From the WSJ Opinion Archives
PEGGY NOONAN
Star-Spangled Evenings
There's no reason to be grouchy about the Oscars.
I once saw Kevin Costner eat Raisa Gorbachev's dessert. This did not happen in a dream but in what is often called real life.
It was at Time magazine's 75th anniversary party, a fabulous gathering four years ago in New York City to which all who had ever appeared on Time's venerable cover were invited. Many of them came--Bill Gates, Elie Weisel, Steven Spielberg, scientists and political leaders and poets. It looked to me like a last gathering of the most famous and productive and important Americans of the 20th century as the country trembled on the edge of the unknown 21st.
I was there as a contributing editor of Time, and I knew I must be in for a great night when I arrived and one of the magazine's editors passed me as I searched in the dark for my table. "You owe it to me," he shot out, merrily. He pointed me up front, where I found my table and introduced myself to my table mates.
It was quite a crew. The table was for 10 or 12, I can't recall, but let me tell you who I remember: Sophia Loren, beautifully made up and gowned; she was seated next to Mikhail Gorbachev, with the pink-beige Afghanistan-looking mark on his forehead; next to him was Mrs. Gorbachev, who was smiling; next to her, Kevin Costner, beautiful in a coal-black silk jacket, his face tan and his hair combed . . . blondly, shinily. Next to him, a card with my name.
And next to me was Mr. Gorbachev's security guy, an American, a terrific kid in his 20s who was born in nowhere but was given by God a body he could make strong and capable; and now he's having dinner with movie stars and former Soviet leaders. He was happy. His happiness came right out of his face and met my happiness and we started to laugh, and communed. Next to him was an important media woman who ran either CNN or NPR, I can't recall. I think one of Ms. Loren's sons was also there. There must have been a few others, but I can't remember them because they didn't do anything as interesting as Kevin Costner.
It was a night of long speeches by and about men and women of achievement. They'd stand and bow in the lights and accept applause. It got a little long. We were all getting a little . . . bored isn't the right word, but we were starting to daydream and plan the next day.
While we daydreamed, while someone or other spoke, Kevin Costner leaned forward slightly, languidly swept his right arm to his right, and picked up Mrs. Gorbachev's dessert, a peach melba kind of thing. He picked up a spoon, and he began to eat. He did this without her permission. He did it with what seemed a sense of what Kevin wants Kevin, by definition, should have.
I looked to see her response. She had seen his movement from the corner of her eye, saw him make off with her dessert and smiled. It was a broad, coquettish smile full of delight. Thank you for taking my dessert, it said. I am glad it caught your fancy. Shall I open my purse? I have some change in there.
I could tell: She felt honored by his assumption, as if his eating her dessert showed how informal they were with each other. She was friends with a movie star.
With that small act much that I had witnessed that evening seemed to come together. Mr. Gorbachev, for instance, wanted attention and engagement, but he got nowhere with Ms. Loren, who treated him with Olympian disdain, as if she'd appraised him and judged him to be a guy out of job who hadn't exactly been a movie star for 40 years. So Mr. Gorbachev turned to Kevin Costner, who doled out his attention and engagement sparingly. Mrs. Gorbachev seemed to flirt with him. The bodyguard, who by the nature of his job is on fairly intimate terms with the former leader of the Soviet Union, a man of history who bowed to its commands and ended communism's 74-year reign--the bodyguard too was dazzled to be with Kevin Costner.
And Mr. Costner seemed not at all surprised by any of this. He seemed used to it. Not because he's interesting or full of integrity or wonderful stories or great generosity of spirit--let me tell you, I talked to him at some length over three hours about politics, culture and movies, and Kevin Costner is one beautiful boring dullard of a man--but because he is, simply, a movie star.
And as such, he is a prince of the city, a prince of the City of Man.
And that's when it hit me: Movie stars run the world. Movie stars trump everybody.
