University Daily Kansan / Monday, March 30, 1992
7
THE OSCARS
Motion picture academy gets bad rating
Critics question members' picks
The Associated Press
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Is the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences a fortress of good taste? Or is it hopelessly out of touch?
The debate has boiled for years, but rarely has it been so intense.
Founded in 1927 as a trade and service organization, the academy receives little attention except during Oscar time. Most of the notice this year has been critical.
For example, Barbra Streisand was not nominated for best director although her "The Prince of Tides" was named in the best-picture category. Streisand said the oversight might be linked to the academy's perceived oldboy network.
Four other women directors were not nominated: Martha Coolidge, "Rambling Rose," Jodie Foster, "Little Man Tate," Randa Haines, "The Doctor" and Jane Campion, "An Angel at My Table." No woman has ever won an Oscar for best director.
Actor Karl Malden, the president of the academy, said the academy's image of a grizzled collection of Hollywood veterans was unfair.
"It makes for good copy," Malden said. "We have tried to get the younger people." Unfortunately, he said, many of the younger actors, writers and directors are busy working on movies and cannot participate in academy committees and boards.
Many view the academy as antiquated because only one African-American actor, Sidney Potier, has won an Oscar for a leading role, and more daring, independent films are consistently slighted.
Bruce Davis, the academy's executive director, said the membership was a little on the mature side. Members are in for life.
Members tend to be older, Davis explained, because they need a minimum number of credits to be eligible. Directors, for example, must have made at least three films, and their work has to be recognized as distinguished by a peer committee.
Davis said each president had tried to bring in fresh blood. "But we 'ren't talking about lowering standards," he said.
Filmmaker Jonathan Wacks praises the Academy for nominating John Singleton, the young African-American director of "Boyz N the Hood" Thenomination makes Singleton eligible to join the academy, and he says he will. Critics say he is just the kind of filmmaker
the academy needs. But Wacks, who heads the Independent Feature Project, said it was disappointing that almost every independent film went unrewarded.
The few non-studio films that have won major awards, such as "Platoon" and "Kiss of the Spider Woman," reported strong ticket sales, Wacks noted. "The academy seems deaf to films that have an independent outlook unless they make money at the box office." he said.
More than a month after the nominations were announced, most in the industry still have not heard of "Death on the Job," "Doing Time: Life inside the Big House," "The Shadow of the Stars," "The Restless Conscience: Resistance to Hitler Within Germany 1933-1945" and "Wild by Law."
Several prominent filmmakers said they were shocked that "35 Up," "Paris Is Burning," "A Brief History of Time" and "Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Journey" were not selected. Critics generally praised each of these nonfiction features.
Two Boston researchers said in a recent study that the Oscars also proved the entertainment industry's sexism and age bias. Elizabeth Markson and Carol Taylor found that elderly women have virtually disappeared from movies.
Critics' choice
MARQUEE
Oscar picks from around the nation
Which movie will win
Chicago Tribune
Dallas Morning News
Detroit Free Press
Miami Herald
Philadelphia Inquirer
San Jose Mercury News
Beauty and the Beast (G)
Bugsy (R)
JFK (R)
The Prince of Tides (R)
The Silence of the Lambs (R)
Which movie should win
Beauty and the Beast (G)
Bugsy (R)
JFK (R)
The Prince of Tides (R)
The Silence of the Lambs (R)
Razzies honor worst selections in entertainment
KRTN
The Associated Press
The film won Razzies, the awards of the Golden Raspberry Award Foundation, for worst picture, worst screenplay and worst director of 1991.
The 12th annual spoof awards, honoring the year's worst films are presented as a comic counterpoint to the Academy Awards. scheduled for today.
LOS ANGELES — "Hudson Hawk" won three top prizes Sunday, but star Bruce Willis and the film's producers probably won't want to crow about them.
Sean Young won twice: worst actress, as the twin who survives in the romantic thriller "A Kiss Before Dying," and worst supporting actress, as the twin who's murdered.
Kevin Costner, the arrow-wielding star of "Robin Hood: Prince of Heaven," was named worst actor. Dan Aykroyd is the second-best actor for "Not But Trouble."
Rapper Vanilla Ice took the Razzie for worst new star for his performances in "Cool As Ice" and "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: The Secret of the Ooze."
Leader says censorship could put end to NEA
The worst original song was
"The Man Who Wrote It" by Hammett from
"TheAddamsFamily."
The Associated Press
ABILENE - Increased censorship and further restrictions on the arts could mean the end of the National Endowment for the Arts, said John Frohmayer, outgoing head of the NEA.
Frohnmayer said censorship would destroy the endowment and destroy the spirit of the United States and the First Amendment.
Frohmmayer, 49, was the key speaker at a six-state regional rural arts forum. He resigned in February and said he wanted to return to private life. He leaves the MEA Nav1.
this country has ever so found.
Frohnmayer was appointed head of the NEA by President Bush in 1989. He was criticized by some artists as as harsh censor and by some congressional critics as too permissive.
