Oscar Night in Hollywood (1948) | Hacker News Reader

Oscar Night in Hollywood (1948)

theatlantic.com

25 pointsCaptainZapp10 comments

https://web.archive.org/web/20201112013653/https://www.theat...

Joan Didion somewhere wrote that one must remember that the voters are all employed in the industry, and that success at the box office is not indifferent to them, but affects the prospects of next year's employment.

I love this sort of thing. There seems to be something so romantic about old time Hollywood, but maybe everyone romanticizes the eras before they were around.

I was honestly astonished how similar some things are now and then.

I got embarrassingly far, skimming it and dipping in to read more deeply here and there, before realizing it was a piece from 1948, not looking at the 1948 Oscars (and Oscars in general) retrospectively from 2023.

I was finally brought to my senses by the quality of the writing. "Damn, this is remarkably well-written... hey, wait a minute...." Raymond Chandler, at that! Hahaha.

If you haven't seen Double Indemnity, which he co-wrote with Billy Wilder, it's absolutely one of the best noir films out there.

Worth noting that this is an adaptation of a story and the original author is neither Wilder nor Chandler, but James M Cain.

Oh I didn't know that. Have you read the book? Would you recommend it? Big fan of Chandler and Hammett.

I have read the book, but I haven't seen the movie or read much else in the genre, just saw a recommendation of it from an author of something much newer I read, so I enjoyed the book but I don't know that I'd read it again if I knew what was going to happen.

Apparently Cain was a big fan of the movie, from a quick check of Wikipedia he said about the male lead: "The way you found tragedy in his shallow, commonplace, smart-cracking skull will remain with me for a long time and, indeed, reinforce an aesthetic viewpoint that many quarrel with; for if I have any gift, it is to take such people and show that they can suffer as profoundly as anybody else…" and the page in general suggests that they deepened the story a bit - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Indemnity_(novel)

Thanks, that's interesting to hear. I'll probably give it a read. The movie was very well done, especially compared to a lot of noir, so I'm very curious about the source material.

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