If there's a moral dilemma in this year's Oscar nomination race, it's the question of whether a quarter-century-old statutory-rape case should weigh against director Roman Polanski's semiautobiographical Holocaust drama "The Pianist."
The unsparing film has already won the best picture award at Cannes, was nominated for a Golden Globe and is one of five best picture nominees in the Directors Guild of America and British film academy competitions. Based on the autobiography of pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman, who survived the Nazi occupation of Warsaw, "The Pianist" also depicts poignant details of Polanski's life. As a 7-year-old Jewish boy, he escaped the Krakow ghetto by crawling through a hole in a barbed-wire fence.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday February 05, 2003 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 15 inches; 548 words Type of Material: Correction
Oscar winner -- An article in Sunday's Calendar on director Roman Polanski incorrectly stated that "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" won the best picture Oscar in 1967. The winner that year was "In the Heat of the Night."
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Sunday February 09, 2003 Home Edition Sunday Calendar Part E Page 2 Calendar Desk 3 inches; 111 words Type of Material: Correction
Oscar winner -- An article last Sunday on director Roman Polanski incorrectly stated that "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" won the best picture Oscar for 1967. The winner that year was "In the Heat of the Night."
The film's artistry has so far largely overshadowed a less sympathetic bit of personal history: Polanski's decision in 1978 to flee the U.S. for France hours before he was to be sentenced for having sex with a 13-year-old San Fernando Valley girl 30 years his junior. The director, a French citizen, lives in Paris, unable to return without fear of arrest.
The Oscars have a way of forcing unpleasant confrontations between art and politics. The most recent example occurred four years ago, when the majority of the award show audience refused to give a standing ovation to director Elia Kazan, the recipient of an honorary Oscar. At the height of Hollywood's Red scare in the early 1950s, Kazan, once a member of the Communist Party, informed on eight of his old friends -- an act that many Hollywood liberals were unable to forgive.
The 1970s saw speculation over whether Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave would lose Oscar support because of their activism on behalf of North Vietnamese and Palestinian causes. But Polanski's case is unique for its emphasis on personal morality and the fact that, after so much time in a marginalized existence, the exile has a film that demands the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' attention.
Polanski is merely one of countless Hollywood figures who have had run-ins with the law and continued receiving acclaim -- from Charlie Chaplin (an underage sex charge) to the adorable Hugh Grant (paying a prostitute). Not to mention the rich history of celebrated outlaw artists, from Rimbaud (stabbing his lover) to author Norman Mailer, who stabbed his wife with a penknife and is now the white-haired eminence of American letters.
Some Oscar prognosticators suggest that a number of academy voters who admire the film will still oppose Polanski on moral grounds, while others might vote against him to save the academy from the embarrassment of an Oscar winner who cannot personally accept his statuette. They say it's more likely this prejudice will play a role in voting for the Oscar best picture and best director winners than in the nominating process -- much the way citizens sometimes sign a petition to qualify a ballot initiative but ultimately cast their vote against it.
"A lot of voters are concerned about the kind of message that is sent to the world about the feature film industry," said Rick Jewell, associate dean of USC's School of Cinema-Television. "There's so much attention focused on the thing he's accused of. It would be really surprising for me if people could set that aside."
Two competing sentiments may decide Polanski's Oscar fate, observers say.
The first, which holds in the director's favor, is the academy's historic tendency to pay more attention to "important" films than purely entertaining ones when it comes to best picture. (For example: "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" over "Bonnie and Clyde" in 1967, "Gandhi" over "E.T." in 1982, and "Dances With Wolves" over "GoodFellas" in 1990.) Holocaust-themed movies in particular have dominated the documentary categories in recent years.
The opposing force is the heightened public revulsion of child abuse, fueled by a series of high-profile kidnap-murders, the rise of Internet child pornography and the more recent revelations of child molestation and cover-ups in the Roman Catholic Church.
For some Oscar voters, "What we may be dealing with is: Can the Holocaust trump child molestation?" said show business historian Neal Gabler, author of "Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity."
"The Pianist," a Focus film, opened in the U.S. in late December to generally excellent reviews. Its straightforward portrait of Szpilman's unheroic exploits clearly struck a chord in Hollywood, where it is now considered a likely best picture nominee but is felt to be trailing "Chicago" and "The Hours," the Oscar favorites. Nomination voting ended Wednesday; the results will be announced Feb. 11.
