WHAT REALLY MATTERS TO OSCAR? WILL THE ACADEMY REWARD 'TRAFFIC,' OR PLAY IT SAFE?

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

A great nation's fate hung in the balance. Would its new leader be a war hero and self-appointed champion of democracy or would power pass dynastically from father to son?

That's what happened in the movie, earning it a lot of Oscar nominations. For fearlessly taking a stand on current political issues? Well, not really, unless you're living in the second century instead of the third millennium.

Whatever similarities the Roman epic ``Gladiator'' bears to last year's election circus are, of course, coincidental. But traditionally, that's how the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has preferred its ``hard- hitting'' best picture winners: self-righteous and socially concerned, but in a manner that's allegorical, microcosmic and/or set far enough in the past to avoid offending potential customers.

This year, ``Gladiator'' fits that paradigm perfectly and is leading the Oscar pack with 12 nominations. But this could easily be one of the rare times in academy history that a film that directly addresses a current national problem could win the big prize.

Steven Soderbergh's ``Traffic'' has already accomplished what hundreds of films have attempted but almost never succeeded at: inspiring a national debate - and a pretty thoughtful and open one at that - about an emotionally charged social issue, the war on drugs.

``Traffic'' is the rare political film which, while avoiding easy answers to a complicated issue and the crowd-pleasing, Oliver Stone-style demagogy that goes with it, has become a popular hit, having passed the $100 million-gross point at the box office last weekend.

That the film offers no easy solutions seems to reflect the public's perception of the drug war. A poll released Wednesday by the Washington- based Pew Research Center for the People and Press found that 74 percent of those questioned consider the U.S. campaign against drugs a failure.

``Traffic'' has also made people in power question long-unexamined national policies. It was reported Wednesday that a Senate committee appropriated $900 million for the kind of drug research and prevention programs that the film advocates.

And the film has again put the drug war into the media's eye. All last week, ABC, the network that's broadcasting today's Oscar ceremonies, devoted its prestigious ``Nightline'' news program to a ``Traffic''- referencing investigation of the narcotics trade.

And ``Traffic'' seems to have enjoyed an 11th-hour surge in the Oscar preliminaries, having won two of the top three prizes at the last major industry ceremony, the Screen Actors Guild Awards, before tonight's big competition.

But does all of this mean that ``Traffic'' will knock off front-runner ``Gladiator'' or that the other serious contenders - the Chinese phenomenon ``Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon'' and Soderbergh's more conventionally entertaining, secondarily issue-focused ``Erin Brockovich'' - will beat the drug movie to it?

If Oscar history is a factor in the matter, ``Traffic's'' facing a large red light.

An overview of Oscar's 72 previous best picture winners yields a mere seven features that could, strictly speaking, be said to have been centered on a serious issue of their day. The first three to do so were, not surprisingly, World War II-related: ``Mrs. Miniver'' (1942), ``Casablanca'' (1943) and ``The Best Years of Our Lives'' (1946).

And even then ...

It can be argued that only the last one, which presented a kaleidoscopic view of returning veterans' difficulties readjusting to the homefront, really foregrounded its subject, while ``Miniver'' took the family microcosm approach and ``Casablanca'' was as much a grand romance as a call to wartime sacrifice and solidarity.

Director Elia Kazan followed with the next two social issue best pictures, 1947's expose of anti-Semitism ``Gentleman's Agreement'' and the 1954 union corruption drama ``On the Waterfront.'' Of course, both of these films' ``hot topics'' were decades (if not centuries) old at the time of their releases, and ``Waterfront'' even bled over into the allegorical category (it was Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg's dramatized rationalization for naming names during Hollywood's anti-communist witch hunt). Nevertheless, the issues they addressed were still vital and volatile when the pictures were made.

Despite all of the upheavals that marked the 1960s, the academy spent most of the decade honoring bloated musicals and historical pageants. The one notable exception was 1967 winner ``In the Heat of the Night,'' which, although basically a murder mystery, at least incorporated the rapidly changing nature of race relations as a central theme.

That era's other great cultural conflict, the Vietnam War, was finally acknowledged in 1978 via ``The Deer Hunter.'' Yes, the movie came out a good half-decade after direct U.S. disengagement from the conflict and three years past the war's end. But since much of it was about the very specific blowback effects Americans were experiencing at the time, it qualified more as current than, say, Stone's pure combat picture ``Platoon'' did eight years later.

And that, folks, has pretty much been all.

Not a single best picture winner during the Great Depression addressed, well, the Great Depression. Nor, for that matter, the rise of fascism in Europe (a less-toxic American version, Huey Long's strongman takeover of the state of Louisiana, was approached under assumed names in what is probably the strongest political film to ever win a best picture Oscar, ``All the King's Men'' - but that was in 1949, 14 years after Long's assassination).

As for women's rights or gay rights or (not counting the aforementioned couple and the nostalgia-addled 1989 winner ``Driving Miss Daisy),'' any minority's struggle for equality in the Land of the Free? Usually relegated to lesser categories. Watergate? ``All the President's Men'' lost to ``Rocky'' in 1976. The ever-growing influence - and concurrent irresponsibility - of media in the last 50 years? ``Network'' lost in the bicentennial year, too, and look how many statuettes ``The Insider'' took home last March (that would be zero).

When it comes to potential controversy, academy voters are more comfortable with pictures that manage to capture something of the tenor of their times in the previously mentioned manners of allegorically, microcosmically (usually in the context of a family) and historically.

For example, it can be argued that the benefit of a decade or more's hindsight made such war movies as ``All Quiet on the Western Front'' (1929-30), ``From Here to Eternity'' (1953), ``The Bridge on the River Kwai'' (1957), ``Lawrence of Arabia'' (1962), ``Patton'' (1970), ``Platoon,'' ``Schindler's List'' (1993) and ``The English Patient'' (1996) more trenchant treatments of their particular conflicts than the propaganda-oriented films released during World War II.

Then there are the best pictures that captured something in the cultural air. As America shifted from a rural to a predominantly metropolitan society in the second half of the 20th century, such movies as ``The Lost Weekend'' (1945), ``Marty'' (1955) and ``The Apartment'' (1960) expressed different forms of urban alienation that went along with the move. ``Apartment'' also touched on the dawning sexual revolution of the '60s more frankly than any Hollywood film had dared to for nearly three decades prior. And in 1969, ``Midnight Cowboy,'' the only X-rated best picture in history, gave an accurate indication of how far things had gone in 10 years.

Add to that some dozen-odd best pictures concerned with the important events of long ago and far away places - from ``The Life of Emile Zola'' (1937) through ``Gandhi'' (1982), ``The Last Emperor'' (1987) and ``Braveheart'' (1995) - and it becomes clear that Oscar and politics are hardly strange bedfellows.

But we'll see tonight if ``Traffic'' is too potent and urgent for the academy to love.

CAPTION(S):

6 photos

Photo:

(1) ``Traffic''

(2) ``On the Waterfront''

(3) ``In the Heat of the Night''

(4) ``Casablanca''

(5) ``All the President's Men''

(6) Christopher Walken in ``The Deer Hunter''