The Oscars and Elections

Daniel Day-Lewis in Lincoln

With Barack Obama's victory over Mitt Romney in the U.S. Presidential election, I started thinking as to how these sorts of things effect the film industry, and whether there's any pattern to how election years shape things like the Oscars. I was reminded of 2008, when it seemed all too easy to connect Barack Obama's groundbreaking victory and its message of "hope and change" with the Best Picture winner that year, the joyous Slumdog Millionaire. And four years earlier, with the United States embroiled in the Iraq war and George W. Bush prevailing over John Kerry, it seems fitting that the Academy would go for a more downbeat choice, Million Dollar Baby, from noted conservative Clint Eastwood. And now, with Obama's reelection in 2012, does that necessarily indicate that the Academy will choose its Best Picture in response to the current political climate? Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, for example, has been the de facto frontrunner ever since it was scheduled and clearly holds many attractive parallels to America today with its divided political landscape. Or will something like Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty, focusing on the SEAL team that killed Osama Bin Laden, get a boost in its chances as a film that tells the story of one of Obama's greatest first-term accomplishments?

Obviously, it would be far too simplistic to claim that certain films win Best Picture solely as a response to whether a Hollywood-favoured candidate wins the presidency. For starters, the film industry has never been nearly so liberal-minded as its detractors would have you believe, and the Academy likely skews ever further conservative than the industry at large given the prevalence of wealthy producers and older voters amongst its membership. So assuming that Hollywood was so downcast after Bush's reelection that it felt the need to vote Million Dollar Baby would be silly. But at the same time, elections are often used to provide a backdrop to national feelings as a whole. And the Oscars, of course, don't exist in a vacuum: it's common sense to see movies (like all media) as a reflection of the times that we live in. So looking back at the films that won Best Picture over the past several decades, I was wondering what kind of conclusions we could draw.

David Niven in Around the World in 80 Days

The idea of the Academy's choices being straight historical reflections seemingly bears truth in the 1950's, where the United States was flush with a booming post-war prosperity boom and all about conventional values, the beginnings of the Atomic Age, and the Red Scare of the Soviet Union. In both 1952 and 1956, Dwight Eisenhower handily defeated Democrat Adlai Stevenson at the polls, and the Academy followed by voting two of its most benign, lightweight Best Pictures of all time: Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth and Michael Anderson's Around the World in 80 Days.

But then we come to the 1960's, when in a decade dominated by social change and political upheaval, these same unprovocative Best Picture choices dominate in election years. In 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater in the aftermath of the JFK assassination, and the Best Picture winner was George Cukor's My Fair Lady. The 1968 election that saw Richard Nixon defeat Democrat Hubert Humphrey and independent segregationist George Wallace was conducted against an even more chaotic backdrop that included the Vietnam war, race riots, and the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.. The Best Picture winner that year? Another, even lighter musical: Oliver!, by Carol Reed, which toned down the already-defanged stage version of Dickens' classic.

Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine in The Apartment

The closest exception to this era of lightweight winners came in 1960, when Billy Wilder's The Apartment won Best Picture and Kennedy defeated Nixon to win the presidency. The Apartment, however, is a film that stands out on other merits from other Best Picture winners of that time; it was the last black and white film to win Best Picture until Schindler's List in 1993, and as an intimate, character-based comedy/drama, it was a marked contrast between the musicals and epics that dominated the Oscars in that time. (In the years surrounding 1960 for example, the winning Best Pictures were Gigi, Ben-Hur, West Side Story, and Lawrence of Arabia). It does seem interesting, however, that the year that the Academy went for something different was the same year that Kennedy was seen as the beginning of a "new era" in the presidency, being the first Catholic President as well as the youngest elected, not to mention the election itself being the first in which television and "new media" played a major role.

Marlon Brando in The Godfather

The 1970's would bring two completely different presidential elections, and with them two of the most dissimilar Best Picture winners that one could think of. With Nixon's landslide re-election over George McGovern in 1972, Hollywood was in the midst of its own kind of cultural revolution not that dissimilar from the national one a decade previous. The studio-dominated era of the 1950's and 1960's, as well as the stifling Production Code were out, and with them the musicals and epics. In their place was the era of the director, and the winner of Best Picture in 1972 was arguably its greatest achievement: Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, a dark tale of the family, the American Dream, and the cost of their success that seemed to sum up how the nation itself would feel when Nixon was forced from office not long after. Then, in 1976, with the United States looking to move on from Nixon's legacy and electing Jimmy Carter over his successor, Gerald Ford, it was the ultimate underdog  story that triumphed at the Oscars: Sylvester Stallone's Rocky.

With the 80's and 90's, it's more difficult to pin down a real relation. The 1980's political landscape was, of course, dominated by Ronald Reagan, who was not just an actor and Governor of California, but a former president of the Screen Actors Guild. Reagan would defeat Jimmy Carter in 1980 and Walter Mondale in 1984, and the respective Best Picture winners in those years were Robert Redford's Ordinary People and Milos Forman's Amadeus, both character-driven pieces that, in a decade driven by individualism, do showcase its destructive effects both on the family (People) and the self (Amadeus). The 1988 Best Picture, following George Bush's victory over Michael Dukakis in what was seen as an affirmation of "Reagan's third term" was Barry Levinson's Rain Man, and its story of a selfish yuppie forced to make amends and reunite with his family can be seen as an introspective reaction to the events of the decade at large, a sort of reverse of the previous two winners. (Ironically, Oliver Stone's Wall Street, which would be seen in future years as the definitive 1980's film, didn't receive a Best Picture nomination at all).

Russell Crowe in Gladiator

When Bill Clinton returned the Democrats to power in 1992, and then defeated Bob Dole to win re-election in 1996, the Best Picture winners were Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven and Anthony Minghella's The English Patient, both throwbacks in their own ways to earlier genres: the Western and the epic romance. Both films were modern takes on these old ideas, and there's a connection to be made there with Clinton as the younger, more modernist president on contrast to the far older Reagans, Bushes, and Doles that made up his contemporaries.

It does seem apt that when we get to 2000 and one of America's most contentious elections, where George W. Bush defeated Al Gore amidst the "hanging chads" and Florida recounts, we also find one of the most wide-open and divided Best Picture fields in recent memory, with Ridley Scott's Gladiator eventually winning the prize. Like Unforgiven and The English Patient, Gladiator was another Hollywood "rebirth" of an old genre in the swords-and-sandals epic (this trend would continue with Chicago winning in 2002 and The Lord of the Rings in 2003 - bringing the musical and fantasy film back to the forefront), but it was also the most "Americanized", as well as the last real summer blockbuster to win Best Picture. In the newer, often smaller post 9/11 world, one wonders if a film like Gladiator could win again. We saw in 2009 that for all of Avatar's blockbuster credibility, it was still the film that spoke more to the times at hand, The Hurt Locker, that won Best Picture that year.

Overall though, it seems that while in some cases you could look at a Best Picture film as that direct reflection of history, in other cases the reflection seems to be a far more hazy, perhaps subconscious one. There's clearly never a direct answer or reason that one can use to say why a film captivated the Academy at that point in time, but that doesn't mean that you can't say that the world landscape surrounding didn't influence the choice. So whether the Academy goes for an seemingly obvious choice this year such as Lincoln, reflecting America's divided political landscape, or a clearly political yet less blatant selection like Ben Affleck's Argo, or even something like The Silver Linings Playbook that doesn't have any political connotation at all but would be an uplifting choice in the same vein as the musicals of the 1960's, it will definitely be interesting to look back on its choices a few years from how and wonder how exactly they came about.