Politicking the academy

David D’Arcy

• Last Updated: February 05. 2009 12:20PM UAE / February 5. 2009 8:20AM GMT

The producer Kathleen Glynn and the director Michael Moore accept the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature for Bowling for Columbine in 2003. John Lazar / WireImage

In 2003, the filmmaker Michael Moore walked off the stage with his Oscar for Bowling for Columbine after capping a denunciation of the White House with “shame on you, Mr Bush. Your time is up”.

A sheepish host, Steve Martin, followed with one of the evening’s few improvised lines.

A group of teamsters (members of powerful blue collar labour organisations), he said, were putting Mr Moore “into the trunk of his limo.”

This year, the politics that have been a regular part of the Oscars’ acceptance speeches since the 1970s could meet a similar fate, as awardees hold back on airing grievances during the nation’s Barack Obama glow. On live television, anything can happen, but producers of the televised ceremony on Feb 22 may try to minimise outbursts that, it seems, turn off viewers.

In a new survey conducted by the movie ticketing service Fandango, 51 per cent of respondents said that the Oscars would be better without any mention of politics.

“The Academy Awards telecast attracts film fans who are interested in movies that they’ve seen and celebrities that they know,” says Harry Medved, Fandango’s spokesman, “so it’s perhaps more exciting for them to watch celebrity fashions than it is for them to get a lesson in politics.”

This dig at political statements points to a deeper concern felt by the Academy.

Ratings for the televised ceremony, which raises funds for it, have been down, and could sink lower. Studies show that TV ratings for the Academy Awards are highest when blockbuster films like Titanic are among the nominees for Best Picture, and low when art films such as Crash are nominated.

This year, the commercial hit The Dark Knight is not among the Best Picture nominees, although Heath Ledger has been nominated for a posthumous Best Supporting Actor award for his role as The Joker. Still, insiders say ratings will suffer as a result. In the Fandango survey, 71 per cent stated that they would be more likely to watch the show if The Dark Knight were nominated for Best Picture. Eighty one per cent said that they felt that Academy was out of touch with popular taste.

The Academy has responded by hiring new producers for the telecast, and by keeping the identity of awards presenters a surprise. It hasn’t yet gone as far as issuing guidelines on the inclusion of politics in acceptance speeches.

“The only guidelines are that they try to limit their acceptance remarks to no more than 45 seconds, and that they be prepared to try to speak from their heart and say something that is meaningful to them,” says the Academy spokesman Leslie Unger.

A look at the nominees hints at what might be controversial. The Best Feature Documentary nominees tend to be the most political, and this year’s crop includes films that touch on topics as varied as Hurricane Katrina, the 1992 Los Angeles riots and the treatment of immigrants to the USA.

Frost/Nixon, a nominee for Best Picture, re-examines the president who resigned in 1974, depicted in Ron Howard’s film as deceitful, self-pitying and even greedy. (He was paid half a million dollars to do the 1977 interviews on which the film is based.) Yet in a year that saw the most emphatic repudiation of the Republican party at the polls since Watergate, using Nixon to attack them again would be to look backwards at a time when prominent Hollywood liberals will want to face the future instead.

“It will be supportive comments about a new era, and ‘Go Obama,’” predicts Anne Thompson, an insider whose Variety blog is widely read. “The horrors of the Bush administration are behind us. These people, if they say something, will say something positive about the new administration.”

Alex Gibney, whose film about the US army’s use of torture in Iraq and Afghanistan, Taxi to the Dark Side, won last year’s Oscar for a feature documentary, says he was given no guidelines for what to say if his film won. “They send out something recommending that you don’t give the kind of pat speech thanking your agent, your manager, your brother and your sister. They say, ‘If you have something to say, make it good, original, target it, because you have a moment,’ but nobody said don’t make a political speech.”

In his 2008 acceptance speech, Gibney opened with at least a little levity: “I think my dear wife Anne was kind of hoping I’d make a romantic comedy, but honestly, after Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, extraordinary rendition, that simply wasn’t possible.” He went on: “Let’s hope we can turn this country around, move away from the dark side and back to the light.” The audience, in the theatre at least, cheered.

