"Oscar Wars" Author Talks 94 Years of Golden Moments

In this episode, Michael Schulman, author of "Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears'' sits down with host Tara Jabbari for a conversation about notable Oscars moments and their larger significance. Michael shares how voting works for the Academy Awards, and the two discuss how the famous ceremony is a lens into how Hollywood thinks. You’ll hear more about some notable chapters from the book (like when Gregory Peck was the President of the Academy, or when Harvey Weinstein played dirty in campaigning), history-making moments, and more! 

Learn more about Michael Schulman: https://www.michael-schulman.com/ 

Article Michael wrote on Oscar nominations and “Barbie’s” lack of nominations https://www.newyorker.com/culture/notes-on-hollywood/the-oscars-are-confused-about-barbie 

Buy “Oscar Wars” https://www.harpercollins.com/products/oscar-wars-michael-schulman

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Transcript

00:04 - VO (Host)
One on the set and action. Welcome to Media and Monuments presented by Women in Film and Video in Washington DC. Media and Monuments features conversations with industry professionals speaking on a range of topics of interest to screen-based media makers. 

00:25 - Tara Jabbari (Host)
Hello everyone. On Media and Monuments, I'm your host, tara Jabari, and today we have Michael Shulman, the author of the New York Times bestseller Her, again Becoming Meryl Streep. He is a staff writer at the New Yorker, where he has been contributing since 2006. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, vanity Fair and other publications. His latest book is Oscar Wars A History of Hollywood in Gold, sweat and Tears. He lives in New York City and he is here today on Media and Monuments. Welcome, michael. 

01:04 - Michael Shulman (Host)
Hi, thanks for having me. 

01:06 - Tara Jabbari (Host)
Thank you so much for coming At the time of recording. We haven't seen the Oscars for 2024 yet, but the nominations have come up and I do have some questions for you on your thoughts for that. But I did want to go over your book. I loved it. I love history too and I'm a film nerd and it was really fascinating the way that you decided to think of writing this book. Can you kind of explain what was your thought process to be like? The history of what brought the Oscars? 

01:39 - Michael Shulman (Host)
Well, thank you, I'm so glad you enjoyed it. My concept for the book is not to tell the story of every single Oscar year and who won, who lost and what jokes were told. The idea was really to take about a dozen years, even a single category like 1951 Best Actress or 1960 Best Picture, and zoom in and tell a story of that year and what changes were going on in Hollywood, in American culture, in the movie industry. It's really intended as a kind of narrative-driven history of particular moments, delving into people's lives and what larger story the Oscars can tell us about cultural shifts. So it all started in 2017 or so. 

02:23
I was working on a piece for the New Yorker about the Academy and the aftermath of Oscars so White. If you'll remember, that was a huge deal. It was just a hashtag movement that blew up and in response, the Academy decided to make a real effort to diversify its membership and they got a lot of blowback from some of the members who didn't like that. It was really something that divided the Hollywood community in ways that we find very familiar from other parts of life. I went out there and I talked to the Academy president, Cheryl Boone Isaacs, at the time and learned a lot about the Academy's history and, beyond the awards, why the Academy even exists. It was so enlightening. And then at the end of that process, I went to the Academy Awards for the first time. 

03:12
This was in 2017. And I was there in the press room during the envelope, mix up with Moonlight and La La Land, and it was just insane. I mean, I'm an Oscar, you know junkie, and I just couldn't believe that I was there for this incredible fluke, historic moment. And to me it was like this big Hollywood twist ending at the end of this year of you know, racial reckoning for the academy and institutional change. And I kind of saw that as a story that spoke to you know what was happening in the country. You know, this is at the same time as the 2016 election and the rise of Donald Trump and everything that that brought with it. So that was kind of where the idea for the book came about, that the idea to take particular years and just go really deep on them and see what sort of what that kicked up about the history. 

