When Oscar Loved America

The 95th Academy Awards will feature wealthy, coddled celebrities lecturing the audience and bashing America. Expect these scolds to add another layer of gilding to the legends of Hollywood’s Golden Age, who loved the nation that made it possible for them to live in the Land of Make Believe.The year 1942 provides the starkest contrast. The event was canceled in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack, Variety wrote in 1941, “but Academy officials, now assured by government and Army heads, are not averse to holding the affair, but sans orchidaceous glitter of previous banquets.”Dancing and black ties were banned but uniforms encouraged, Variety reported, “and it is expected that film people holding reserve commissions will give dinner a military touch.” Celebrity painted a target on the backs of actors, but they answered the call anyway.When James Stewart was drafted into the Army Air Corps, Uncle Sam wanted to keep him safe training pilots. Stewart persisted to become commanding officer of the 703rd Bomb Squadron flying B-24 Liberators, keeping reporters away but making enlistment films like “Winning Your Wings” directed by John Huston.For the 14th Academy Awards, tradition required that Stewart present the Best Actor award since he had won it the previous year for “The Philadelphia Story.” He performed the duty in full military regalia, a living symbol that Hollywood was part of, not apart from, America.Classified for limited duty due to poor eyesight, President Reagan joined a unit that produced 400 training films. Since he served as commander-in-chief, he’s sometimes raised on a technical point as the only actor to ever outrank Stewart who — after rejecting promotion to major until all his pilots earned advancement — retired a one-star general.Hollywood knew that actors who didn’t serve owed fellow citizens an explanation. Ricardo Montalban was declared 3-A — a hardship deferment — due to having three children, but fans had seen him looking fit for years, portraying what he called “the terrible caricature, a Latin lover.”When the war came, Montalban said in an interview with the American Archive of Television, “instead of the Latin lover, I became the father. I would be in publicity hanging diapers for my children, taking them for the first haircut. … That was the reason I was not in the Army.”“My son is in the army,” Montalban imagined the audience saying. “Why isn’t he?” A magazine centerfold showed the “strapping” actor Sonny Tufts “with his arms extended with boxing trunks,” Montalban said, “and a myriad of arrows pointing to all the defects that he had,” from a plate in his head to fallen arches.Those behind the camera did their bit as well. Charles Chaplin answered President Franklin Roosevelt’s call to rally support for our allies in the Soviet Union. Director John Ford, a Navy lieutenant, served as head of the photographic unit for the OSS making documentaries.Ford went ashore on D-Day, as did actors including James Doohan, Alec Guinness, David Niven, and Charles Durning. Henry Fonda, saying he “didn’t want to be a fake in the war studio,” supported the landings as a quartermaster aboard a destroyer.This sense of patriotism lingered for decades, but the far left kept trying. Vanessa Redgrave’s notorious speech in 1978 provoked instant condemnation for its hostility to Israel. At the 1975 awards when producer Bert Schneider read a telegram from the North Vietnamese, Frank Sinatra delivered an Academy statement saying they were “not responsible for any political reference made on the program.” Anti-Americanism culminated with actor Julia Reichert quoting Karl Marx in 2020. The following year, Oscar ratings plummeted to a record low as the industry appeased Communist China while insulting all things American — including the president, if he happens to be a Republican. By contrast Wendell Willkie, the 1940 GOP presidential nominee, was guest of honor at the 1942 Oscars, serving as representative for FDR, the Democrat who won.America remains the defender of liberties Hollywood uses to get rich playing pretend. Among those rights is free speech. As they exercise it tonight, they can’t be surprised that few tune in to watch an industry that loves exploiting stories like those of the World War II generation tarnishing a golden legacy into brass.

When Oscar Loved America

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