Anti-war statements haven’t always gone down so well, even within the ceremony itself.

In 1975, Peter Davis won the documentary prize for his now-classic film on the Vietnam War, Hearts and Minds. After Davis’s acceptance speech, the producer Bert Schneider read a telegram from the Provisional Revolutionary Government of Vietnam (which was negotiating with the US in Paris at the time) thanking “friends” in the US for working for peace. Both Bob Hope and Frank Sinatra took to the stage to deny “responsibility for political references”. In response, Shirley McClaine went to the microphone and defended Hearts and Minds and, by implication, the telegram. “Now you would think it was the most inoffensive thing,” Davis says.

“I’m certainly not opposed to people giving a line or two of what they believe, and I loved it when Olympia Dukakis said ‘Go Michael!’ in 1988,” says Davis. Dukakis won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Moonstruck when her cousin, Michael Dukakis, was running for US president.

In 1973, just a year before Davis’s Oscar, Marlon Brando sent a Native-American woman named Sacheen Littlefeather to decline his Oscar for The Godfather, citing the treatment of Native Americans in film and television. Brando gave her a 15-page statement to read, but the producer threatened to have the young woman (who, it turned out, was not a Native American at all, but a young actress named Maria Cruz) removed or arrested if she spoke for more than 45 seconds.

Much of the audience booed, and Clint Eastwood, presenting the Best Picture award, remarked that it should be given “on behalf of all the cowboys shot in John Ford westerns over the years”.

For Barbara Koppel, who won documentary Oscars in 1977 and 1990, “The Academy always had this rich history of highlighting important social issues, particularly in the documentary field. These are films that expose real stories and human ideals, so of course you’re going to have something that gets to the core of the issue.”

When Koppel received the Oscar for Harlan County USA in 1977, the co-host Jane Fonda, famous for her outspoken views, introduced the award’s presenter, the once-blacklisted writer Lillian Hellman, who noted that Hollywood had “confronted the wild charges of Joe McCarthy with all the force and courage of a bowl of mashed potatoes.” Koppel borrowed a dress and arrived at the ceremony in a Volkswagen, “but that was a very long time ago”.

“The audience loves to hear stuff that’s real,” Koppel says. “They see the glamour, they see the beautiful clothes, but when people get up there, they want to feel something. They want it to be something that comes from someone’s heart. And if it’s politics, I think people want to hear it, or they want to hear the sheer emotion of something that was so unexpected.”

Sometimes discretion and the spirit of conciliation prevail. John Wayne (the star of The Green Berets) was a stoic Best Picture presenter in 1978 when he handed Michael Cimino the Oscar for his anti-war drama, The Deerhunter. In 2003, when Michael Moore had many in the crowd booing, Sean Penn, just back from a fact-finding trip to Iraq, accepted his Mystic River Oscar with quiet thanks to the director Clint Eastwood.

Last year, when Marion Cotillard won Best Actress for her portrayal of the French chanteuse Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose, the French actress did not let on during her acceptance speech that France and the US had the worst relations in years. “I guess both sides could agree that they liked Edith Piaf,” says Bob Berney, the former president of Picturehouse, which distributed the film in the US.

Still, industry insiders tend to welcome spontaneity and truth at the ceremony. “Everything Michael [Moore] said about the war we were about to begin with Iraq was true. I thought he was amazingly prescient,” says Bingham Ray, the former president of United Artists, Bowling for Columbine’s US distributor.

But don’t expect too much of it, says Emanuel Levy, the veteran critic and author of All About Oscar (2003), a history of the Academy Awards. For Hollywood liberals, times are too good. “Who will they talk against?” he asks. “Even the war in Iraq is not a divisive issue, especially now that we have a president who promises to terminate the war within two years. Also, the Iraq War has not produced many good movies, and not Oscar contenders.” Nor did the audience go to see them in large numbers.

Bingham Ray recalls his blunt counsel to Oscar winners from Michael Moore to Danis Tanovic (No Man’s Land, 2002): “Don’t go up there and be a knucklehead. Present well. Be short and sweet. Less is more.” Wise advice, but some can’t resist those 45 seconds of fame.