The Academy Goes With the Popular Choice: The 48th Academy Awards, Rocky's Best Picture Win, and the Trajectory of Cinema Ever Since

At the 48th Academy Awards there were five films up for the Best Picture Oscar, namely Alan J. Pakula's All the President's Men; Hal Ashby's Bound for Glory; Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver; Sidney Lumet's Network; and John G. Avildsen's Rocky.

The first four films were what a certain sort of ideologue would call "elitist"--tonally and technically sophisticated, with a socially critical outlook (be it Pakula's thriller-like treatment of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's investigation of the Watergate scandal, Ashby's biopic about folk singer Woody Guthrie, Scorsese's vision of Times Square in a New York approaching what is still conventionally remembered as its "rock bottom," or Lumet's satire of network television centering on the rise of a right-wing populist "mad prophet of the airwaves"). By contrast Rocky was an old-fashioned sports story about an underdog who gets a shot at the top and makes the most of it, with, some thought, a rather right-wing edge (in its essentially "aspirational," "You only need willpower to be a champ" attitude, and what some saw as its racial subtext), which got it called "populist."

In what was then and now seen as a gesture toward the broader moviegoing audience Rocky was given the prize over those other more conventionally Oscar-worthy (more technically accomplished, more thematically ambitious, more substantial) films. And if it is less often spoken of than, for example, Jaws or Star Wars by those historians who recount the end of the New Hollywood, it does get mentioned from time to time as a sign of where film was headed, with some justice given the sequels. Looking back at Rocky IV, for example, one sees in the sequel-itis, the Cold War-ism, the thoroughly "high concept" character of the product's look and feel and tone, the "New" New Hollywood clearly arrived.

All the same, there is a surprise for those who look back from the sequel, or from Rocky's reputation as a marker of the decline of the New Hollywood, to the original. If Rocky IV purely belonged to the new era, "Rocky I" did not--with, instead of mansions and press conference halls, grand arenas and training facilities out of the future, the screen saturated with the shabbiness of working-class districts amid which people lead dead-end lives, while the movie actually looks, classically, like a movie. One can even quantify the fact. Where Rocky IV has an Average Shot Length (ASL) of a mere 2.3 seconds--shrinking toward 1 second in the training montages and fight scenes--the ASL was 8.5 seconds in the original, the sequel squeezing almost four times as many shots as the original into any given space of time, and watching it you really feel it.* Where the mid-'80s follow-up a 90-minute music video intended above all to dazzle with light and sound, with synchronization of image and soundtrack, all very Michael Bay a decade before Bay shot his first feature, the original was a movie telling a story, whatever one makes of it, about people in places that were none too dazzling in a way much out of fashion in major feature film by the '80s, and even more so now.

* Figures on ASL from the ever-handy and much-recommended Cinemetrics web site.