With the race for Oscar firmly behind us
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By Shane Gilreath
With the race for Oscar firmly behind us, I couldn’t help but reflect on my early teenage years, growing up fascinated by film and movie-making. Though creativity has taken me down different roads, that person feels a complete contradiction to the person I am today. After all, I didn’t even watch the Oscars, but in those days, it’s likely that I checked out every book on films, every filmmaker and actor that the local library could shelf – Bogie and Bacall, Monroe and Dean, Taylor and Clift, Hepburn and Tracey, Cary Grant, Mae West, and Greta Garbo. We could use a little more of that magic in the modern era. We might criticize the old studio system and the legend of the casting coach, but they continuously churned out films for the right entertaining reasons. Not always to shock and rebuke, but for the escapism that film, and, perhaps, only film allows. When the world feels like it’s sinking, I’d much rather watch ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,’ or the slapstick antics of Chaplin and Mabel Normand.
The truth is, in more recent times, I’ve begun to long for the past, a heavier than usual statement from an historian. I’ve devoured old episodes of Johnny Carson and ‘In the Heat of the Night,’ adding any materialization of ‘The Dick Cavett Show’ and ‘Burt Reynolds’ Conversations with…’ to the mix, and for all the same reasons. Naturally, and, perhaps, the older I get, I find that I’m quite sentimental. For all the advances in technology that we hail, there remains something to be learned from the past. Call that, again, the historian in me, but I’m glad that I lived during an expanse of time when there were rules and society largely played by them.
Years ago, I saw an interview with actress Isabella Rosselini, the daughter of a Hollywood great, in which she talked about addressing a college class where none of the students knew her mother: the legendary Ingrid Bergman, who gave us such classics as Gaslight, Anastasia, and Casablanca. And while I may not have been around for Hollywood’s heyday, I appreciate that I know Bergman, the uproarious laughs of Burns and Allen and Lucille Ball; the search for Scarlett; that I recognize Esther Williams rising like the Venus de Milo; the face (and mind) of Hedy Lamarr and Anita Ekberg frolicking in Rome; that I’ve been thrilled by the steps of Fred and Ginger and that American in Paris; the thrill of a swashbuckling Errol Flynn, swooping in to save Olivia de Havilland; that I can recognize, on sight, Elizabeth Taylor’s violet eyes, and know that White Christmas appeared in Holiday Inn years before it became a staple with Bing and Rosemary, Vera and Danny Kaye in those iconic velvety red costumes, designed by the incomparable Edith Head – she in her thick round frames. I’m glad that I know both the Rat Pack and the Brat, Grace Kelly, before and after she married Monaco, and I feel fortunate to have talked to people entertained by Sophie Tucker and Betty Grable; to have heard stories from both World Wars, by people who lived them, and to have heard the crooning voices of Sinatra and Vera Lynn and then Michael Buble and Katherine Jenkins; to appreciate the hard work and dedication of Bob Hope and Carole Landis and the USO tours; to recognize the harmony of The Andrews Sisters and their “Bei Mir Bist Du Schön,” when sitting in a modern pizza restaurant (and I, as the anomaly, did).
The truth is, every generation looks at the previous with some element of disdain. I’m sure, at some point, there was some cause that I did, too. I also know that – thankfully – I was raised fairly eclectically, being introduced to other times and other worlds. I was granted the privilege to walk in them and appreciate them. As with anything, if we approach it, eyes wide open, there are strains of beauty in the past and many lessons to learn. For those of us who feel the world has pushed too far in the wrong direction and want some semblance of the peace of yesteryear back, let us remember the words of another movie heroine: after all, tomorrow is another day. Like any Golden Era picture, there is hope in that, and for all our peddling forward, let us not forget, nor fail to appreciate, who paved the path…yesterday.