We all know they're world-famous and important, that they are in effect corporations whose personal success is responsible for the creation of hundreds and thousands of jobs. We all know their faces are world-famous. But I didn't realize until that night that movie stars trump everybody. The big ones--Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks--trump senators and, arguably, the entire House. They trump governors, whom they think of as men with unfortunate hair. Movie stars trump the real princes of sort-of-real thrones, such as England's. If Prince Charles and Russell Crowe walked down the street together in any city in any country on any continent in the world, the crowd would flock to Mr. Crowe and ignore the nice, well-tailored man at his side.
Any number of senators and officials can say they want a World War II monument in the mall, but if Tom Hanks wants it done, it gets done, period. It's getting done even as we speak.
The only person movie stars do not trump is the American president, while he is president, and in only one way does he trump them: He can nuke someone. Movie stars don't have that power, yet.
This was my big epiphany from the Time party: Mr. Gorbachev is nothing compared to a star whose movies flop. I actually hadn't known that.
There was only one man I wanted to meet that night, and he turned out to be, in my eyes, the great man of the evening. I saw him across the room at a round, white table talking to Mel Brooks. During the milling-about time between courses I went over to thank him for his excellence. Soon I was standing near him and seeing him in the bright lights--a smooth, black tuxedo on a not-so-broad back. He turned toward me; I introduced myself and asked if I might shake his hand. He smiled and said sure--I was later to find out this was amazing behavior on his part--and we talked for a few minutes about the party and about politics. I left feeling I'd just met a wonderful American man.
Later I found out that he too had done something interesting at the dinner. He had been assigned by the editor of Time to sit at the table of the president of the United States, Bill Clinton. When he saw where his place card had been put, in this place of honor, he ordered it moved, because he didn't want to sit at a table with a man like that.
And here's to you, Joe DiMaggio. He married a movie star half a century ago but the one thing he seems not to have liked about Marilyn Monroe was that she was a star. And that night he refused to sit with the biggest political star in the room. Joe DiMaggio trumped movie-stardom. But Joltin' Joe has left and gone away.
I wish the philosopher Joseph Campbell had talked about movie stars, because I think they are received by a lot of people as having magical powers. One reason stars have such power is people tend to think that the parts they play have something to do with the people they are--with their own characters, with their personalities. You can't help but think Mel Gibson is brave. You can't help but think Tom Hanks is good. Even though you also know this is perhaps not always true, or perhaps only true now and then, or maybe not true at all.
But it's hard to keep this in your head. One of the oddest things about modern America is that we've never been so cynical about stars at the same time that we've never been so adoring of them, so aware of them, so worshipful. And we are these things in part because we often confuse the parts they play with the people they are. They do, too--the stars themselves do. Kevin Costner very much gives off the vibe of a man who sees himself on his own inner Imax as the Postman who saved the nation.
But the people most likely to confuse the part the movie star plays with the star himself are the not fully mature, the not fully developed, the not deeply intelligent, the not fully stable.
And we have more and more of these people in the modern world.
Which means stars are getting bigger and bigger. More and more famous. More and more powerful.
Which gets me to the Academy Awards. Much has been said about Sunday night's extravaganza, much of it critical, and the criticism is understandable. The ratings were historically low; the hostess, Whoopi Goldberg, while possessed of the extraordinary confidence and command necessary to host a show watched, live, by a billion people, suffers from the singular failing in a comic that she is not funny. She is smug, she plays the survivor, and when she makes off-color references she's embarrassing not because she's over the top or cutting-edge but because she's corny, old-fashioned, as if she were struck in the '60s when it was daring to use "Down Under" as a double entendre. Corny lasciviousness is creepy.
It is also true that this year's Oscar producers appear to have no sense at all of the lives of real Americans in the real America, but instead seem to experience life through some weird, antiart prism in which everything comes down to what racial, religious or ethnic group is oppressed on a daily basis in our sad country. The show's ratings might reflect not only America's reaction to Ms. Goldberg's witlessness but also to the introduction of men such as Al Sharpton as Thinker on the Meaning of the Movies.
America knows that when Hollywood producers are giving you Al Sharpton, Hollywood is pursuing its own version of reality, and it's not yours. So why not watch "Six Feet Under," which has the benefit of being interesting and funny and strange and beautifully acted and aesthetically pleasing.
And yet. For all of that, a good thing happened on that show, and I think we lost the good in the criticism.
