1927-1928: Wings

The Oscars are ready for lift off

The very first Academy Awards, held in 1929 for films released between August 1927 and July 1928, were very different from the ceremony we all know and (mostly) love. For one thing, the winners were announced well in advance. Most people think that Wings was the first “Best Picture” and thus most people are wrong. In the first few years, there was no “Best Picture” but a “Best Production” award. In fact, the 1927-28 awards arguably awarded two best pictures, but we’ll open that can of worms next week.

In other interesting Oscar trivia, acting awards at the first year were presented for a body of work during the 12 month period and not necessarily one particular film. Thus Emil Jannings became the first Best Actor for roles in both The Last Command and The Way of All Flesh. The Way of All Flesh has the dubious distinction of being the only lost film that won an acting award (meaning no known copies of it exist). Wings, the “best production” winner was considered lost until a copy was located in a French theater some years later.  So with that segue way, let’s talk about Wings.

Since last year’s The Artist, I’ve developed a fascination with silent movies. The lack of sound, the accompanying music and the exaggerated pantomime movements of the actors give the films an ethereal quality to them. Wings is no exception as it feels like it exists in a black and white (or sepia toned) dream to me. Despite the Academy’s reputation for saluting arty-farty movies, Wings was actually a huge big-budget blockbuster for its day, with amazing aerial shots where the cameras were mounted to the planes and the actors themselves acted as stunt flyers in some instances.

Wings is the story of a love square – Tom-boy Mary (1920s sex pot Clara Bow) is in love with poor Jack (Charles Buddy Rogers (not the pro-wrestler (only 3 people will get that joke))) who fancies “Big city girl” Sylvia (Jobyna Ralston) who is in love with and loved by rich boy David (Richard Arlen). Jack and David both go off to fly planes in World War I, and despite initial dislike of each other over the whole Sylvia thing, eventually bond over some homoerotic training camp sparring. Mary herself joins the war effort as a driver, while Sylvia disappears from the movie except as a plot device.

The movie moves kind of slowly, especially in its big battle sequences. Once you’ve seen one plane catch on fire and slowly spiral to the ground, you’ve seen every plane catch on fire and slowly spiral to the ground. The director also hand tinted the gun shots and fires as a bright orange which is oddly distracting from the black and white film (It’s no Schindler’s List girl in a red coat). There is a L.O.N.G. set piece where a drunken Jack sees bubbles everywhere and starts shaking everything and everyone in sight to create more of these animated bubble. It’s a bizarre fantasy-like sequence that goes on way t0o long and seems out of place in a movie about the hardships of war.

Eventually Jack and David get to the real fighting, both against the lousy Germans and each other, not unlike the plot of Pearl Harbor. The movie also contains some of the most overwrought title cards in silent film history, including this personal favorite: “Like a mighty malestrom of destruction, the war now drew into its center the power and the pride of all the earth.”

I found Wings to be a so-so film with the story behind it actually more interesting than what shows up on screen. It’s worth a look as a historical piece but not really a blow away movie.

Final Trivia: Wings is also the one of only two silent movies to win Best Picture (and the only *real* silent movie if you take a look at The Artist) and one of only three movies to win Best Picture without its director being nominated. Next week we’ll look at the “lost Best Picture” of the first academy awards, Sunrise.

Operation: Oscar

A (not very) brief summation of why I’m here…

The very first Oscars I watched was when I was eight. Because it was a school night (Tuesday, maybe) I had to tape the last half of the awards and watch them at a later date, with most of the big awards (Best Picture, Best Actor/Actress) spoiled for me by the time I saw the envelopes opened. This was 1988 so The Last Emperor won everything in sight, seemingly, and I really didn’t know what a lot of the awards (sound editing? art direction?) meant. This sad habit of only being able to watch a portion of the awards live continued until a teacher’s strike in 1993 meant there was no school the next day and I was able to see Unforgiven take best picture in real-time with the rest of the world (The 1993 awards were for 1992 movies, remember). My dad even took me to see it a few days later, despite its hard R rating.
I think part of the reason I like the awards is because they set some sort of verifiable achievement to an art form, almost like sports. Baseball has the World Series. Football has a Super Bowl. Why not a night for movies to sum up the entire year and say what was particularly good in that year?

In a more pragmatic sense, when I was a little kid, the Oscars offered a glimpse of movies I could hardly dream of seeing. All the acting awards, plus the Best Picture nominees, got to present clips from the films, and for a little kid who digested every movie ad he saw on TV, but couldn’t actually view too many movies with a rating higher than PG, it was an overload of information. I still remember a clip from the 1987 awards for Best Actor which had this fully clothed man walking into water. Crazyness. I don’t even remember what movie it was (and it clearly wasn’t the winner because Michael Douglas won that year), but what an impression of a cinematic world outside of cartoons. It was pure catnip for a burgeoning movie buff (Checking Wikipedia the movie was most likely Marcello Mastroianni in Dark Eyes).  The clips have been cut way back at the Oscars recently and even Best Picture nominees show more of a trailer for the film than any specific clip, which I think is too bad, even though at 32 and living in a reasonably sized city, I have access to pretty much everything nominated, shorts and documentaries notwithstanding. I still love the clips.(Ironically, The Last Emperor is the newest Best Picture I have never seen).

The Oscars are weirdly polarizing, because most people seem to care about who wins, but often times they HATE who wins and dismiss the awards as being out of touch. Without a doubt, the Oscars are tied to a certain type of film, although what that type is has changed through the decades. We’re at a very strange period now where Oscar winners are typically arty “prestige” pictures put out by a subsidiary of a major studio, that generally don’t make that much money and may only show in art houses, unless there is a re-release when the nominations are announced. And yet, at various times, hugely successful blockbusters have also won Best Picture. Sometimes Best Pictures are widely remembered (Gone with the Wind, The Godfather), some beloved or critically adored movies lost out to movies that the consensus holds to be of far lesser quality (It’s a Wonderful Life, Citizen Kane) and some winners would probably be relegated to the cinematic dustbins of history if not for the win (Tom Jones, Cimarron).

So here is my mission: To watch every Best Picture winner, in order, from the debut ceremony to modern-day. It’s a fete that will take a while. Even if I owned all 84 films, I couldn’t watch them in 84 consecutive nights. I’m at the mercy of my schedule and my one-dvd-at-a-time subscription to Netflix to get a lot of this done.(I don’t know enough to download bootleg copies on the internet, and even if I did, for such an exercise as I propose, it feels dirty and like cheating.) I have already seen approximately 50 percent of the Best Pictures, some once many years ago, some several times, but I plan to start fresh and watch them all. My goal is to review 3-4 movies per month, adding in interesting trivia from the awards and the movie itself when merited. I will also occasionally offer bonus reviews of non-winners that still mark a personal milestone for me, however eccentric those milestones may be (but we’ll get to that in good time). I’ll also have to “jump ahead” in the project when Oscar time comes around to catch up with that year’s nominees (Since 1996, I have seen all but two Best Picture nominees *before* the awards and caught the two that I missed within months of the ceremony). I hope that by doing this, I can share my love of movies and also find an enjoyable, unique way to write about them and the awards show I do truly love.

And with that in mind, let’s open the envelopes!