Hollywood confidential

The Oscars have dominated the awards calendar for decades, thanks to ruthless tactics, powerful PR and all-American values. Will that be enough to be keep them at the top, asks David Thomson
Oscars (Academy Awards)
Old-fashioned American success... Academy Awards ready to be handed out. Photograph: Richard Drew/AP
On Sunday February 25, at some point in the prolonged evening, Sid Ganis will step before the cameras and welcome the watching millions to the Academy. I know Sid personally, and I like him - he is sincere, hard-working, popular. He is an ideal president of the Academy, and a brilliant poseur in the sense that the Academy does not really exist, except as an idea in our minds.

This year, with The Queen (in every sense) very much a figure on February 25, there are intriguing comparisons. Yes, the Queen (the monarchy) has palaces, crowns and great paintings - but very few of them belong to her or her family. They are ours, the assets of the nation. I know it's still possible to believe that the British monarchy comes to us in direct descent from the will of God. But history gives a different story: of "noblemen" claiming a crown, finding it under a bush, having their heads chopped off for arrogance and lending support to the entire system of class as an obfuscation of merit.

Now look at the Academy. Yes, it is a fine word, with intimations of someone coming down from Olympus with the true nature and structure of the film business. It can leave you believing that someone is in charge of Hollywood, and that the names coming out of the envelopes are as "right" and deserving as the decisions of the nine supreme court justices.

The Academy can be lordly and authoritative. It can take the attitude that if you have a dog named "Oscar" and you call him, you owe the institution 10 cents. Its way of trying to place itself over and above absurd, upstart opportunists such as the Golden Globes and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association is to imply that the Academy is as fundamental as the effect of light on silver emulsion in film.

That's not true. The Academy was not there from the beginning - and very few movies made today are bothering with silver emulsion. The Academy is a small club (maybe 6,000 members), that makes glaring and terrible mistakes at every awards evening, and which is anxiously trying to forget the rather squalid and very opportunistic ways they came into being.

This is not an attack on Sid Ganis or the staff of the Academy. They are terrific people, most of them madly in love with film (albeit with an age and a glory that have passed). The Academy would be praised if only for their Margaret Herrick library, which is one of the great resources for film scholarship in the world, and one of the places where veterans from the business are most comfortable leaving their papers and records (or, at least, the ones that make them look good). Anyone writing about the history of film is indebted to the Academy library, and enjoys the awards evening because so much of the television income goes to maintain the library.

But let us be clear about why the Academy was created. The moguls who ran Hollywood formed it in the mid to late 1920s because they feared attack. There were many parts of America and the world that were suspicious of the movies: vulgar, sensational entertainments that made kids play truant, instilled crazy ideas of history and fact, and might even be seen as a drug to appease the masses in troubled times. If you doubt any of this, go back to the press of the 1920s and see the attacks on Hollywood - from churches, from government and from academia.

That hostility was sharpened in the 1920s by a series of scandals that came out of Hollywood - drug deaths, murders, orgies and so on. They were often exaggerated (in part because the impact of Hollywood and the movies has been to exaggerate nearly everything about America). The stories were not necessarily characteristic: there were many people in Hollywood who simply made as much money as they could and ignored drugs, jazz babies and big parties. But there was unquenchable evidence that barely educated beauties given a lot of money were often out of control. A few power-brokers in Hollywood saw a need to generate much better publicity. The Academy was PR.

Yet it was more. The ruthless money-making wing of Hollywood was horrified at the emergence of trade unions. Unionisation began with menial workers, but it was easy to see the threat to the booty if people like actors, writers and directors ever got the bug. And it was to scotch that possibility that the Academy was formed as a forum where industrial grievances might be settled. It was a stupid hope (but no one should suppose that these guys were smart), and by the 1930s there were unions throughout Hollywood - and they were making trouble. Down the road, their lessons helped the crucial breakthrough in the picture business, the one whereby the "talent" became profit participants to rival the studios or the companies.

So the Academy was intended to alter the public's view of the business, to have us think that the whole thing was sanctified or ordained. No, of course it didn't work. At that time, no one quite saw the degree to which the public fed on the scandals. It's more fun to think of massive philandering on the part of a Hollywood star than his quiet buying-up of a quarter of the San Fernando Valley. And a kind of social contract set in: pretty kids can become stars, so long as a few of them fail and come crashing down.

Americans always knew that people were awful - no matter what Hollywood films tried to suggest about nobility, altruism, etc. We are even forgiving of the painful realisation that the Academy awards aren't right or sane or forgivable. Part of the difficulty is that the Academy wants to be nice, or hates to be unkind. This year, for instance, Peter O'Toole is up for the eighth time.

But this is not about justice. We should not expect it. Something far more serious is afoot. Once upon a time, the awards were dominated (as Hollywood intended) by what you'd have to call mainstream American pictures. Go to 1939, and the nominees for best picture were Dark Victory, Goodbye, Mr Chips, Love Affair, Mr Smith Goes to Washington, Ninotchka, Of Mice and Men, Stagecoach, The Wizard of Oz, Wuthering Heights. And the winner: Gone With the Wind. But not Jean Renoir's La Règle du Jeu, now reckoned one of the greatest films ever made - because it flopped when it opened in Paris. (Note that Renoir's La Grande Illusion had been nominated the previous year.)

But the glory of the mainstream was unmistakable. More than 60 years later, we still look at those grand pictures. Yet increasingly in modern times, Hollywood has a harder job nominating its own pictures. This year, The Queen and Babel are foreign; Little Miss Sunshine (a Sundance winner) is not in the mainstream; Letters from Iwo Jima is far more the whim of Clint Eastwood than a "regular" picture; and if The Departed is the closest to the mainstream, it is also a remake of a Hong Kong movie. I am not the only film critic who reckons it's another thin year in which any of the films could win. Many of us also believe that the German film The Lives of Others is easily the best picture of the year.

Here's the point: the Academy desperately needs old-fashioned American success. But as George W Bush is learning, that syrup is in short supply now. The Academy has a show once a year that funds the whole operation. They realise now that other award shows rival them. They feel secure for the moment, but a small slip could spell trouble. In truth, the American public has already lost the habit of going to the movies.

So the Academy is looking to find other sources of revenue. It plans a real movie museum, in Los Angeles - can you believe such a place hasn't already been built? That may change their fiscal situation. But it may come too late, at a time when movies feel as old hat to a younger generation as radio, telephones that had to be plugged in, or flicks like Gone With the Wind.

· Live Oscar coverage begins on Sunday at 12.30am, on Sky Movies 1