It was that American kids, American teenagers, American immigrants and Americans in general got to see beautiful if over-the-top free speech as the winners referred to race.
Now you might say that in a country in which African Americans are 12% of the population and yet our most admired leaders, such as Colin Powell, are black, and our most admired cultural figures, such as Oprah, are black, and our emcee this evening is Whoopi, and on and on--you might say that our country doesn't have as big a race problem as Hollywood thinks. You might say America has made much more progress than Hollywood understands. You might say we as a nation are unbelievably integrated compared to 50 or even 25 years ago.
But you could also say, and you'd be right, that it isn't perfect. And you could also say America is a country in constant pursuit of perfection, which is a good thing.
When Halle Barry bubbled and sobbed in her speech, it was understandable. She had just won an Academy Award, a billion people were watching, her career and life had been troubled and now had triumphed, and she was the first black woman ever to win in the best actress category.
And that itself is pretty wonderful. And so her words, which you might say expressed a certain wonder. "Oh my God. Oh, my God. I'm sorry, this moment is so much bigger than me." She thanked black actresses of the past for breaking ground, and of the present for sharing a sense of solidarity. She said the moment was "for every nameless, faceless woman of color that now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened."
Well, Ms. Berry didn't quite open the door. America finally did, as America finally does. But Ms. Berry passed through it, and that is cause for joy.
When Sidney Poitier won his special award for lifetime achievement, he was, as everyone said, dignified and eloquent. When he won the Oscar as best actor almost 40 years ago, it was something startling and new. Now it's not. That's good. He thanked those who had helped him rise, and noted that "I benefited from their effort. America benefited from their effort."
It did indeed. I only wish he'd spoken more of his early life on Cat Island in the Bahamas, or his days as an American immigrant, washing dishes for a living and at least once sleeping in a bus station. He went from nothing to everything. He did that and America did that. They did it together.
Denzel Washington, the best actor of the evening, added context and proportion. "Oh, God is good. God is great," he began. "I thank the academy for saying to me that on this given night I was the best that I could be."
Just so. He's a great actor, and he has real presence.
Conservative commentators have been especially tough on the show, again understandably, for as a group they tend to hate cant and phoniness and the untrue. They are always searching for what they believe to be true.
But a nation runs not only on certain truths but on other things, too--on warmth and fellow feeling and generosity, for instance. It means something for kids when they see, again, that everything is possible in America. This is particularly important now, as our kids have it drummed through their heads each day in school that America has been a place of bigotry and slavery and shame. Some of our children are getting a fairly eccentric sense of what it was like in America even only 25 years ago.
But we all probably benefit from reminders of what is possible here. There is for instance the lady on the train, a trite story perhaps, but true. It was Monday, the morning after the Oscars, about 9:30. The train was the No. 4 or 5 into Manhattan, full of commuters. A woman gets on with a friend, a man. They're both middle-aged, both middle-class, both on their way to work, both black. She is bubbling about what happened last night. She's saying--and she's really bubbling--". . . and she thanked Dorothy Dandridge and Lena Horne and oh I forget, she was thanking . . ." And I wanted to shout, "Diahann Carroll. Wasn't it great?" But the woman was 10 feet away and I didn't want her to know we could all hear her.
Anyway, there was something lovely in it.
Mere sentiment you say. Maybe. But nations do run on many things, and sentiment is surely one of them.
It was nice that Halle Berry and Denzel Washington and Sidney Poitier won big awards. It's nice that there was a history-making breakthrough. It was nice that we noticed and thought about its meaning. It was nice that the progress of black artists in Hollywood highlighted a progress in our country that seems obvious to many of us but is not obvious to all of us. And it's nice that people paid attention.
By the way, on the Oscars Web site, God was not capitalized in the transcripts of the speeches. Halle Barry was quoted as saying "Oh my god" and "My god." We are at the holiest time of the year, with Passover here, Good Friday today and Easter this Sunday, and I wonder if the good folk at Oscar.com couldn't give God a capital G. After all, he made the stars, every one of them.
Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal. Her new book, "When Character Was King: A Story of Ronald Reagan," is just out from Viking Penguin. You can buy it here at the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Fridays.
