L ast week, I wrote about the Nixon Library and Museum, the presidential site in Yorba Linda, Calif., exploring the triumphs and travails of the Golden State’s first native son in the Oval Office. Nixon was very much of California, coming from Orange County and incarnating the earnest, striving, practical character of suburbia. Granted, he was many things, but a matinee idol wasn’t one of them. A few miles down the road from Yorba Linda is Hollywood, very much of California, too, and dreams, gloss, and glitter. Hollywood, its own world, doesn’t exist exclusively to serve the other, the suburban mindset, though Hollywood is a commercial proposition. What it makes is an amalgam of the arts. Design, music, literature, and performance mesh, often to create cultural icons.
The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, opened in 2021, is the new museum of the history and craft of movies. It’s run by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, whose annual Oscars infuriate, befuddle, mortify, and rivet. At a cost of $500 million, it was a bit cheaper than Star Wars: The Force Awakens. That, in a way, set a low bar. The new museum could not possibly be as bad as that movie, so it was bound to look like value for money.
The Academy Museum is actually very good. Movies are the world’s most popular form of art, captivating and forming us like no other genre, so a museum devoted to film makes sense. I’ll give a nod to Lumière, but movies are a distinctly American art. Fueling European art for centuries were kings, priests, and aristocrats. Americans tossed the king to the curb, kept our clerical class small and poor, and forbade an aristocracy in our Constitution. Artists here needed to cater to broad popular taste, and thus Hollywood was born.
Movers and shakers took their time, occupied as they are not by Then but by Now. History and heritage aren’t second nature in Los Angeles, but self-adulation is. The Academy Museum nicely combines all three. It’s on Wilshire Boulevard next to what will be the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and L.A.’s natural history museum at the La Brea Tar Pits, where dinosaurs once roamed. It’s a serious, smart place where moviegoing mall rats and scholars will find lots to enjoy. Putting those two audiences — and so many other human niches — on the same page isn’t easy, but the movies do it all the time. And so does this new museum.
The museum’s two buildings connect by skywalks. The building facing Wilshire was once the elegant May Company Wilshire department store, built in 1939 in Streamlined Moderne style with a striking black-and-gold façade. After the store closed in 1991, it might have been demolished were it not for an architecture-conservation push, as rare in L.A. as a good sequel. For a while it served as the home of Eli Broad’s art collection, when LACMA dreamed it might get it as a gift.
Alas, as with so many LACMA dreams, it never happened. Broad built his own museum honoring himself. The Academy Museum refitted the building facing Wilshire but built a spherical extension in back of it with theaters, an auditorium, and a glass-domed terrace on the top floor, giving a splendid view of the hills and, on a clear day, the Hollywood sign. I don’t think they needed Renzo Piano to build it but probably felt they needed the marketing power of his name to raise the money.
The Titanic-sized question was how to fashion a museum on the collective history of tens of thousands of objects — movies — each made to be seen in its entirety rather than in clips, which is, unless visitors see an entire film, the most we’ll get in a museum. “I see dead people,” I thought, channeling The Sixth Sense, but living ones, too, in this salute to cinema. So the introduction, Stories of Cinema, is impressionist and suggestive, a kaleidoscope of seconds-long clips starting with the earliest movies, through to today’s. Stan and Ollie, Judy, Mickey, and Scarlett and Rhett get a moment, as do Hannibal the Cannibal, “nobody’s perfect,” “I am Spartacus,” the Joker, those pesky killer birds, and AI’s grandfather. “I’m afraid I can’t do that” — Hal’s comment in 2001: A Space Odyssey — has the scary weight of prophecy. The gallery for Stories of Cinema is off the lobby, named in memory of Sidney Poitier.
It’s well done. It puts us in the mood. I’ve seen a zillion movies and forget nothing so, for me, it was fun, but for younger visitors, it’s a revelatory and educational sweep through movie history and a montage that doesn’t morph into a barrage. A nearby set of wall panels explains in succinct, well-written paragraphs what each of the key figures in moviemaking actually does, alphabetically so there’s no hierarchy, though “acting” is first. People don’t know enough about the casting director, the essential collaborations among the cinematographer, the set designer, and the makeup artist, the blends of sounds, and what the producers do.
On the second floor, three large galleries each focus on a single movie or filmmaker. These rotate every few months. When I visited in March, the exhibits were on Casablanca, from 1942, Boyz n the Hood, from 1991, written and directed by John Singleton (1968–2019), and the documentary maker Lourdes Portillo (1943–2024). On view, mostly, is ephemera, but there are good photographs, each gallery had a theme, and I’d never heard of Portillo, who died last week, so I learned something.
The museum positions Casablanca as a movie about refugees and the shady people using them as they desperately try to get where they want to go while the war gets closer and closer. Many of Casablanca’s off-screen creatives — its director, writers, music composer, and producer — were Jewish, some émigrés, but the film emphatically leaves European Jews, most at risk from the Nazis, out of the narrative.
An overt Jewish storyline would wreck its box-office potential. Romance, an exotic setting, and baddies like Claude Rains and Sidney Greenstreet made the refugee theme more oblique. The space was beautifully curated. It’s biographical and a history lesson but also experiential. Objects such as Sam’s piano — he of “Play it, Sam” — help put 2024’s visitors in an empathetic frame of mind.
