And the Oscar Goes to....Hell

THEY SAY THAT Hollywood is high school with money, but this year's Oscars seemed, at times, more like a theater banquet for a small, pricey college. There was Professor Beatty, getting his retirement plaque and rambling on -- and on – about responsibility. (They say he used to be quite something with the ladies.) And there were the American Beauty folks leaking humanist lubricants all over the podium. And there was Hilary Swank from Boys Don't Cry calling for diversity and acceptance in her very own unique glittery designer dress. Class clown emeritus Billy Crystal kept everything rolling with a few pre-filmed male rape and drag gags and some gentle racial heckling of Best Supporting Physical Anomaly Michael Clarke Duncan. (Funny how the self-serving LAPD joke ended with a cut to the cheerful Duncan, and not to the dignified, soon-to-be-shunned Denzel.)

Well, what are you going to do when the best actor of the lot (Sean Penn) is a no-show and the actor with the best performance of the year (Russell Crowe) looks like a nervous wreck in an aisle seat it's slowly dawning on him he won't need? Still, there were moments that bordered on moving -- Dame Michael Caine’s generous shout-outs to his category-mates, and Jack Nicholson’s old pro introduction of his old buddy/rival pro, Warren Beatty. It's probably no accident that it was Nicholson, the stoned dinosaur, the designated jerk, who provided the closest approximation to human feeling in the room. It isn't necessarily that Jack is from a better age (this won’t be another hazy disquisition on the superiority of Spiro Agnew-era cinema). But he does seem to hail from an older, more comfortable, more spirited precinct.

It's not that the industry wasn’t always about money and gratuitous displays of self-love masquerading as aesthetic or social concern,

but there was a time when a front of stars provided an important escape hatch for film consumers, and a productive creative niche for themselves. Nicholson’s frequent collaborator Robert Towne, the author of seventies-fetishist cream reels Shampoo and Chinatown, has written that the problem with Hollywood films today is that there is no shared mythology among audiences, neither the hope and jingoism of pre-Vietnam film nor the easy (Rider) cynicism of the Jack pack. If we can't agree whether our society is brimming with promise or sucking mud, what the hell is a Meaningful Blockbuster supposed to tap into? (American Beauty's slick solution was to prop up a worn façade and knock it down.) Even Stanley Kubrick didn't know the answer to this question, and his punishment, based on last night's show, seems to be erasure from the obit clip and a dim legacy of demeaning nods to 2001' ape-with-a-bone bit.

Maybe the only way to truly understand the Oscars, and the industry they celebrate, is to watch it with your friends and lay some cold hard cash down on the results. With real money riding on the outcome of something you know nothing about -- Best Sound Effects Editing, for example -- it's possible to appreciate the courage a movie executive must possess to make the kinds of calls that so deeply affect our cultural life. Should you greenlight the Green Mile? Should you fast-track Stuart Little, pay Spacey what he’s asking so he’ll do that weird thing with his eyes for you? You must look into your heart and ask, Who Would Harvey Call?

But the real trick to comprehending how Hollywood works is not just to bet your paycheck on the Oscars, but to lose it. Then you might finally appreciate all the secret sacrifices that have been made to bring you quality distortion and amnesia. Otherwise, to endure the spectacle without taking a quantifiable hit from the contents of the envelope is, to paraphrase the late novelist Stanley Elkin, to be a man in Nebraska told it's raining in France. What do you say?