Oscar Wars is very long and detailed-500 pages of actual text and another 100 of sources. The strongest bit was the first 1/3 or so when he writes about the Academy’s early days and “Old Hollywood”. Then he strays from the long-established pattern of talking about the literal making of the movies and the stars behind them and then the awards by the time we hit the eighties by focusing pretty much only on the actual awards show.

He almost ironically and frankly bizarrely chooses not to integrate the history and stories of Black actors in Hollywood into the corresponding decade-based chapters with the rest of their peer’s stories but puts in a standalone chapter towards the end of the book. It was not only odd to suddenly be reading about the 1930s again after making our way up to the 80s, 90s, and beyond but it really felt like he was doing what he said the studios do–marginalizing and tokenizing their stories by setting them apart from the larger history he’d been writing about for about 400 pages.

I honestly was surprised at how little the book went into the mechanics of the awards show worked, that content was mostly shared in the 80s and then the Moonlight fiasco chapters. I had expected more of the book to be about the actual Academy and the Oscars. It wasn’t for most of the book which made it very noticeable when it stopped being largely about filming and actor relationships. Were people in the later decades less likely to talk about onset drama so he had less to work with? The early years had a lot of content, two warring gossip columnists and while you hear about how tightly the studios controlled the actors, they seemed to share a lot of snappy, gossipy, and unflattering information with the public. Oddly when actors seem to have more control over their careers after the studio system ended, they don’t seem to do as much off-the-cuff commenting. Perhaps because they are dependent on finding jobs day to day in a way studio players were not? I think this would have been an interesting path to go down for the author in the later chapters but he did not. Instead, the book switched to award-show dramas and ended.

Perhaps the book should have stopped in the 1960s or 70s? The later chapters feel increasingly disconnected from the earlier ones, almost as if they were written separately and shoehorned in. Perhaps splitting the material into two books would have been a better idea? It felt like he ran out of steam at the end.

It was a long book and well-researched but there were a number of flaws that were difficult to ignore.