The Social Network, one of 10 contenders for the Best Picture award at the 2010 Academy Awards (set for Feb. 27), tells the story of Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg. Although charmed in business, he is portrayed as an unlikeable Harvard computer nerd with negligible social skills, business ethics or personal charm.
In the opening scene, a young lady walks out from a date with him, calling him “an a******.” In the closing scene, as he is being sued by various friends and business partners whom he has betrayed, a sympathetic female lawyer pays him a compliment: “You’re actually not an a******, but you’re trying awfully hard to be one.” In these two bookend scenes and all that falls in between, it’s apparent that the man who taught 500 million Facebook members how to “friend” each other via computer has no idea how to keep a friend in real life.
Some critics see in Zuckerberg a true ironic hero of our times and have proclaimed The Social Network as “best film of the year.” In my opinion the cinema has seen better days if The Social Network, with all of its cloying mediocrity, is being so widely hailed.
Although 1939 was the year World War II broke out, it stands out as one of the best years in cinematic history: Best Picture nominees included Gone With the Wind, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Ninotchka, Stagecoach, The Wizard of Oz and Wuthering Heights. (GWTW deservedly won.)
The Academy Awards: The Complete History of Oscar (Black Dog & Leventhal), by Gail Kinn and Jim Piazza, gives year-by-year summaries of the films that were nominated and the films that won in a growing number of categories since Oscar was born in 1927. Film connoisseurs will find this large, lavishly illustrated volume an interesting reference work.
The year 1940 also brought forth a goodly share of cinematic gems. Nominees for Best Picture (in 1941) included The Grapes of Wrath, The Great Dictator, The Letter, The Philadelphia Story and Rebecca – the David O. Selznick-Alfred Hitchcock collaboration that ultimately took the golden statue. (Best Director went to John Ford for Grapes of Wrath.)
Another parade of excellencies unfolded at the Academy Awards for 1950. Best Picture contenders included All About Eve, Born Yesterday, Father of the Bride and Sunset Boulevard; the prize went to producer Darryl F. Zanuck for All About Eve. That film’s writer-director, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, also won twin Oscars for Best Director and Best Screenplay. (Mankiewicz had accomplished a parallel feat the year before for the less memorable A Letter to Three Wives.) Meanwhile, Sunset Boulevard earned writer-director Billy Wilder an Oscar for Best Story and Screenplay.
Fifty years ago, at the awards ceremony in 1961, Wilder won three Oscars – Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Story and Screenplay – for The Apartment (1960). According to author Kevin Lally in his readable biography Wilder Times: The Life of Billy Wilder (Henry Holt & Co.), it was “only the second time – after Leo McCarey’s Going My Way victory – that one individual collected three Oscars in a single night.” Wilder and his writing partner I. A. L. Diamond gave thank-you speeches that were memorably brief: “Thank you, Billy Wilder,” said the one and “Thank you, I.A.L Diamond” said the other.
An Austrian-born Jew, Wilder (1906-2002) began his career as a journalist in Vienna and worked for a time in Berlin. In 1933, he left Germany for Paris – “It wasn’t my idea, it was Hitler’s” – and soon came to Hollywood, where he and Charles Brackett co-wrote several successful scripts for director Ernst Lubitsch, including Ninotchka starring Greta Garbo. In 1944, he co-wrote the film noir classic Double Indemnity with Raymond Chandler, then Lost Weekend with Brackett. In 1950 came his original film noir classic Sunset Boulevard, followed by several comedies including The Seven Year Itch (1955) with Marilyn Monroe and Some Like It Hot (1959) with Monroe, Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis.
With The Apartment, which starred Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine, Wilder was at the top of his form. Still, reviewers criticized him for his “amoral” characters: C.C. Baxter (Lemmon), who loans out his apartment for his bosses’ adulterous trysts in exchange for the promise of a promotion; and Fran Kubelik (MacLaine), who has an affair with Mr. Sheldrake, the married department boss (Fred MacMurray).
As the ’60s opened, America apparently wasn’t yet ready for a romantic comedy laden with dark social themes and imperfect heroes, even if decency wins in the end. Baxter, who is smitten with Kubelik, decides to be a “mensch” – a decent human being – and ultimately wins her from the duplicitous Sheldrake. (The Apartment features two of the very few Jewish characters in Wilder’s opus – Dr. and Mrs. Dreyfuss – who act as moral compass for Baxter, influencing his understanding of what it means to be a “mensch.”)
One of my favourite books on film is author-screenwriter Garson Kanin’s book Hollywood, (Viking Press) in which he describes his personal encounters with Wilder, Samuel Goldwyn, Carole Lombard, John Barrymore, Greta Garbo, Marilyn Monroe, Groucho Marx, Charlie Chaplin, Irving Thalberg and other show-biz celebrities. Kanin’s portrayal of Goldwyn, the autocratic studio head, includes many of the latter’s hilarious malapropisms that have been retold and traded as “Goldwynisms” ever since.
Of a screenplay, Goldwyn would say that “I read part of it all the way through”; of a verbal agreement, that “it wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on.” Upon meeting Goldwyn for the first time, Kanin is barely able to conceal his amazed delight after the legendary mogul opens with, “Sidney Howard tells me you’re a very clever genius.” (“Could it be?” Kanin muses. “Had I heard correctly? Did I own, so soon, a personal Goldwynism?”)
Kanin (1912-1999), whose own screenplays with wife Ruth Gordon included the witty Tracy-Hepburn romantic comedies Adam’s Rib and Pat and Mike, has given us a highly readable and entertaining book filled with sparkling portraits of Hollywood personalities – none more mighty or coveted than the glittering statuette known as Oscar.
