[By James Perloff] Perhaps a better title for this post would have been “A Tale of Two Clint Eastwoods,” but I’m no Eastwood expert. I know he’s done quite a bit of directing as well as acting over recent decades, and I haven’t kept up with his work. That’s because I rarely watch modern films, since Hollywood has gone progressively so dark.
I also acknowledge that some people will bitterly disagree with this article. Tastes vary widely, and that’s why any almost any movie or product on Amazon will have reviews that span the full range of one to five stars. This article is something I would have liked to have written over 30 years ago, but I didn’t have a blog back then—in fact, neither did anyone else.
The post isn’t really just about Clint Eastwood; it’s about the Oscar ceremonies, a topic I’ve written about before—e.g., why James Stewart and It’s a Wonderful Life were snubbed as Best Actor and Picture of 1946; why a dull, lifeless story was named Best Picture of 1947; and the remarkable discrepancies in the way Quo Vadis and Ben-Hur were treated at the Academy Awards for 1951 and 1959. The reasons were always political.
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