At long last, after years of false starts, mysterious hiring and firing, abrupt changes of philosophy, and hundreds of millions of dollars spent, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures is here. Housed in a building once used by LACMA, with an addition designed by Renzo Piano, it is over-equipped to be the greatest film museum on earth—“a museum,” in the words of Academy C.E.O. Dawn Hudson, “worthy of the movies themselves.” And it is a failure.
To claim to be telling a viable history of film while failing to acknowledge the men and women who built the industry without which there would be no Motion Picture Academy (Louis B. Mayer, Fred Astaire, Barbara Stanwyck, Charlie Chaplin, Margaret Booth, Adolph Zukor, Frank Capra, Olivia de Havilland, Mabel Normand, Humphrey Bogart, Samuel Goldwyn, Ernst Lubitsch, to name only some of the visionary hundreds, many of them immigrants born of poverty); to pay no heed to the studio system itself (MGM, Paramount, Columbia, RKO, etc.), which produced, for several miraculous decades, the very movies the Academy has celebrated over the 94 years of its existence; to praise Citizen Kane for its “innovative approach to nonlinear narrative structure,” a statement both generic to the point of useless and which hardly accounts for the film’s monumental cultural prominence—it is worse than a failure. It is a fraud.
