sinatra! Joseph Cotten!

So far it’s living up to its rep. Sort of like Valley of the Dolls, but worse – far worse. Because the dialogue is so forced, so arch, and the actors aren’t able to do anything with it, it reminds me of a college production of a David Mamet play. (Yes, I worked on at least one of those.) I don’t know that it’s a matter of talent, at least when it comes to the actors. After all Stephen Boyd did some cool stuff with his role in Ben Hur. (He was playing the gay subtext, while Chuck Heston could not be told about such a thing.) Apparently Harlan Ellison has complained that his dialogue was rewritten daily by the producer and director, who were oh so obviously better writers than Harlan. And to call the direction wooden is an insult to knotty pine.

This is not a Douglas Sirk movie, or even Todd Haynes channelling Sirk. Sirk and Haynes both understand why they’re telling stories, why they’re filming something called a melodrama. The guys running this shoot think they’re doing important work but have no idea what is actually being captured on screen.

“One phone call, and I’m not dog meat… one phone call, and game called on account of Oscar!”

SCTV once did a parody of this thing called The Nobel. But not even those geniuses could trump the grim, wonderful reality. The Oscar is so far out of control that I need to see it again before I try to write anything coherent about it.

And if you ever wondered why Tony Bennett never had anything like the film career that Frank Sinatra had, wonder no more.

By the way, I just clicked over the the actual Oscar ceremony. Did you know that some people actually consider Ben Stiller funny?

Update on Tuesday, March 9, 2010 at 10:18AM by Scott

The Self-Styled Siren does a great job of conveying The Oscar's awful wonderfulness – or is that wonderful awfulness?