The top 10 Oscars books
From red-carpet thrillers to insider accounts, the Guardian's film critic hands out his gongs to the best Oscars literature out there
Partly because Academy Award madness is almost upon us, partly because like all former PhD students I love a good reading list, and partly out of sheer nerdiness, I have compiled an arbitrary list of the top 10 Oscar-related books. This has involved the incidental pleasure of hanging out in the Humanities One reading room of the British Library, and also in the library of the excellent and under-appreciated Cinema Museum in Kennington, south London.
1) Robert Osborne 80 Years of the Oscar: The Official History of the Academy Awards (2009)
A hefty, celebratory, coffee-table slab of a book, packed with stats and pictures like a book about sport. Very much the approved, authorised version.
2) Mason Wiley and Damien Bona Inside Oscar: The Unofficial History of the Academy Awards (1977)
Notionally "unofficial" but in actual fact as starry-eyed about the whole business as any endorsed publication, this is another stat-heavy, list-packed slab, periodically republished in updated editions like Osborne but with a more loo-bookish feel. It has a "running header" giving gags and wisecracks used at each ceremony, including this from Bob Hope in 1977: "I haven't seen so much expensive jewellery go by since I watched Sammy Davis Jr's house sliding down Coldwater Canyon." You had to be there.
3) Peter H Brown and Jim Pinkston Oscar Dearest: Six Decades of Scandal, Politics and Greed Behind Hollywood's Academy Awards, 1927-1986 (1987)
One of the few books that appears genuinely antipathetic to the Oscars, denouncing the "pointless, gross charade of the Academy Awards an institution that honours the cotto! n candy of box office instead of artistic integrity". It has an interesting chapter on a classic story of Oscar dysfunction: WR Hearst's mistress, Marion Davies, yearned poignantly for the Oscar Hearst's millions could not buy her, and the book draws a connection between that and the failure of Citizen Kane to win Oscars, perhaps due to the Academy's discomfort at seeing Davies fictionalised on screen. The actress herself is quoted as saying: "The Oscar is a cruel joke hatched by a cruel town and handed out in a cruel ceremony."
4) Anthony Holden The Oscars: The Secret History of Hollywood's Academy Awards (1993)
As you would expect from Holden, a highly readable, professional, well-researched job of work, though I don't think any great secrets are disclosed. He has an interesting passage on the brief and doomed attempt to give Olympic swimmer Mark Spitz a movie career and make him the "male Esther Williams".
5) Emanuel Levy All About Oscar: The History and Politics of the Academy Awards (2003)
A book with an interestingly cool, analytical approach. Levy has a shrewd section on Oscar-winning acting performances and their tendency towards a cautiously imagined eccentricity or vulnerability. (This is more or less what Robert Downey Jr's character in Tropic Thunder was to call "going semi-retard".) Alcoholism is favourite subject and Levy has a list of Oscar-nominated "drunks". Male: Ray Milland for The Lost Weekend, James Mason for A Star is Born, Jack Lemmon for Days of Wine and Roses, Dudley Moore for Arthur, Paul Newman for The Verdict, Albert Finney for The Dresser and Under the Volcano and Robert Duvall for The Apostle. Female: Susan Hayward for Smash-Up, the Story of a Woman, My Foolish Heart and I'll Cry Tomorrow, Deborah Kerr for Edward, My Son, Vivien Leigh for A Streetcar Named Desire, Piper Laurie for The Hustler, Elizabeth Taylor for Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?, Bette Midler for The Rose, Marsha Mason for Only When I Laugh, Diana Ross for Lady Sings the Blues, Jessica Lange for Frances and Jane Fonda for The Morning After.
6) Helen Hayes (with Thomas Chastain) Where the Truth Lies: A Novel of Glamour and Murder in Hollywood (1988)
Helen Hayes was a double Oscar-winner. She received best actress for The Lullaby in 1931 a fallen-woman drama about a decent mother who turns to prostitution to send her son to medical school and best supporting actress for the 1970 disaster movie Airport. Hayes then played twinkly-eyed Agathie Christie sleuth Miss Marple in A Caribbean Mystery and, in 1988, wrote this Christie-esque murder mystery set at the Academy Awards. (Established thriller writer Thomas Chastain was credited as co-author, so perhaps it's truer to say Hayes lent her name to the enterprise, contributing ideas and gossipy insider touches.) Arthur Strickland is a movie producer with a string of enemies, murdered by an unseen assailant right on stage at the awards. ("On screen and televised live over the air to an audience of over one billion viewers was the close-up picture of Arthur Strickland lyi! ng unmov ing, a knife in his back, the blade buried deep in between his shoulder blades. His Oscar lay beside him.") Maybe someone should do a contemporary adaptation.
7) Mary McNamara Oscar Season (2009)
Again inspired by Agatha Christie, but probably a racier and more chick-littish Oscar novel than Hayes's offering. A PR woman deeply involved in the business of promoting Academy Award fever in the all-important month between the announcement of nominations and the ceremony itself, is on the trail of a murderer in Los Angeles when someone bumps off her ex-husband, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter Josh Singer.
8) Steve Pond The Big Show: High Times and Dirty Dealings Backstage at the Academy Awards (2004)
Another racy, gossipy account, though probably not with any real scoops. Pond has an interesting section on the notorious 1989 awards, produced by the formidable Broadway mogul Allan Carr. Pond calls it "one of the most grotesque television broadcasts in recent memory". Carr created a misjudged, overproduced and horrendously cheesy extravaganza, featuring Rob Lowe (whose notorious sex tape had been made public the year before) singing a spoony number to an actress dressed up as Snow White. However, Carr's OTT concept is fondly remembered now by Oscar buffs, who say that it was at least honest in its tackiness. Carr is credited with changing the phrase "And the winner is " to "And the Oscar goes to "
9) Zadie Smith Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (2009)
This contains Zadie Smith's "Ten Notes On Oscar Weekend", her account of going to Los An! geles fo r the 2006 Academy Awards season. Originally published in the Sunday Telegraph, it is the best reportage account of the Oscars I've ever read: funny, absorbing, detached without being snooty or condescending, enthusiastic. Smith appears to have been invited to the A-listers' top table, and pulls off the elegant trick of not naming any of them. A re-readable treat.
10) Annie Proulx Blood on the Red Carpet (2006)
Annie Proulx's grouchy account of attending this same Awards ceremony in 2006 has not, I think, been published between hard covers, but it appeared in this paper and you can read it online here. Brokeback Mountain, the blockbuster based on her short story, was up for best film and was notoriously beaten by the inferior ensemble melodrama Crash. The writer appears to be a tough and sceptical outsider, and yet somehow appears also to be no stranger to these shindigs. ("There was one man in a kilt there is always one at award ceremonies ") Could it be that Proulx is more of a "Hollywood" person than she appears?
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