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Oscar Fever: The History and Politics of the Academy Awards

Continuum, 370 pp., $19.95 (paper) Film scholar Emanuel Levy's Oscar Fever: The History and Politics of the Academy Awards is stuffed with the same strange facts as other Oscar histories. In 1936, for example, Claudette Colbert became the highest-paid person in the United States ($302,000), and in 1995, Mira Sorvino became the eighth actress to win an Oscar for playing a hooker (in Woody Allen's Mighty Aphrodite). The notable distinction about Oscar Fever, though, is Levy's analysis of the numbers. In a deceptively simple style, Levy, the senior film critic for Variety, explains the culture that propels some luminaries, and not others, up the stage on Oscar night to nab that little gold man. "Suffering and victimization have been the chief attributes of the female Oscar roles," he writes. "According to Oscar, women have suffered a disproportionately large number of disasters, natural and man-made. While men are in charge of their lives, women exercise little or no control over their romantic, marital, and even familial bonds, all of which are causes for torment and anguish. Sexual assault and rape are the most obvious forms of victimization." I bet Melissa Rivers is planning on discussing that very topic on the red carpet Sunday night, don't you? Levy can state his case too plainly, like when he needlessly points out that "the Southern belle is a uniquely American literary and cinematic type" by way of discussing the Bette Davis classic, Jezebel (1938). Though there may be Oscar histories that are snazzier, none are more comprehensive.