The perfect lead-in to this weekend’s Academy Awards ceremony, Michael Schulman’s Oscar Wars is a broad overview of Hollywood history filtered through the prism of their biggest night. In eleven chapters, he focuses in on the moments and the movements that have changed the movie business and the culture at large.
The book starts, logically, at the beginning, as the nascent industry conceives of the Motion Picture Academy and its awards banquet. There are multiple motivations for doing so, from establishing film as a legitimate artform to consolidating studio power in order to keep the labor movement in check. In its infancy, the Academy Awards barely survived year to year, as they struggled to win over skeptical talent. It was also a time of great change in Hollywood, as the emergence of talkies threatened careers and demanded an influx of new talent.
A late chapter, centered on the Academy Awards honoring the best films of 1950, finds Hollywood reaching maturity, old enough as an industry to critique its seedier side, as shown in two of the year’s leading nominees, All About Eve and Sunset Boulevard. Both were about actresses aging out of their careers and struggling as a result, a reality both Gloria Swanson and Bette Davis could too easily relate to.
There are chapters concerning McCarthyism and the blacklist, the youth movement of the ’60s and the emergence of the New Hollywood, the excess of the ’80s (which reached its nadir with the disastrous 1989 Oscar ceremony, featuring Rob Lowe’s infamous dance with Snow White), and the absurdly expensive Oscar campaigns of Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax, which engendered the cottage industries of Oscar campaign specialists and Oscar pundits alike.
There are drawbacks to Schulman’s approach. Because he is dipping into the Oscars at intervals, some titanic Hollywood figures are given scant attention just by virtue of not being particularly relevant to those particular years. There is not much here about Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, or Brian de Palma. Actors like Harrison Ford, Robert de Niro, or Meryl Streep are similarly absent. There are also larger gaps as Shulman nears the present. He covers the 1999 race between Shakespeare in Love and Saving Private Ryan, then skips all the way to the infamous Moonlight-La La Land envelope fiasco of the 2017 ceremony, stopping only briefly in between to discuss Halle Berry’s history-making win in 2002.
But there is a lot of fascinating information to be gleaned from Oscar Wars, especially for the Hollywood obsessive. (This is a not book for the increasing number of people who have never seen a movie made before they were born.) I particularly enjoyed his breakdown of the nominees at the 1976 ceremony, which included One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Barry Lyndon, Nashville, Dog Day Afternoon, and Jaws, with Steven Spielberg cast in the part of the film nerd unwittingly destroying the momentum of the looser, wilder New Hollywood artistes.
This is quite a lengthy book, so unfortunately you probably don’t have time to get through it before Sunday night. But if you’d like some tidbits to sprinkle into conversation at your Oscar watch party in 2025, this is just the book for you.