Quote:
Originally Posted by GaylordWilshire
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I have. A week ago today.
I like to know a source before I read their opinion, so I did research what "Air Mail" is and also the author of this piece: Sam Wasson. A good place to start:
https://www.samwasson.com/about
So now my opinion: He isn't wrong.
One thing you would absolutely think essential to entering a museum like this is, well, the entrance!
Wasson:
"whose imposing concrete lobby evokes the Fascist sterility of The Conformist"
Indeed, I was quite non-plussed at entering the place, it felt nothing like being welcomed, it felt like a wall of scaffolding. To be sure, there are things in the museum people will be glad they have seen, but they're not in a context of enjoying those things, but rather teaching you something. I began to think I was going to see a bottle of pills that Louis B. Mayer had fed to Judy Garland to keep her energy up in filming the Wizard of Oz.
Most casual visitors will never have seen an Oscar in person before and even that section takes away the wonder of what a moment like that might be like. Or used to be like. In addition to the museum fee you pay, an attraction in the museum is that you can go into a private area one or two at a time and pretend you've won an Oscar and pick it up and hold it etc., while a narrator comments on your winning. I think they decided at some point NOT to let people say anything like an acceptance speech as people are wont to bash AMPAS nowadays and wouldn't that be amusing on youtube? Whatever they record they send to you later on (after reviewing/censoring it? I don't know) on your cellphone. But even this experience at the museum comes with an aura of money grubbing. You have to pay an extra ticketed fee for it at $15 a pop. And it's completely private, no one else gets to see any of this going on.
I keep thinking "The Oscars" have reached a jumping the shark moment. Or maybe passed it. Which is interesting because hanging over the escalators in the lobby is the shark from Jaws. Perhaps they'd be better off letting us jump over it than go under it.
I don't want to be critical of the Museum, I want it to be a success. The two new theatres there will be having continuous programs of movie screenings all year and that in itself is something I can't wait to start attending. Last week I saw a several minute news report about the new museum that actually made it seem like I wanted to go there, until I quickly realized I had.
A Hollywood museum by AMPAS should be entertaining. I was surprised at how even the gift shop there doesn't know what people want. Really, the gift shop was the most disappointing thing there. LOL! When people come to Hollywood their idea of what they want to see is more like the Universal Studios tour than taking a film studies class at USC. I mean, a section of the bookshop is devoted to Spike Lee? Even people who are huge fans of Spike Lee films aren't going to want to buy what's there.
The museum also has a restaurant named after Fanny Brice called Fanny's. It wasn't open during preview week, but it stated it would be open for breakfast lunch and dinner. Dinner? It also said it would close every day at 4pm. ???
Thanks for linking this article. The writer loves Hollywood and the movies and his harsh criticism is because he's disappointed in the inaugural presentation here and makes great points. I don't know if he went in to the museum with pre-conceived notions or they were formed along with his visit.
Like the author, I do want to be kind and hopeful for the future of this place. I'm thinking of a line from Tea & Sympathy, "In the future, when you talk about this, and you will...be kind."