The Oscars are Hollywood’s company picnic. Granted, the nature of the film industry makes the character of the picnic unique (the food and drink are partaken afterward, people dress up, and it’s televised), but at its heart, the event is an employee awards presentation. So why all the spectacle? It’s because of us.

Image - © Bettmann/CORBIS --- 20 Mar 1952, Hollywood, California --- Movie fans and parking attendants jam Hollywood Blvd. as stars arrive at the 24th annual presentation of Academy Awards. Used with permission.

To start with, none of this is new. The Oscars have always had this aura. Louis B. Mayer came up with the idea in the late 1920s as a way of counteracting Hollywood’s image as a whore bent on seducing the country with the lewdness of its lifestyles, both in film and in real life. The industry had experienced a number of scandals involving murders, drug trafficking, and a supposed rape, among other things. During the 1920s, about half of the nation’s state legislatures considered laws censoring or banning Hollywood cinema.

The Academy Awards were first held in 1929 as a means of promoting a focus on quality within the industry, but perhaps more importantly, to communicate that Hollywood valued its craft and to focus attention on the stars that enabled audiences to see past the industry’s perceived moral compromise. While the first year’s awards were not broadcast, starting with the 1930 Oscars, the event was broadcast over radio. Since 1953 the event has been televised.¹

It is in understanding the nature of the film industry that we can unravel some of the Oscars’ magnetism. We may think that Hollywood cinema is primarily storytelling, special effects, fantasy portrayal and the like, but at its core it is relational. In the early 1910s, film executives were surprised to find out that audiences wanted to know the identities of film actors. Eventually, the studios realized that by publicizing carefully constructed identities for their “stars,” they could sell more tickets by encouraging the audience habit of choosing films according to which stars were in them.²

Stars and the cinematic and “real” worlds they occupied took on a role in the lives of their audiences much larger than just providing entertainment or escape. The cultural historian Warren Susman argued that Hollywood culture constituted an alternate religious system. Just as the church taught believers how to live in the world, what to worship and what their ultimate destinies were, Hollywood socialized generations of viewers as to what constituted the good life and what should be worshipped while reinforcing a secular system of belief rooted in glitz and materialism. Stars, both as onscreen personas and in their glamorous personal lives, served as role models, guiding audiences in how to behave in modern, consumerist culture.³

As Gaylyn Studlar has argued, particular stars in particular kinds of films came to fulfill collective and individual social and psychic needs.  To cite just one example, between the 1930s and 1950s, James Stewart’s characters embodied and symbolically resolved our collective wrestling with a host of issues: purpose/small town life (It’s a Wonderful Life), pretend (Harvey), politics (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington), insanity (Vertigo) and personal boundaries (Rear Window). The same could be said of more recent stars such as Meryl Streep, Jack Nicholson, Julia Roberts, Tom Cruise, Matt Damon, and many others.

In a country where all are supposedly equal, stars, or celebrities, as they have evolved, have become our royalty. (If you question this, note how effective the Obama presidential campaign became by promoting the senator as a celebrity persona.) Although they are mere humans, we care about celebrities and the world behind the media they star in because of these roles they perform for us.

Beyond these other aspects, we also care about the inner world of film because of the nature of identification. Films, television shows and other types of media content succeed because we see ourselves in them. In a successful story (real or fictional) we experience emotions through characters (or reality TV personalities). They give us experiences and take us on journeys that we want to share.

The Oscars offer us a chance to be close to those who conjure and enact stories that give color, passion and texture to our lives. We care about what stars wear and how they look because their bodies are the vessels through which we imagine the worlds they enable us to inhabit. We experience their worlds through their eyes, ears, taste, touch and smell. We need their magic.

And what does a website dealing with Christianity and culture have to learn from such a spectacle? First, we should note the importance of popular culture. It is a well we come to not just for relief from the world, but as a means of entering into the world. Largely due to their impermanence, media like cinema are important to us as a means of embellishing. They enable us to imaginatively try out behaviors, life experiences and outlooks.

Secondly, the battle for hearts and minds is being won largely through portrayal, not propositions. From Will & Grace to Milk, attitudes toward behaviors such as homosexuality are shifting significantly as audiences identify with characters that embody specific lifestyles. Meanwhile, the church continues to behave as if the game is happening more or less within its walls.

With a few exceptions, apart from reactionary, demonizing rhetoric, entertainment culture continues to be treated as if it is not serious and therefore not worthy of the church’s attention. We fund missions and ignore the global proliferation of media content shaping the souls of every people group on the planet. We decide better just to leave it alone.

Guess what? Read the blogs, watch the Grammys or Emmys, look at what people are paying attention to. The human landscape is being continually redefined by our participation in entertainment culture. The Internet, cell phones, television and even Netflix put the worlds of celebrity and mass-produced story in the forefront of our lives. Believing otherwise is like dismissing the Oscars as the handing out of a bunch of trophies.

_________
¹History of the Academy Awards, oscars.org, http://www.oscars.org/awards/academyawards/about/history.html. <2.21.2009>
²Richard deCordova, The Emergence of the Star System in America, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001).
³Warren I. Susman, “‘Personality’ and the Making of Twentieth Century Culture,” in Culture as History: the Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 284.
⁴Gaylyn Studlar, This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

Chris Simmons is Editor of gospelandculture.org and Executive Director of The Gospel & Culture Project.