During his speech Saturday, Frohnmayer defended the NEA's stance on obscenity in the arts.
"It has gone without question lately that the endowment funds obscenity." Frohmayer said. "And yet no inquiry in any jurisdiction anywhere in
"What the critics mean by obscenity is that which they don't like. And so, it is time for some cross-examination. Have you seen it? What do you think the artist was trying to say? What is it about that bothers you? Can we talk about it?"
Frohnmayer said teaching U.S. children that art involves taking risks may help save the NEA.
"Unless our children have that kind of education, we will not be a nation that competes in the world market for the next creative invention of the next century," he said. "Creativity will be the currency of the 21st century."
Hosted by the Kansas Arts Commission, and attended by representatives from Kansas, Arkansas, Nebraska, Texas, Oklahoma and Missouri, the forum was the first in a series of regional art forums sponsored by the NEA and organized by the National Assembly of Local Arts Agencies, a national service agency based in Washington, D.C.
'Ruby' actor eases into superstar status
The Associated Press
NEW YORK (AP) — A few months ago, Danny Aiello was with some buddies at a hamburger place in California when he spotted a famous face. Dean Martin. The singer was sitting alone, his head down, people just passing him by.
"I got up and walked over and I got down on one knee and looked up at him and I said, 'Mr. Martin, my name is Danny Aiello and I'm an actor from New York,' he recalled during a recent interview at a Manhattan hotel.
"I said, 'I'm a great fan of yours and always have been and if anyone should do your life it should be me. He looked up with a little smile and said,' Thank you, I know you, Danny.'
"It was very sad, something I'll probably use in a movie some day. You pause for a moment because you're in the same field. You know it's eventually going to happen to you. The laughter's going to stop, the recognition's going to stop and you'll be taken for granted."
Aiello leaned forward as he told this story and then eased back into his chair, letting the message sink in. He wants you to know he hasn't forgotten, that you're talking to a guy whose father left home when he was 6, who was afraid to smile as a teenager because he couldn't afford to fix his chipped front tooth.
Right now, however, Aiello's grin lights up the room. He's a contender, a player, and nothing seems to get in his way. It's snowing hard today, but
the actor arrives looking like a million bucks, his gray hair neatly brushed back, a dark, blue blazer wrapped around his broad shoulders.
"For some reason, the fans love me," Aiello, a native New Yorker who now lives in New Jersey, says with a good-natured shrug. "When I walk around Hollywood, if I'm doing a film, cars will stop in the street and people will yell." Danny!' out the window, which excites me because everyone tells me they don't do that in Hollywood."
In his mid-30s, Aiello lost his job after organizing a wildcat strike at Greyhound and decided to take a shot at acting. He never had a lesson, but he soon found work in theater and broke into movies in 1973 with "Bang the Drum Slowly."
The characters he's taken on are often angry, frustrated; they seem to be in over their heads. In a sense, he's playing them he might have become if his luck hadn't been so good.
His latest is the title role in "Ruby." Aiello never thought a lot about Jack Ruby, the Dallas nightclub owner who killed Lee Harvey Oswald, but he quickly related to his story after agreeing to play him.
*He could be interpreted as a very sleazy kind of
Ruby was a street tough from Chicago and if things had gone a little differently, the actor reasons, he could have been a big shot, a friend of the famous — like restaurateur Toots Shor. Instead, he was stuck in a strip joint, mixing with mobsters and running numbers. After Oswald was charged with killing President Kennedy, Aiello believes Ruby saw his chance to redeem himself.
guy, but as I investigated him, I saw he was more complex than that," Aiello said. "He was a Damon Runyon like character. He wanted to be loved, he wanted to be big. If he was with cops, he became a con. If he was with wiseguys, he was a tough guy.
"It was an easy transition to play him because I was Ruby. I used to be a bouncer. I knocked people out of joints and Ruby did that. I could fight my ass off and Ruby did that. When he killed Oswald, I said, 'Yes!' It was retribution for killing the president, it was an eye for an eye. Being a street guy, I thought that Ruby was a hero."
Aiello's heroes as a kid — father figures, he calls them — were the tough guys he saw at the movies: Wallace Beerey, Humphrey Bogart, John Garfield, James Cagney.
Several years ago, he got the chance to meet Cagney, not long before the actor died. A banquet was being held in Cagney's honor and Aiello was one of the speakers.
"Iremember seeing 'White Heat,' when he keeps saying, 'Hey me, look at me, on top of the world.' That's what I told my mom when she was alive, 'Hey me, look at me I'm on top of the world,'." Aiko recalled.
"I incorporated that into my speech and said, 'Look at me, ma. I m on top of the world with Jimmy Cagney.' I went off the stage and he gave me a hug, he gave me a smile, a similar kind of thing I got from Dean Martin. When Dean looked up at me with a smile, that's when I thought of the smile of Jimmy Cagney."
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