04:03 - Tara Jabbari (Host)
And you kind of open the book explaining that's my first time ever going to the oscars happened to be the envelope mix up and then you end the book. That you're like technically. Like I ended we were done with the book and then this most recent oscars was the infamous slap between will smith and chris rock and it and it kind of opened up the race card again because of who was involved with the slap. So it kind of revisits it and it's interesting because while I was reading it I'm like, and after that we have the first Asian actors to win major categories and also directors and things like that. So the race thing keeps coming up and changing the whole Oscars. So white conversation. But I wanted to know what your thoughts were, especially because majority of your book does go in chronological order. Right, but there is one section I think it's chapter 10, but where you talk about tokens in 1940, 1964, and 2002, which is when Hattie McDonald, sidney Poitier and Halle Berry make history. 

05:23 - Michael Shulman (Host)
You know, I thought it was from the start obviously important to talk about the racial disparities of the Oscars, and the first several decades just barely had anyone of color and they're still. You know, this year's the 96th Oscars and they're still firsts, sadly. You know, I just interviewed Lily Gladstone, who's nominated for Best Actress and the first Native American woman in that category, and she really comes on the heels of just a smattering of people over the decades who are Indigenous. That's pretty sad. It's a really mixed thing for people who are the first because they feel like why hasn't it happened sooner? How are we on the first anything after 90-something years? So yeah, obviously diversity and inclusion has been at the very forefront of a lot of the conversation about the Oscars over the past 10 or so years and that's really important and I wanted to make sure I devoted a good chunk of the book to that. But I didn't want the whole book to be about that and part of it is how you know, over Oscar history, like that's our Oscar war of. You know the present, but in the past there have been these major clashes over, you know, labor relations in Hollywood or the blacklist in the 1950s and the Cold War or the generation gap of the 60s. So there are different kind of battle lines that the Oscars have fallen on. 

06:50
That idea for the chapter you mentioned about those three Black actors who were the first winners in their categories, respectively decades apart. You know, basically I wanted to tell those stories. But what interested me is that when you tell those stories together there are some really fascinating parallels. For one thing, you can tell that for each of those three actors Hattie McDaniel in Gone with the Wind, sidney Poitier in Lilies of the Field in the 60s and then Halle Berry in Monster's Ball you know it was a big moment In Monster's Ball. You know it was a big moment. It was a moment when Hollywood could sort of pat itself on the back for its liberal, progressive, expansive, enlightenment and mindset. And yet for the winner it was often a pretty isolating experience and they faced a lot of backlash and they had the feeling of having to sort of carry the weight of an entire population on their backs and they were sort of representing everyone and pleasing no one. 

07:49
Halle Berry has this incredible quote toward the end of that chapter where you know she said in her speech in 2002, you know, tonight, you know a door has been opened and then years later, like 14 years later, in the heat of Oscars, so White she realized well, I thought the door that night had been opened but it really hadn't. No one else has walked through it and she said she was heartbroken by that. So I wanted to dig into sort of you know we've all seen like the inspiring moments of you know Halle Berry crying and you know Sidney Poitier accepting his award in the 60s, and they are very inspiring moments. But they're also a little bit more complicated than that. 

08:23 - Tara Jabbari (Host)
Yeah, that was what I liked about what you pointed in, particularly that chapter, because you were like they are isolated. You know people had so much hope and they're like see, it's not so white. Or you know there's so much hope and then you're like, yes, but in all those decades not a lot has changed. 

08:42 - Michael Shulman (Host)
Yeah, and then it would take, you know, three decades for the next person to win. 

08:46 - Tara Jabbari (Host)
Yes, and you put so much pressure on these individuals who do not represent all Black people, let alone Black actors. Because Hattie McDowell was like I'm just playing, you know, the servant or the maid for Scarlett O'Hara, but we are not all servants and she always got some flack for playing that role and so it was very interesting. So it's been a while since I had read this because I reached out to before the holidays, before the new year. So I was like, oh, I got to reread it before we someone. But before I did I was like what are the things that I could have really? 

