No, the winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture was not, as everyone had predicted, The Revenant.
Of the roughly 34 million people in the United States who watched the show on their TV screens last Sunday, none would have told you that they did not know the 88th Oscar Ceremony this year would be held at the Dolby Theater in Hollywood, Los Angeles, thereby getting caught making the same embarrassing — and let’s face it, dumb — mistake that Christina Aguilera made last July when she asked: “So where’s the Cannes Film Festival being held this year?”
Cliches aside, the Oscars, as the ceremony is nicknamed, are the Super Bowl of filmic art. And filmic art has captivated urban audiences in America since the turn of the century, and left a revolutionary impact on society, affecting — and in turn being affected — by its culture, its mores, its values. In short, the medium has transformed the national mood, radically revising attitudes and, over the years, even cementing the identity of Americans from coast to coast.
You will not find there any cineastes, folks who probably subscribe to Cahiers du Cinema, and see purported hidden profundities in black-and-white Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Orson Welles and Okira Kurosawa films, no matter how marginal and unsung they may be. They look down their noses on the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, that hosts the Oscars, whose members, in their view, are a bunch of under-educated oafs, pandering to the unwashed masses, and are at any rate unqualified to cast ballots on category winners. Elitists to the core, these cineastes. But we move on.
This year, however, the Oscars were especially important to those of us who are engaged in the journalistic enterprise. Yes, we had a dog in the race, and it was called Spotlight. The film, as even your 87-year-old aunt knows by now, narrates the story of a dogged team of investigative reporters from the Boston Globe whose expose of the shameful cover-up by the city’s archdiocese of paedophile priests led to the forced resignation of the all-powerful Cardinal Bernard Law. The reporters in the film — as those in real life had done — stuck to the facts. They worked the phones, knocked on doors, interviewed sources and checked, then double-checked those facts — perhaps mindful, from their journalism school days, of Helen Thomas’s advice to aspiring journalists: “If your mother tells you she loves you, double check it.”
Mind you, Spotlight created a buzz long before it was nominated — along with seven other hot favourites, including the seemingly invincible The Revenant — for Best Picture, when it had been given long, thunderous applause by audiences at various film festivals. But to beat the Revenant, even the achingly engaging Brooklyn? Long shot. Yet it did! Reporters are the good guys here, committed, dedicated and adherent to the ethics of their profession. As one Spotlight reporter, Mike Rezendez, was quoted as saying about the six-month-long investigation: “No Hollywood cliches, no sex scenes and no guns. Just a true story.”
Or as Spotlight’s editor Walter Robinson explained before the film’s Boston premier: “We, as reporters, stumble around in the dark, one step forward and two steps back, and through all the tedium you keep going. Maybe you get some dumb luck, but in the end you get that story and it’s all worthwhile.”
Hollywood, of course, has released several worthwhile movies in the past about journalism and journalists — with some showing them in a bad light. Consider in this regard Orson Welles’s iconic Citizen Kane (1941) about the rise and fall of Charles Foster Kane (based on the real life Randolph Hearst), a newspaper magnate who built a media empire by using sleazy yellow journalism to sell papers, and manipulated the public into supporting the Spanish-American War, even giving undeserving rave reviews to opera performances that featured his untalented wife.
And consider Shattered Glass (2003), a film that chronicles the rise, and pathetic fall, of Steven Glass who, in the mid-1990s, fell from grace after it was discovered that the colourful stories he filed for the New Republic were not just colourful, but fabricated.
Journalism at its worst, yes, but other films depict the craft at its best. There is the compelling, and wildly popular, All the President’s Men (1976), about how two young reporters at the Washington Post uncovered massive acts of malfeasance at the White House, effectively forcing the president to resign halfway through his term in office. And almost 20 years later, we all watched Good Night And Good Luck (2005), a black-and-white period movie about the legendary American journalist Edward R. Murrow and his fight with the demagogue Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, a fight relating to the right, indeed duty, of reporters to act as watchdogs over, not lapdogs of, the establishment. There were of course other movies in between, all the way from His Girl Friday (1940) to Broadcast News (1987) — movies that tried to tell it like it is.
All of which brings us back to the serendipity of marrying enthralling filmic art with unimpeachable journalistic integrity, as both enterprises continue to play signal roles in our modern lives, at once transforming our societies and our perceptions of the world: The one, being our cultural bellwether, and the other our objective fact-checker.
Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.
