I have needed almost a full day to gather my thoughts on what I saw unfold during the third hour of the broadcast of the 94th Academy Awards, but it is time to ask questions about the unsettling sights I saw. What the absolute Hell was that Godfather tribute?
I was a bit weary when I first heard that the Oscars were going to do a tribute to The Godfather—last night was only the 49th anniversary of the film’s Academy coronation (the film was released in 1972 and was celebrated in 1973), it’s not even close to among the most celebrated films in the history of the awards (it won three trophies, which doesn’t even put it among the 100 most celebrated films in Oscar history), and anything interesting that happens at the Oscars inevitably happens by accident. My expectations were low and somehow things went way worse than I expected.
The Godfather might be the single easiest film on the planet for which to find somebody to give a good Academy Awards tribute. It’s modern enough that it doesn’t seem like a history project to watch it and it is widely esteemed enough that the volunteers should be plentiful. Martin Scorsese, the director emeritus of the Academy Awards, surely would have shown up to pay tribute to his good friend Francis Ford Coppola’s magnum opus. Steven Spielberg, also a friend and contemporary of Coppola and probably 1A to Scorsese among the Academy, was already in the theater as a Best Director nominee, and surely Paul Thomas Anderson, also in-house as a director, would suffice. But instead, the Academy went off the board and brought out Sofia Coppola, Francis’s daughter and a respected director in her own right, to introduce a tribute to a film that she, as a baby, appeared in, well before her much-maligned appearance in the third chapter of the series.
Just kidding, they went with P. Diddy.
With all due respect to Monster’s Ball or Get Him to the Greek, this was certainly not the cinematic figure I would have expected. But I can also see some argument for a bit of an outsider. Like, think of the most completely random, non-film celebrity you can think of. How about Tom Brady? It would be extremely weird if Tom Brady introduced the Oscars’ Godfather tribute, but it would speak to the film’s wide appeal. But the big problem wasn’t that Diddy approached the tribute as an outsider—it is that his influence took over the tribute.
For reasons beyond my comprehension, rather than showing the countless classic lines of dialogue or the film’s breathtaking cinematography, the montage portrayed The Godfather as though it was Scarface, a film which is perfectly fun and watchable but is nobody’s idea of truly significant. It turned out not to be a tribute to a film celebrating its 50th anniversary but rather a tribute to the trilogy as a whole, giving nearly equal weight to all three parts, baffling even for those of us who think The Godfather Part III is far better than its reputation. In theory, the montage’s soundtrack should have been simple—the film’s iconic score—but instead it was scored mostly by music from Kanye West and, of course, Diddy himself.
My wife, who has never seen The Godfather, turned to me during the tribute and remarked, “This movie doesn’t look very good.” And I can’t disagree with her on the merits of the tribute! You got a car explosion and some violence and some brooding shots of Vito and Michael Corleone, things which are certainly part of The Godfather but in no meaningful way convey what makes it great. How is there not even a glimpse of Vito and Michael speaking to each other? How are there more clips of Joe Mantegna speaking than Robert Duvall? Diddy prefaced the tribute by stating how much he loves The Godfather, but based on this montage (and yes, I am firmly aware that he probably had minimal input on the montage’s creation), I have no idea why he would.
Next, Diddy brought out Francis Ford Coppola, the director of all three films, Al Pacino, the star of two films and a prominent supporting actor in the other (and, really, the gravitational center of that film too), and Robert De Niro, who was the fourth credited actor in one of the films, and not even the one being theoretically commemorated. That De Niro was even in The Godfather Part II is basically a footnote to his career. It helps of course that De Niro is the most relevant of these three to modern movies and looks by far the most vibrant of the trio today, but this would be like doing a tribute to Back to the Future and bringing out Robert Zemeckis, Christopher Lloyd, and Elisabeth Shue.
The audience gave an extended standing ovation because, again, what person involved in making movies does not cherish The Godfather? Only Coppola spoke—given that he is an 82 year-old man who was never a performer even in his prime, it went about as well from a dynamism perspective as could be reasonably expected. But he had virtually nothing to say—he thanked Mario Puzo, the author of the novel The Godfather and co-writer of the film screenplays, and producer Robert Evans. The only time either Pacino (who, and I cannot stress this enough if you have not seen the films, far and away the most significant on-screen presence throughout the trilogy) or De Niro spoke was at the tail end, when De Niro repeated Coppola’s well-meaning but lethargic “Viva Ukraine” used to close out his speech.
The Godfather is both one of the greatest films ever made and a film that has been continuously embraced by dumb guys. It seems like every Trump administration lackey would cite The Godfather as his (always his, in this case) guiding template in life, despite the lessons of the films very much not being that you should like your life like Michael Corleone does. After this tribute, I understand why people who haven’t seen the movies think The Godfather is some meathead action movie rather than a beautifully made, poignant epic of mortality, guilt, and how the American dream and the American nightmare are so frequently one and the same.
The Godfather came out before I was born but it didn’t come out that long before I was born. I knew when I first watched it that it wasn’t a new movie but I also didn’t think of it as musty or stale. But some day, the film will exist entirely in the past—it’s pretty remarkable that so many prominent Godfather people such as Pacino, De Niro, Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton, and James Caan are still with us, but this won’t always be the case. And it would be a shame of the legacy of one of the great American artworks was as the dumb gangster movie it never was.
