THE OSCARS 2016, A JOYLESS, PAINFUL GUILT-FEST - MARCH 1, 2016

Once the Oscars were about glamour and stardom.

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Published: Tuesday, March 01, 2016 7:59 AM

Jack Engelhard

Jack Engelhard’s classic international bestselling novel Indecent Proposal,...

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Some people won, some people lost, but Sunday’s Oscars were mostly about guilt, which is why shrieking Chris Rock was the perfect host.


He was perfect if you like feeling terrible about yourself.


He’s black and you’re not and that was enough for him to keep rubbing it in.  He never let up.


He took up the anti-police “Black Lives Matter” taunt 48 hours after Virginia Police Officer Ashley Guindon was killed on her first day of duty.



I don’t go to enough movies. Is this racism? Islamophobia?
In comedy, timing is supposed to be everything.


Yes, black performers were given no heed for this year’s awards. This should not have happened. African-American talent deserves better. But does that make Hollywood “racist?” Over the years there’ve been quite a number of awards and nominations for black talent, as anyone can find on Google.


Life is unfair and that goes for everyone. Were Italians fairly represented? Sylvester Stallone lost. Asians? Greeks? Irish-Americans? Were Jews given a break?


But nothing works these days without a gripe or a cause. It’s never enough. Nobody’s satisfied. People all over feel shortchanged, which is why millions gravitate to the casinos. As I expressed it in “Indecent Proposal,” we feel cheated by life and temptation drives us beyond limits to get even.

Sunday’s Oscars were about in-your-face getting even.


So, okay. Okay! I get it and I’m sorry. It’s my fault that Will Smith didn’t get nominated. I take full responsibility.


I’m sorry about global warming, too, Leonardo DiCaprio. I apologize and won’t let it happen again.


We thank the Academy for reminding us that we are slackers. We promise to mend our wicked wicked ways for next year’s Oscars especially if Chris Rock’s number comes up again. We need to make him happy. Late word has it that this year’s telecast dipped six percent in the ratings. This too must be racism, no?


More guilt? You bet.


Like that man said, the man who ran up to accept the Oscar for something or other – we are not doing enough for gay equality.


Count me in as guilty here, too. I’m sorry and won’t let it happen again.


Years ago the Oscars were about glamour and stardom. I don’t remember them as being a joyless, painful guilt-fest.


DiCaprio, accepting for Best Actor, warned that if we don’t do something about global warming right this minute the planet is doomed. This was around midnight when he said that and…and OMG! Was I supposed to get a good night’s sleep after hearing this?


If you are not Stephen Spielberg, is there any hope?


I mention Spielberg because that is practically the only name I know anymore. What happened to Gable and Lombard, Bogart and Bacall?


These new people, I don’t know them and I feel guilty about that, too. I don’t go to enough movies. Is this racism? Islamophobia?


“We didn’t need dialogue,” lamented Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. “We had faces.”

These days, as for me, I hardly know the faces and most of the time I don’t even know the names of these morning glories. This is my fault, for sure.


Anything else to feel terrible about after Sunday night’s Guilt Bash? Yes! Good movies, the small ones, get no chance, no shot. Only the studio ones budgeted at $250 million, where things fly and go bang all over the place and tell no story – these make it to the big screen.


Too bad, then, for Laszlo Nemes. This Hungarian director won for a movie that tells a story, a story about the Holocaust.


“Son of Saul,” nabbed the Oscar for Best Foreign Language and from all accounts it is a very fine film – which nobody will see.


We should all feel guilty about this, especially. 

The Curious Case of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Oscars)

By Jack Engelhard

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last royalty check came to around $4.85. In the beginning (with the publication of “This Side of Paradise”) he was America’s literary darling. In the end, practically everybody gave up on him. Hollywood snubbed him. His wife, Zelda, died in an insane asylum. Only his lover, the columnist Sheila Graham, remained loyal.

The author of “The Great Gatsby” -- the prince of novels in our literary kingdom – died forgotten, a self-perceived failure.

Today, even Hollywood appreciates him. A short story of his, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” was turned into a movie and won two Oscars at last night’s Academy Awards. Too bad he’s dead. Fitzgerald could have used some of that love when he was still alive. He got nothing but scorn.

This may well typify the life of a novelist in Hollywood, or the life of a novelist, period. How we glorify our artists usually too late!

Fitzgerald – in his novels and short stories – is the man we turn to for sentences that sing. But after “Paradise” and even after “Gatsby” he teetered from rejection to rejection. He tried Hollywood and got himself a credit for one movie, something called “Three Comrades.” He was hired on to do some tinkering for “Gone With The Wind” but his tinkering was too much. Nobody touches Margaret Mitchell. He was escorted off the set.

He kept going back to ask for any kind of screen work, even “additional dialogue,” just to pay the bills.

He placed himself at the mercy of a particular Hollywood tycoon. “Tell me what to write and I’ll write it,” he pleaded.

“Me?” said the boss. “I should tell F. Scott Fitzgerald how to write?”

His last work, still unfinished, has been published as “The Last Tycoon.” It’s about Hollywood. Some say that even though it’s unpolished it may still be the finest novel ever about Hollywood. That honor must be shared with Nathanael West who gave us Hollywood unwashed in “The Day of the Locust.”

Nathanael West was killed in a car accident en route to Fitzgerald’s funeral – as if to prove the Hollywood jinx for true novelists.

Fitzgerald spoofed Hollywood in a series of short pieces collected as “The Pat Hobby Stories.” These vignettes that are about a hack always in search of an angle, are delightful and often hilarious. They spoof Hollywood without malice, but we get the message. They do not belong in the Fitzgerald canon because they’re so un-Fitzgerald-like, written somewhat in the style of Damon Runyon and Ring Lardner. But they were written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, so even when he tried to write flip, he still could not write a bad sentence.

Hemingway kept after Fitzgerald to write “true” and to refrain from the pursuit of money. But Fitzgerald was always desperate. The boozing didn’t help. Hemingway was especially critical when Fitzgerald put words to his own disgust, despair and melancholy in “The Crack Up,” a still underappreciated but sterling work of art. This reads like a follow-up to King Solomon's "Ecclesiastes" and is Fitzgerald at his best, like the following:

“I must continue to be a writer because that was my only way of life, but I would cease any attempts to be a person – to be kind, to be generous… The decision made me rather exuberant…I felt like the beady-eyed men I used to see on the commuter train from Great Neck fifteen years back – men who didn’t care whether the world tumbled into chaos tomorrow if it spared their houses. I was one of them now.”

No, he wasn’t. He wasn’t one of them, much as he tried. He left us the glory of his writing. Hollywood finally came around.

Too bad he’s dead.

About the author: Novelist Jack Engelhard wrote the international bestselling novel “Indecent Proposal” that was translated into more than 22 languages and turned into a Paramount motion picture starring Robert Redford and Demi Moore. His latest novel, now available in paperback, is “The Bathsheba Deadline.” He can be reached at his website www.jackengelhard.com.