T A B L E_.T A L K Are Click and Clack causing your relationship to break down? Readers discuss the shows they love and their partners don't in Table Talk's Media area   Extra! Extra! Find the media books you want to read at barnesandnoble.com Search by:  Keyword Title Author     R E C E N T L Y Strange fruit By James Poniewozik Garden Escape is a new publication grown from the fertile soil of Garden.com. You might call it a catalog; they call it the ultimate service magazine. What if they're right? (03/16/99) Kiddie-porn trafficker -- or crusading undercover reporter? By Susan Lehman Larry Matthews' 18-month sentence for receiving and transmitting kiddie porn raises difficult First Amendment issues (03/11/99) The anti-Marthas By James Poniewozik The Discovery Channel's daytime shelter shows decorate down-market souls in six cheerful shades of Play-Doh (03/09/99) Conservative pinup battles "arm candy" canard By Susan Lehman Ann Coulter will write for George. Plus: N.Y. cops get tough on the New Yorker; doubloon-or-nothing for Wenner (03/04/99) The Teen Millennium By Steve Erickson From "Buffy" to "Jawbreaker," today's culture makes teenagers the battlegrounds of cosmic forces (03/03/99) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE UNSPUN ARCHIVE		WHY ELIA KAZAN SHOULD NOT RECEIVE AN OSCAR | PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - But Kazan didn't simply confess on his own behalf. He didn't give the committee the names of traitors selling atomic bombs to the Kremlin. In an atmosphere of persecution and hysteria he gave the committee the names of eight friends who had committed no crime whatsoever, and in so doing he helped destroy them. The argument advanced by some that these names were already known to the committee and that therefore Kazan's testimony was of no real significance lies somewhere between naive and ridiculous: At the time, Kazan was the most respected director in Hollywood, and the HUAC went after him precisely because his testimony was of enormous significance, because it ratified betrayal and thereby lent betrayal exactly what the HUAC wanted and needed -- the moral authority of a major liberal filmmaker who had made his reputation with movies about prejudice. On any number of levels, what Kazan did was a disaster. But true as this is, if Kazan had made a movie in 1998 so good as to warrant a nomination for an Academy Award or, more to the point, a nomination for best director, none of the above would matter. It wouldn't matter because, leaving aside for the moment the general folly of the Oscars and who wins them, the awards are about artistic competition -- picking the "best" -- and once you muddy such competition with politics, ideology, history, even morality, artistic integrity itself is at risk. If Kazan were nominated for best director of the year and deserved the award, he should win it notwithstanding what happened half a century ago. Moreover, whatever his past political lapses, if Kazan had never before been honored by the academy, his contribution to film might indeed warrant a special award, for the same reason that Louis-Ferdinand Céline, for instance, should have won a Nobel Prize for literature despite his collaborationist history with the Nazis. Céline was a world-class 20th century writer, and that's what Nobel Prizes are for, great writers, and once you begin weeding out writers on the basis of whether they're fine human beings, you can pretty much crowd who's left into a Motel 6 service elevator. James Joyce, for you literary groupies out there who still have stars in your eyes, was a perfect asshole. For the moment let's leave aside the possibility that Kazan isn't the great filmmaker his advocates suggest. For the moment let's leave aside that many of his most famous films, from "Pinky" to "Baby Doll" to the Oscar-winning "Gentlemen's Agreement," are now hopelessly dated. For the moment let's leave aside that even "classic" films such as "A Streetcar Named Desire" and "East of Eden" are more compendia of memorable moments than truly transcendent movies. Let's leave aside that Kazan was a more important director than a great one, and more important for his contribution to film acting than to filmmaking. Let's agree that revolutionizing film acting isn't a small thing, after all, and that if "On the Waterfront," "Viva Zapata" and "Splendor in the Grass" fall short of being truly great, they're close enough that to quibble is simply ungenerous. For the moment, let's say for the sake of argument that Kazan is indisputably in the first rank of American film directors -- and that his shelf is heart-tuggingly bare of Oscars to show for it. In fact, this isn't remotely the case. Kazan has already won two Academy Awards for best director. This is two more than Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Charles Chaplin, Fritz Lang, Josef von Sternberg, Ernst Lubitsch, Preston Sturges, Nicholas Ray, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese have won between them. Let me repeat that, since I know right now you're saying to yourself, "I'm sure I misunderstood what I just read." Kazan has won two more Academy Awards for directing than all those other directors -- every single one arguably Kazan's superior -- combined. In short, given how Kazan has been lavishly rewarded by the academy in the past, the problem with giving him a special Oscar is that it's special. It's not a matter of the academy correcting an oversight. It's not as though there haven't been any number of talented people over the years who never received special awards. By its nature this award is an extraordinary gesture, not a little arbitrary, finally gratuitous; and gratuitousness, by its own nature, has an agenda. Gratuitousness is overkill in service of a purpose, in order to make a point, which in these particular circumstances can only raise the question of what is the purpose and what is the point. In the case of this particular award, the purpose and point is forgiveness. What's remarkable about this is that the academy can't forgive Kazan, because Kazan hasn't asked for forgiveness or ever acknowledged he's done anything to be forgiven for. He isn't merely unrepentant but belligerent: Speaking for him recently in response to those who have suggested Kazan use the forum of the Oscars to offer an apology, his wife told the Los Angeles Times, "Too fucking bad ... he has nothing to be contrite about." As far as anyone can tell or has told, the immorality of his actions 50 years ago hasn't inspired on his part a single instant's retrospection or contemplation, or even uneasy doubt. What it did inspire was "On the Waterfront," a powerful film that's also, in its true intentions, horseshit. Making the case for informing, it analogizes Marlon Brando's moral dilemma with Kazan's and renders it heroic. The problem with this analogy is that in the film Brando's silence costs people their lives rather than the other way around, and that when he finally does inform, it's on dangerous criminals who murder people (including his own brother), not a lot of hapless Hollywood nitwits who got their heads lodged squarely up their asses searching for Stalinist paradise. I don't know who the academy is forgiving, for what; I doubt the academy knows. The only conclusion possible, pathetic and slightly queasy though it may be, is that the academy is somehow forgiving itself -- "because Kazan was a victim too," as though in some metaphorical fashion he died for Hollywood's sins and now Hollywood is going to make him a saint for it. Hollywood has always had trouble with its metaphors: After all, Kazan didn't die, nor did his career. After informing on people whose lives and careers were never the same again, he went right on making movies another 20 years, by all accounts growing more and more bitter at how unfairly life has treated him, even as it continues to bestow on him more wealth, more fame, more Kennedy Center honors -- everything but what self-justification and special Oscars can't bestow, and that's a conscience. SALON | March 17, 1999 Steve Erickson's Unspun appears every other Wednesday in Salon.