Portillo’s advocacy documentaries are about violence against women in Mexico and the phenomenon of disappearance in Argentina — kidnapping and murder during the country’s many upheavals — and the efforts of mothers to get answers. As in the Casablanca gallery, the Portillo gallery has an experiential element — the religious shrine in her home — and then moves to her work as a filmmaker.
These three mini-retrospectives — on Casablanca, Portillo, and Boyz n the Hood — are driven by racial, ethnic, and religious identity, as is much, though not all, of what the Academy Museum does. It’s owned and run by the group that gives the Oscars, so the galleries on the Academy Awards are big and dazzling and, alas, sodden by race. The Academy Awards are many things — entertaining, bewildering, mercenary, contemptibly faint-hearted, and sometimes on target — but the history of the awards isn’t as rote and boring as the Oscars galleries makes it out to be.
In the middle of the gallery is a raised platform with mannequins dressed in the suits and gowns that award-winners wore on Oscars night. On the walls of the space are screens showing clips of acceptance speeches, mostly of category firsts for African Americans. This will feel dated very fast — it already does — but the curators can easily reimagine the space. Now, the Academy is still feeling the sting of the “Oscars So White” movement and its own efforts to rig the awards to deliver a “just like America” racial balance, which only drains its credibility. This, too, shall pass.
Among the video vignettes to be included — I hope — are Will Smith’s notorious girl-slap from the 2022 awards, the beyond-the-scope-of-human-imagination announcement of the wrong winner in 2016, Robin Williams’s “Blame Canada” high-kicking show tune from 2000, fake Indian Sacheen Littlefeather’s stand-in acceptance speech for Marlon Brando in 1972, Alfred Hitchcock’s two-word “thank you” acceptance speech in 1968, and Harold Russell’s 1947 acceptance speech for The Best Years of Our Lives. Russell, who lost both hands in a World War II injury, won the best supporting actor award for his role as a wounded veteran returning to his fiancée. He’d never acted. Years later, he sold his Oscar for $60,000 to pay for his wife’s medical expenses. “My wife means more to me than an Oscar,” he said. This is so much more compelling than the first this-or-that minority to win an award for best makeup.
The Oscar Experience was a surprisingly weird and fun gallery. There, a visitor — and it’s only one at a time — is placed in a mini-version of the stage at the Dolby Theater, where the Academy Awards ceremony happens each year. It’s got a podium and a plush red carpet and curving gold walls as well as stage lighting. At an appointed moment, the visitor wins an Oscar, a moment captured on video. I got a few hints from my minder. Feel free to jump up and down, winning gladiator-style, stay on your mark on the floor, and no speeches allowed. Greer Garson’s acceptance speech in 1942 for her Mrs. Miniver prize was four minutes and the longest on record. People can indeed drone on.
Not wanting to court a broken hip, I stayed planted and subtly caressed my prize when my “and the Oscar goes to Brian Allen” moment came. I pumped it over my head as well and smiled but, goodness, I’m from Vermont and dour by nature.
For a few seconds, I held a genuine Academy Award. They have them in stock. It weighs a little over eight pounds and is indeed a sleek, handsome little guy. My attire came not from Armani but from the hardware store in ye olde Arlington. The gallery guard had to ever-so-insistently pry Oscar from my hands.
To tweak Clint Eastwood’s line from Sudden Impact, my day was made.
Looming over the atrium is the 25-foot-long animatronic shark that ate beachgoers for lunch and then for the helluvit. Yes, the shark from Jaws hangs suspended from the top-floor ceiling, near the escalator. The menacing music cued in my head. Looking at Bruce — Spielberg named the toothy, insatiable beast after his lawyer — I thought, “I’ll take the stairs.” The thing might fall on me, a tragic end to the art critic who’d just held Oscar.
I enjoyed John Waters: Pope of Trash, the multi-gallery retrospective of the work of Baltimore’s muse and sage. It’s a very good survey of his themes and process. I’ve seen some of his films — Pecker, Serial Mom, and Hairspray are favorites — and left with a deeper understanding of his unique style. I look at the things on view — costumes, film scripts, props, and posters — as relics and not deeply impressive, but the show is a class-in-miniature.
The museum — aside from my tiny quibbles on its obsession with race — is a place for serious film scholars as well as tourists and casual moviegoers. It’s a collecting institution, owning 13 million objects, mostly film reels and clips, posters, props, costumes, screen tests, and sketches. Some are high in profile and low in academic merit, such as Dorothy’s ruby slippers and Dracula’s black cape, but 3-D zoetropes for animated movies like Toy Story (1995) are foundational, as is the museum’s vast collection of disaster-movie technology.
Jacqueline Stewart is the museum’s director. She’s a serious film historian who has taught the art history of films at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago. She was also the artistic director of the Academy Museum during its planning. The future of the place is in the hands of the curators, who’ve assembled first-rate exhibitions.
The exhibitions change, so it’s a place for multiple visits. Movie premieres and screenings of classic movies take place in the museum’s theater. This month’s focus is Marlon Brando films, since April 2024 is the centennial of his birth. The museum has already become one of the country’s essential museums, given its unique mission and quality.