tailieunhanh - Hollywood on the Head of a Pin: Montage and Marketing at the Oscars®

The great majority of the clips in the “100 Years” montage comprise iconic moments from significant performances: Al Pacino shouting “Attica!” in Dog Day Afternoon; Sally Field holding up a “Union” sign in Norma Rae; Whoopi Goldberg’s body being “taken over” by Patrick Swayze in Ghost; Cagney and the Public Enemy grapefruit; Diane Keaton’s “La-di-dah” as Annie Hall. And while there is no coherent narrative per se, the montage does contain an overall structure guided by the music: there is a clear introduction, followed by a dramatic build-up, then a. | Hollywood on the Head of a Pin Montage and Marketing at the Oscars by Lisa Kernan Hollywood an entity whose questionable geographic location has been increasingly problematized in the era of the global popular film market is also a magic word. At once a place in Los Angeles an industrial marker and a mythical land it is emblematic of contemporary cinema s contradictory urge both to escape the material constraints of a film-based culture industry and nostalgically to re-experience that same material culture. The floating signifier of Hollywood is essentially a magic carpet of nostalgia and marketing. This essay explores one manifestation of the popular historicization of Hollywood the historical film clip montages created mostly by former trailer producer Chuck Workman for the Academy Awards telecasts produced by Gil Cates during the 1990s. These brief pieces of televised film about film history participated strongly in the reconfiguring and marketing of the cinematic past in the popular imaginary during the nineties pivotal years in the globalization of hegemonic American film culture. The Academy Awards telecast is a surprisingly under-examined televisual text considering its longevity and international ubiquity and deserves further work. But the montages have performed historically specific ideological operations within the telecast and are worth examining on their own. In order to historicize the Workman montages I want to point first to the Oscars telecast for 2002 a year in which no Chuck Workman pieces appeared and the first year the awards were held in Hollywood. This Oscars was different the show was held in a theater that seated 1500 fewer guests than some previous venues Anderton but whose location within the new media complex and mall at Hollywood and Highland offered for virtual guests geographic cachet ersatz Intolerance elephants and big-screen video displays. As commentators and stars alike remarked this was the year the Oscars came home yet the home