How many films were judged best of the year at the first Academy Awards? Actually, two. The award for Best Motion Picture went to "Wings," William A. Wellman's World War I flyboy epic, and that's the correct answer if anyone asks you, "What was the first film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture?" But there was also an award that split year of 1927-28 for "most artistic quality of production," which went to the stunning American debut of celebrated German director F.W. Murnau, "Sunrise."
Both were good calls. "Wings" typifies the kind of movie experience that is still considered likely Oscar fodder (though the term "Oscar" wasn't coined till the mid-'30s): a simple, sturdy premise, plenty of state-of-the-art spectacle, hot young starpower (Clara Bow, Richard Arlen, Buddy Rogers and a film-stealing one-scene appearance by Gary Cooper) and a big-budget risk that paid off.
"Sunrise" is something else again: a visionary rendering of a universal allegory of love, betrayal and redemption in which a nameless couple (the subtitle is "A Song of Two Humans") leave their rural village on a day-trip to the phantasmagorical City, are wrenched asunder, then symbolically remarried, then separated again by a twist of fate. Murnau himself married the German tradition of building the most elaborate dream realities in the studio to the superior technical resources of Hollywood, creating a technical and stylistic milestone that would inspire American filmmakers for the next decade and beyond. The film proved to be a box-office disappointment, but "most artistic quality of production" - no contest.
This two-pronged awards structure reflects a dichotomy that persists in our culture to this day. Some people go to the cinema seeking art; others just go to the movies. Personally, I go the movies and am happy if I stumble onto art. There's no reason "art films" have to be hoity-toity and theoretical. To stay with the example at hand, "Sunrise," an art film par excellence, is also an emotionally exhilarating movie-movie with incandescent performances by a popular cutie-pie actress (Janet Gaynor, who copped a statuette of her own) and a guy principally identified as a cowboy actor (George O'Brien). I've seen "Wings" once, and quite enjoyed it. I've seen "Sunrise" 30 or 40 times and think of it almost every day of my life.
So I don't believe the Motion Picture Academy was wrong to drop "most artistic quality of production" after that first year: a movie is a movie is a movie. Still, imagine that the practice had continued. Then - to cite an oft-deplored "injustice" of Oscar history - the Academy could have bestowed Best Picture of 1941 on John Ford's elegiac family saga "How Green Was My Valley" and still found a way to pay grudging respect to Orson Welles' maiden film effort, "Citizen Kane." ("Kane" did win Best Picture honors from the New York Film Critics and subsequently has been named best film of all time in numerous critics polls.)
Hollywood could have lain down in front of the 1939 juggernaut of "Gone With the Wind" and also risen to tip its collective hat to "Stagecoach" or "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington." Honors in 1943 could have been split between "Casablanca" and, say, Alfred Hitchcock's personal favorite among a host of Hitchcock masterpieces, "Shadow of a Doubt"; in 1946 between the epic postwar tribute "The Best Years of Our Lives" and, oh, "Notorious," "It's a Wonderful Life" or "My Darling Clementine." Or, more recently, between 1997's "Titanic" and "L.A. Confidential" or "Kundun"; 1998's "Shakespeare in Love" and "Saving Private Ryan"; 2000's "Gladiator" and "Traffic"; and 2002's "Chicago" and "The Pianist." In these last three cases, you could argue that the same kind of statement was made by splitting Best Picture (which is a producer's award) and Best Director awards just that way - an upshot not out of the question this coming Sunday evening.
Oh, well, something to think about as we approach the 78th Oscars. I really took keyboard in hand today chiefly to alert readers that it is now, at long last, possible to purchase Murnau's eternally renewing "Sunrise" on DVD. Fox Video made the silent classic available last year in a backhanded way, not as a for-sale item but as a free bonus if one purchased three other Fox Studio Classics. That's still the name of the game, in a sense. "Sunrise" is part of a "Best Picture Collection" box set of "How Green Was My Valley," Joseph L. Mankiewicz's bitchy showbiz classic "All About Eve" (1950) and the late Elia Kazan's "Gentleman's Agreement" (1947).
That last title is among Oscar's dullest choices (and a less satisfying movie than another Kazan effort of the same year, the true-life mystery "Boomerang!"); it was honored principally for producer and studio boss Darryl F. Zanuck's courage in making a movie explicitly addressing anti-Semitism in America, in the face of opposition from most of the other studio bosses in Hollywood (all Jews, unlike Zanuck). Still, "Sunrise" alone is worth the price of the set. So, for that matter, is Ford's impeccably composed "How Green Was My Valley" - one of the several best pictures ever to be named Best Picture, even if it's remembered from here to eternity as "the movie that won the Oscar instead of 'Citizen Kane.'"[[In-content Ad]]
