Entry 13:

Dear Geoffrey,

I'm thinking about the ghost of Oscars past. Remember that gallant tribute to the elderly actresses now in retirement, Jane Powell and Ginger Rogers, draped on staircases in gowns, where there was so much gauze or Vaseline on the camera lens to fudge the wrinkles? The Native-American Marlon Brando speech? Some of Billy Crystal's funnier opening bits, like his mimic of Hannibal Lecter, and the Whoopi Goldberg awkwardness and attempt to inject some political gags, and those inside jokes about studio heads or agents going out to billions of people in Manila and Nairobi who must be scratching their heads. (Unless they know who Mike Ovitz is, too--I wouldn't doubt it.) There's something so embarrassing to me about that Hollywood/American in-crowd narcissism being broadcast worldwide, but maybe that's part of the appeal, you know, the rest of the world's fascination with watching select people intent on self-love and hoping to grasp the secret, even if they may not get the specifics of the Ovitz joke.

What I hate are those Chuck Workman montages, a second for each "cherished moment," partly because they underline for me how much has been forgotten historically--Rain Man is Hollywood's idea of ancient history, and only It's a Wonderful Life qualifies as pre-historic. But maybe it's just my prejudice against montages. What makes Oscars riveting, for better or worse, is that they still can't dispense with the "real time" element: A guy accepting the award for best short documentary is going to thank as many people as he wants. That "thank you" ritual, what do you make of it? Because, take away the gowns and the opening jokes and the suspense of who gets the award, and that's what you're left with: a primitive ritual in which one tribal member after another gets up and thanks the chiefs for letting them join the hunt.

I sit there waiting for someone to be churlish: You're damn right I deserve this, and you should have given me one years ago. Or honest: Don't you think I was a little over the top in that scene? But the gratitude is soothing: These are people have reached the pinnacle of being appreciated, and they are reduced to gushing banalities, so I guess I'll just go on with life and my job at the office. If they uttered witty sentences of acute judgment like Samuel Johnson or Edmund Wilson, clutching their Oscars, then I would be envious ...

I'm suddenly thinking of producer Alan Pakula getting killed in a freak accident, driving on the Long Island Expressway, I believe it was, some debris falling from the overpass and hitting him, maybe while he was composing an Oscar acceptance speech in his head. Maybe this is also what I'm watching and waiting for: someone to clutch his chest in midspeech and keel over. Death at the Oscars. It was the Surrealist poet Philippe Soupault who said that he engaged in long midnight walks all over Paris, hoping to find death at the end of them. I think we watch TV secretly for the same reason: the newscaster taking out a gun and shooting herself.

Did you see Anthony Lane's piece on Julia Roberts in this week's New Yorker? He says she doesn't take off her clothes any more because "I don't do documentaries" (quoting Roberts), then goes on to demur that in European and Altman movies it's thought that "the scent of documentary can and should be allowed to flavor a fictional method." In an otherwise entirely too smart-alecky and glib piece, that's the one sentence of Lane's I like, and it pretty much sums up what I was trying to tell you yesterday about my love for the cigarette-smoking moment in The Circle and all those real-time process moments I like. Not fantasy but documentary. That may be where our emphasis differs, you and I.

Best,
Phillip