09:28
One was also the generational gap, like we were just talking about. That we touched on is like in the late 1960s when gregory peck was the academy president and he sort of him and candace bergman, it turned out kind of teamed up because the academy and everyone was kind of older and all these independent young guys, filmmakers, were felt like they weren't being seen and didn't really care about the Academy. And she's like, well, if you want them to get involved, you got to get. You know, they started teamed up and then it kind of changed the trajectory of who got nominated and who got who won Oscars for the next couple decades, right. So that was kind of cool to learn about it and to see also like that diversity, like you needed the generations to work together. 

10:29 - Michael Shulman (Host)
Yeah, I mean, that whole episode was a real precursor to what happened after Oscars so White and, in fact, when the Academy under Cheryl Boone Isaacs in 2017, started making this initiative to diversify their membership, they pointed to Gregory Peck as a precedent. So what happened was Gregory Peck, of course, probably most famous as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, which, a few years after that, he became Academy president and he was kind of the liberal elder statesman of Hollywood. He was extremely well-respected and yet he could see that the Academy was behind the times and the movies were changing very rapidly. There was a new youth audience who didn't go for the kind of stuff that Gregory Peck was in. You know, they were into the Graduate and 2001, space Odyssey and Rosemary's Baby and foreign films and stuff like that, and they didn't care about the Oscars and they weren't represented at the Oscars, and so he very wisely thought that there was a need for serious reform. A lot of the people who were in the Academy and voting for the Oscars were people who had been at the height of their careers in the 30s, and so he was thinking about that around 1969. 

11:48
And meanwhile, candice Bergen, who we all know now as Murphy Brown, or maybe you know her from Book Club or something. She was a 23-year-old starlet and kind of it girl and she was the daughter of a famous ventriloquist, edgar Bergen. So she'd grown up in Hollywood. She grew up knowing people like Cary Grant or whatever. And she wrote to Gregory Peck in a letter that I found preserved in his papers in the Academy Library in Beverly Hills, saying, basically, the Academy is full of antiquities who are gumming up the world of motion pictures and you need some new blood. And you need some new blood. And can I please go out and recruit some people some of my young hip friends like Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda who had just made Easy Rider to get involved and be in the Academy? And Peck wrote her back and said, yeah, please do it. And she did and she brought him some of the leading lights of this sort of what we call the new Hollywood. 

12:57
At the same time, peck was devising a plan to essentially demote people to non-voting status who hadn't worked in movies for seven years. So that was the more controversial part, because he also in his papers at the Academy Library are all the hate mail that he got from people saying please don't kick me out. You know, here are my credits, like I'm still relevant and you know, like Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird he was taking this sort of principled stand that did not make him very popular, but you know, it was a really transformative moment for the Academy and it set the stage for what happened in 2017. 

13:39 - Tara Jabbari (Host)
moment for the academy and it set the stage for what happened in 2017. It's my understanding, also kind of launched. Also the one flew over the cuckoo's nest, winning the big which is the big five, yeah, yeah best picture. That's that you know like. And if it wasn't for those, that team of candace and gregory like it didn't, it would not have allowed for for that to happen. 

13:58 - Michael Shulman (Host)
Yeah, I mean, that was a moment when the movies were changing so dramatically. And you know, in 1969, the winner of best picture was Oliver, which was rated G. The next year it was Midnight Cowboy, which was rated X. So to go from G to X in one year is pretty dramatic. And you know, I have to say, if you look at the Academy Awards of the 70s, they are pretty sort of on the ball in terms of where movies were headed. You know, you have, you know, winners like the French Connection and the Godfather and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and stuff like that. 

14:31 - Tara Jabbari (Host)
And then the other part that I was thinking of was the 90s and particularly Harvey Weinstein and how he kind of changed how voting happens and it sort of was like all the wooing and dining and all the campaigning because Steven Spielberg, who had been working for longer, and it was all more about the craft and the art. Everyone was expecting, particularly the year, what is it? Ninety eight. 

