Emanuel Levy

All About Oscar: The History and Politics of the Academy Awards by Levy (2003) provides a text that is carefully divided into very logical increments regarding the history and politics surrounding the Academy Awards. Beginning with the events that led up to the establishment of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Levy presents a history of the Oscars and how they have become the most popular and prestigious awards in the film industry. Reflecting the independent judgment of over 1,500 film professionals who participated in a poll conducted by the American Film Institute in 1996, motion picture film critic O'Neil (2003) agreed with this claim when he acknowledged, “The Oscars are still the most prestigious — and perhaps even the most accurate” (p. 794) of all movie awards. In All About Oscar, Levy also describes why filmmakers strive to win this prominent award and how it can have a vast impact upon their future success. Furthermore, he describes the requirements imposed by the Academy in order to be nominated for an Oscar and compete for the top award. Throughout the remainder of this book, he cites various theories relative to how important a film's genre and subject matter is in order to increase the potential for winning an Oscar. In doing so, he addresses the Academy's view of bio-pictures, problem dramas, historical epics, comedies, and musicals. In summary, Levy's book All About Oscar offers the reading audience a broad collection of facts that demonstrate the historical, cultural, and political contexts of Academy Award winning films. He examines the Oscars from many different perspectives (genre, subject matter, popularity figures, etc.). Levy offers the reader with realistic observations coupled with sound reasoning for what actually constitutes an Oscar winning film in the eyes of the Academy membership. He also concludes his book with various informative charts including: Best Picture Winners and Nominees by Genre from 1927-2001, Best Picture Winners by Year and Date of Release, and Best Picture Winners by Year and Running Time.… (más)

Emanuel Levy's Small Town America in Film explores the image of small town America on film from the beginning of the sound era in 1927 to 1991. Because "small-town America has been one of the few uniquely American symbols to be continuously preeminent," Levy believes that his analysis of more than eighty films would reveal what the "American cinema told its audiences about everyday life in small towns: work and public life; love and marriage, family and friendship; sex and leisure; politics and community life…. the goal is to demonstrate the prevalence of certain myths…in the treatment of small towns" (15).
Levy says that he will be comparing small-town films by theme as narratives and cultural texts; he does not succeed in creating a coherent, systematic examination of these films, however. There is some analysis of films, but it is far from systematic and anything but coherent. The bulk of Levy's study is occupied with detailed summaries of films about or set in small towns, and some discussion about how the film was received. It is a characteristic of the book that the summaries of the films are not always coherently written or systematically organized. The book becomes essentially a collection of descriptions of films that might have some kind of connection with small towns.
Other aspects of Levy's methodology become troublesome upon closer examination. Rather than analyze a random selection of small town films, Levy selects films that were popular as well as critically acclaimed, while intentionally leaving out all musicals and westerns. No objective criteria are used to select the films he chooses to analyze. These problems make Levy's goal of presenting a "comprehensive view of small towns in American cinema" seemingly impossible to achieve (27). The set of values that Levy uses to analyze small town films—individual versus community, stability versus change, sacred versus profane, community versus society, and integration versus isolation—are themes that could be used to view any American film regardless of place. Despite the general categories used, Levy claims that "the substance of these unit-ideas is not universal: their meanings change depending on the historical and ideological contexts in which they were generated" (24).
Despite the weaknesses of his work, Levy does manage to tease some conclusions from his incoherent mass of data. During the thirties, filmmakers used comedy in their portrayal of small-town life; in the forties, drama and war films; in the fifties and sixties, melodramas; in the seventies, horror films; and in the eighties, satire. As time progressed, filmmakers also changed their perception of small towns from protectors of American virtue to being virtually synonymous with cities as homes of corruption and disillusionment. These trends, though, are not clear progressions across time.
Levy has obviously spent a great deal of time reviewing the nearly one hundred films considered in this work, and the secondary sources used seem to be mostly adequate for his purposes. One weakness in his sources, though, is apparent if we consider the sociological works used. Levy says that he is using sociological theory in part to analyze the films; however, he reviews no sociological works published since 1980. Notwithstanding these limitations, Small-Town America in Film does contain information that would interest the most readers, if those readers did not mind becoming disappointed rather quickly with the squandered potential of the work.… (más)