Summary: “The Oscars” (1993)

Murray N. Rothbard’s “The Oscars” is a brief 1993 film column that treats the Academy Awards as evidence in a wider cultural argument. Its immediate subject is Hollywood’s annual ceremony, but its deeper concern is the moral and political meaning Rothbard assigns to films, performances, and critical prestige. He reads the awards through a culture-war opposition between heroic narrative and liberal self-reproach, older dramatic convention and fashionable nihilism, sexual normativity and “gender-bending.”

For once, the Academy Awards were tolerable—not the ceremony, which was longer, more boring, and more Politically Correct than ever—but the awards themselves.

That opening distinction frames the essay. Rothbard does not admire the ceremony or the Academy’s cultural world; he merely finds the outcome less disastrous than expected. His approval of Unforgiven is therefore reluctant and comparative. Clint Eastwood’s win is acceptable to him as career recognition, but he argues that the film itself repeatedly apologizes for the Western genre’s defining acts of violence and revenge.

The Unforgiven was neither my favorite picture of the year, nor a particularly good movie or Western, but it was not too bad, and certainly infinitely better than the repellent Crying Game, which it just beat out by a nose.

Rothbard’s judgment of Unforgiven reveals his broader critical standard: aesthetic value is bound to moral posture. The film’s dark photography, guilt, and anti-heroic self-questioning strike him as signs of liberal compromise. What rescues the picture, in his account, is its late recovery of decisive action and unembarrassed retribution.

Despite all this, The Unforgiven is redeemed at the end by a magnificent and heroic final sequence, in which Eastwood abandons his kvetching and self-loathing and mows down the bad guys in a superb, action-packed tour de force.

Against this compromised Western, Rothbard’s preferred film is Scent of a Woman, which he praises as an old-fashioned “movie-movie”: dramatic, romantic, verbally sharp, and centered on Al Pacino’s bravura performance. His defense of the film is also a defense of sentiment, theatricality, and affirmative moral structure against critics who dismiss such qualities as superficial. The same assumptions shape his comments on the acting awards: he weighs the prizes less as industry news than as tests of whether Hollywood can still recognize vivid performance rather than prestige, category manipulation, or political fashion.

The essay’s sharpest polemical energy is reserved for The Crying Game. Rothbard treats its failure to win Best Picture as the night’s real victory. He attributes the film’s success not to artistic power but to publicity and to what he portrays as the enthusiasm of left-liberal critics for perversity and nihilism. This is where the column shifts from awards commentary into a denunciation of early-1990s cultural politics.

In fact, this seems to be The Big Cultural Event of the Year: gender-bending.

Rothbard’s discussion of The Crying Game is openly derogatory toward transgender, intersex, and gender-nonconforming people, and it escalates from one film to a broad indictment of contemporary culture. He links the movie to Orlando, newspaper commentary, and affirmative-action satire as symptoms of a campaign to dissolve sexual distinctions. The close invokes The Sound of Music as an emblem of an older cultural order, even while admitting its artistic limitations. The point is less consistent film criticism than cultural restorationism: Rothbard uses the Oscars to argue that modern critical taste, identity politics, and sexual pluralism have displaced heroic drama, verbal intelligence, and moral clarity.