15:03 - Michael Shulman (Host)
Yeah, ninety nine, you know. So Saving Private Ryan came out in summer of 1998 and everyone just thought, ok, this is the best picture winner. Obviously it's this big Spielberg war epic. And it was. You know, it was the front runner for most of the year. Then, at the very end of 98, weinstein released Shakespeare in Love and suddenly the race got a lot more interesting and the campaigning, thanks to Weinstein, got a lot more aggressive. He had honed this campaign playbook over the course of the 90s with movies like Pulp Fiction and the English Patient and he basically pulled out all the stops for Shakespeare in Love, whether it was placing a ton of ads and variety in the Hollywood Reporter or putting Gwyneth Paltrow everywhere. His staff would call voters and make sure they watch the movie, ask them how they like the movie. He would seek out pockets of voters in obscure places. 

16:00
What made it really controversial and really ugly was that DreamWorks, which produced Saving Private Ryan, heard this rumor through the grapevine that Weinstein was bad-mouthing Saving Private Ryan. He was negative campaigning. Specifically, he was saying oh, the only good part of the movie is the first 20 minutes of the D-Day sequence, and then it just becomes the standard World War II movie. Weinstein, of course, always denied that. I spoke to the person who said she told DreamWorks that exact thing. She heard it from Weinstein. She told DreamWorks, weinstein, she told DreamWorks. 

16:39
And then DreamWorks felt like, oh my gosh, we're being attacked, basically, and so they had to campaign even harder. They started complaining in the press about what Weinstein was doing, and then the campaign became the story and Weinstein became the story, and then the movie won Shakespeare in Love won and people in Hollywood were flabbergasted. Basically, they said we're not going to let this happen again. We're not going to let Weinstein, this asshole from New York, come and steal our Oscars again. So the next year DreamWorks had American Beauty that year, then they had Gladiator the next year and they won both because they said, ok, we're going to take the Weinstein playbook and double it and we're going to hire, you know, a bunch of strategists to work for us and we're going to place even more ads and we're going to do all these panels. And that's how you it was basically an arms race and that's how this sort of ecosystem, this this award campaigning ecosystem, just ballooned and ballooned and ballooned. 

17:33 - Tara Jabbari (Host)
Forgive my ignorance, but how does the voting work, Because it doesn't really go into it in the book and the campaigning for the Academy. Can you kind of explain how does the voting work? 

17:47 - Michael Shulman (Host)
Yeah, well, so there's about 10,000 people in the Academy right now and they're all various professionals who reach a certain level in the industry and they have different branches, like the acting branch, the directing branch, cinematographers, etc. Everyone nominates in their particular branch, so the actors nominate for the acting categories etc. And then everyone gets to pitch in on Best Picture. Really it's about persuasion. I mean, it's not on like a political campaign, you know, where you have like different states who vote in various primaries and you have to appeal to those people and, just like with a political campaign, there's the sort of the messaging you know like stump speeches. And then there's the ground game, which is like going to, you know, the state fairs and shaking hands and kissing babies and all that. So with the Academy Awards it's you know the messaging is like how do you craft, you know, in the ads for the movie and the, you know, in the, in the interviews that people are doing and the press they're getting, how do you position someone as like, is a certain actor an old-timer who's never gotten their due, or is someone a breakout star? Or is a movie like a really important humanitarian message? Or you know, the most beautifully designed and crafted film of the year from like a, you know, a master like martin scorsese. That's the messaging, and then the ground game is who are these voters? 

19:15
There's like a couple thousand people, and you have to get them first of all to watch the movie in order to nominate it. That's the big hurdle. They have stacks of screeners and they now have an internet portal that they watch it online, but you have to get their attention. Ideally, you want them to actually come out of the house and watch it on the big screen so that you can be awed by the beautiful craft, and so that's why you have these stars in the movies, hosting screenings and stuff like that, making appearances. Oh, you mean, I can go watch poor things on a big screen and Emma Stone will be there. Okay, I'll leave my house and go. It's all about sort of capturing the attention of each and every Academy member, and of course, the Academy has had to over the years you know, rein, in some of this. The Academy has had to over the years you know, rein, in some of this. They are continually making new rules, sort of like campaign finance reform, to try to make sure it doesn't get completely out of hand and corrupt. 

