Summary/Review of Alan Stone's Article "Best Picture: How Far Will Hollywood Go?"

Summary

                Alan Stone wrote this article as a reaction to the award of Oscar’s Best Picture, to Paul Haggis’ Crash, instead of Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, insisting that it was the latter’s defeat, rather than the former’s victory, to the supposed surprise of everyone. Citing Annie Proulx, whose short story inspired Brokeback Mountain, the writer contends that it was the voters who could not see beyond their boundaries to award her movie instead. After a short summary on the movie, the writer expounds on the cultural divide in reactions between the gay community and mainstream audiences, and how the movie evolved from American tolerance into derisive humor. Alan Stone then reviews Crash, before giving a summary on what the movie storyline was about. Parallels are drawn with Driving Miss Daisy, another “undeserved Oscar” winner. Finally, he concludes that the Crash’s Best Picture was evidence of the limits to which Hollywood was willing to transcend stereotypes, finally shedding light to the meaning of the title, “... How Far Will Hollywood Go?”.

Reflection

                Reading the title, it gives a portrayal that there was something wrong with the recent award of Best Picture, without betraying too much on what it was. I felt that the writer did well in setting the context, in which the reader is led into a sense of expectation and inevitability of Brokeback Mountain’s victory in the award’s category, before dropping the anvil with Jack Nicholson’s (you could almost always remember his grin) announcement of Crash’s victory. And this is where questions need to be asked. The writer’s choice of Annie Proulx’s quote, coupled with the mention of John Wayne, would set the tone of stereotype and boundaries with which the writer centres his article upon. Yet, it is perhaps quite glaring that her comments were almost surely biased against the actual winner, for obvious reason that she was the originator of Brokeback Mountain.

The writer then quotes “Industry Insiders” citing “homophobia and other resentments” without caring to mention who these insiders were. To seal his agenda against Crash, he reveals that the show was premiered too long before the awards to be considered, as if that criteria in itself should be considered during nomination. Surely enough, he insists that the makers of Crash had played a masterful hand in handing out complimentary copies of the DVD as it was the kind of movie that “gets better the second time you see it”. Once again, a very subjective comment on the movie. His use of hedge phrases like “could be” and “might well” do not make the article convincingly neutral, which by now takes a persuasive nature.

A rather well hidden manner with which the writer utilises to win the reader over was the structuring of his article. With Brokeback Mountain, he furnishes a summary on the show, before a rather lengthy review of it. In this review, he uses key words such as taboo, tolerance, masculinity, and derisive to describe the show’s inability to push beyond stereotypical and cultural boundaries, to its detriment. In contrast, the writer starts off his descriptive of Crash in a very subjective critic of the movie, insisting that the show was in essence a copy of old ideas past, with its artistic intricacies only traceable upon second viewing. His correlation with Driving Miss Daisy, another “undeserving Oscar winner”, seems insufficient to substantiate his comments. After subjecting the reader to such negative expectations, he then writes the movie summary proper. One has to question how any objective reading of this section is now to take place.

Finally, the writer concludes with what he has been trying to convince the reader all along; that “Proulx was right”, “the Heffalumps in the Academy... want to be assured not threatened.” And that Crash’s victory was sufficient evidence of how to be successful, a film needed to “stretch clichés but not break them”. Points I feel, whilst should not be excluded from consideration, and perhaps require more substantiation, even when the subjective nature of movie reviews are taken into account. All in all, the article quite possibly succeeds on an emotive, persuasive account, but probably fails to stand up to more critical, objective analysis.