20:05 - Tara Jabbari (Host)
There has been a lot of outcry for the 2024 Oscars because of Barbie and particularly about Barbie, because Margot Robbie did not get nominated for Best Actress. Because Margot Robbie did not get nominated for Best Actress and Greta Gerwig did not get nominated for Best Director. And I was thinking I'm like, well, they're both producers for Barbie, which is nominated for Best Picture, and if it wins for Best Picture, they would get the Oscar. 

20:33 - Michael Shulman (Host)
Margot Robbie would. Yeah, she's nominated as a producer. Greta Gerwig is nominated as a screenwriter with Noah Baumbach, so they both are nominated for other things no-transcript. 

21:01 - Tara Jabbari (Host)
Many times. 

21:02 - Michael Shulman (Host)
Well, the movie was nominated. It got eight nominations. So I think it's sort of a mixed message. Like Barbie certainly wasn't ignored. It got a lot of nominations and some of them were surprise nominations, like America Ferrera and Best Supporting Actress. So the acting branch made that choice and then they didn't choose, or not enough people voted for Margot Robbie and best actress to be nominated there. 

21:28
So I feel like it's a sort of conflicted way of nominating Barbie and I wrote about this for the New Yorker that day the nominations came out. I mean, it's a lot of things at once. It's, first of all, both of those categories are very competitive and you have people like you know, lily Gladstone, who I mentioned, who's, you know, a trailblazing nominee and best actress, and you know Martin Scorsese and Christopher Nolan and Justine Trier and best director. Each category has its own kind of like, it's its own thing, going on its own sort of chemistry, and there are also different branches, as I mentioned, who made those different choices. They're totally different people nominating for Best Director versus Best Actress huge fun blockbuster, you know. 

22:28
I think the Academy has traditionally not always embraced big populist kind of movies like that. 

22:30
You know it reminded me of Jaws in 1976, which was, of course, the biggest movie of its time, a big crowd pleaser, and it was nominated for Best Picture. 

22:42
But Steven Spielberg was snubbed for best director and that only got four nominations, but you could sort of tell that the Academy didn't quite know what to do with it. Barbie is also a comedy and the Academy does not have a great track record with comedies or comic performances. And then, of course, as many people pointed out, there's a gender element to it and it's a very feminist movie. So it's something you'd naturally point to, and Hillary Clinton sort of got on the bandwagon of, you know, talking about it online. And certainly in the director category there has been a big gender barrier, you know. I mean there have been several female winners in the last couple of years and this year has a female nominee, justine Triet, for Anatomy of a Fall. But that doesn't explain what happened with Best Actress, because that's an all-female category, you know, like Margot Robbie, she sort of lost out to other women and including the first Native American nominated in the category, I love Marty, but that movie was way too long. 

23:48 - Tara Jabbari (Host)
However, lily, she held her own. I'm like you know she's the. She wears the pants in that relationship While I'm watching. I'm like she's holding her own against Leo and against, you know, robert. So I was like she's going to get nominated, if not win, and I was like that's a well-deserved nomination. But it was an it's an interesting thing and I that's what I was thinking Like I think it is a bit of a gender thing, because they're like, I don't know, it might be a little too much for Greta to get too many nominations. That was my theory, but I was like, oh well, I'll be talking to Michael soon, I think. 

24:26 - Michael Shulman (Host)
I mean maybe. I mean certainly historically, if you look at the entire history of, like best director, there are not a lot of women in it and there continue to be, like you know, maybe one a year. Last year I think there were no women in the category, which is a real problem. But I also think that the directing branch is inclined more toward sort of dramas, toward I mean, this year you had two international films, not just an annual fall comedy, summer blockbuster, yeah, I just don't know if that's where the taste of that branch lies. I don't think it's like a conspiracy. Let's not nominate Greta for too many things, because again, they're not the same people nominating for screenplay. So it's like a different branch. The optics of it, it looks, the optics of it are a certain thing, but when you look under the hood it's just a little more complicated and a little harder to read. 

25:31 - Tara Jabbari (Host)
You kind of talk about in the book that you're like, theoretically, the Oscars is supposed to be about giving the unaccoladed to art the best in art, and art is quite subjective. It's not like sports where there is a clear winner, right, but we want to have a winner and that's the thing is. We were like when people were really upset about the barbie nominations and I'm like guys, no one talks about driving, miss daisy, everyone we study do the right thing, right, and who won the oscar that year and who did not get nominated for best director? It was spike lee. But we still actually study and talk about do the right thing and which one's actually the better movie, arguably, um. And so I was like it's not about the nomination at the end of the day, time will tell. 

26:26 - Michael Shulman (Host)
But do you think that the oscars and we kind of touch it a little bit in the book by you know, like alfred hitchcock kind of has those- what's the alfred hitchcock thing is his, uh, his term, the mcguffin, which is like at the beginning of the movie, like someone's someone's car breaks down or you know, someone needs, like. It's like the little plot device that just gets the story moving. The actual like meat of the story is not just little, this little thing on page three of the script, so the MacGuffin I was. You know, in the book I say that the horse race of what wins and what doesn't, that's kind of the MacGuffin. 

27:03
What interests me most about Oscar season is sort of what it reveals about the state of Hollywood at any given moment. And I think that if you look to the Oscars as a kind of perfect barometer of cinematic worth, of what is the best movie, what is the best performance, you're always going to be frustrated or disappointed because they're always getting it totally wrong. But if you look at the Oscars as a kind of magic mirror that shows you what Hollywood is thinking and how it sees itself, they're extremely interesting and extremely rich. And that's sort of how I tried to write about the Oscars. 

27:42 - Tara Jabbari (Host)
Yeah, and you did a great job, because at the end of the day I was like no one's gonna change my mind if I really. I mean, I still love the movie spice world. Say what you will, it's a great movie. But and then at the same time, like shawshank, redemption is one of my favorite movies, didn't win anything at the oscars, or maybe it won a couple things, but it didn't win best picture and yet it's considered one of the best films of all time, right? So it's a little weird kind of thing where when you necessarily, if it says Oscar winning whatever director or writer or whatever, it doesn't necessarily mean you aren't the actual best for everybody, right, because it's art. 

28:29 - Michael Shulman (Host)
Well, yeah, and I think part of the fun of Oscar season is arguing over it. Like you know, art isn't meant to be ranked. Like sports, there are no clear winners. Like you can't, it's sort of an impossible calculation. It's totally subjective. And yet I do think art is meant to be discussed and Oscar season gives us all a platform to talk about what we liked in movies over the year, what we thought was the best movie or the best actor or the best actress, and, I think, disagreeing with the Academy and raging about what they got wrong and what they left off, and that's part of it. I think that's part of the fun and it's part of what engages us as moviegoers. So in that sense, it's every year there's going to be something. You know everything that there's going to be some someone who's left off, and it you know. People go online to, you know, rage against it and talk about how stupid the Academy is. That's the MacGuffin. It's like the Academy nominations get us all talking about what we thought about these movies. 

29:28 - Tara Jabbari (Host)
You did such a great job, and Oscar Wars is out now. Is there anything else that you want to share and promote? 

29:36 - Michael Shulman (Host)
I mean mostly the book out in paperback. You can read all about Betty Davis and Sidney Poitier all the way up through me, watching the slap from the balcony and seeing Will Smith dancing at the Vanity Fair party to get in jiggy with it hours later with his Oscar Huge smile on his face Covers a lot of ground. And then also, you know, my work's at the New Yorker, so anyone who wants to seek out my coverage of this year's Oscars, I will be there in March and I'll be sort of reporting on my evening. 

30:11 - Tara Jabbari (Host)
Well, thank you so much, Michael, for coming. 

30:13 - Michael Shulman (Host)
Thank you so much. It's a pleasure. 

30:17 - VO (Host)
Thank you for listening to Media and Monuments, a service of women in film and video. Please remember to review, rate and subscribe wherever you listen to this podcast. For more information about WIF, please visit our website at wifasandfrankv. As in victororg, media and Monuments is produced by Sandra Abrams, candice Block, brandon Ferry and Tara Jabari, and edited by Emma Klein and Juliana Yellen, with audio production and mix by Steve Lack Audio. For more information about our podcast, visit mediaandmonumentscom.