5 Thoughts About Hollywood’s Obsession With Hollywood
And why Mank, a movie about the making of Citizen Kane, got more Oscar nominations than any other movie this year
Mank is a two-hour black-and-white movie about the real-life screenwriter (Herman Mankiewicz) of a two-hour black-and-white movie (Citizen Kane) about a real-life mogul (William Randolph Hearst) who produced movies, many of them starring his movie-star mistress. Scenes in Mank are introduced on-screen as they are in screenplays, with Courier typeface titles like EXT. — MGM STUDIOS — DAY. Citizen Kane was nominated for nine Oscars, including Best Picture and Original Screenplay, the latter of which Mankiewicz and Orson Welles won. The Academy Awards ceremony that year, 1942, took place at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, walking distance from brand new Union Station — which is the venue for the pandemic-adapted 2021 event, in which Mank is nominated for Best Picture and nine more awards.
In other words: Hollywood narcissism in a beautiful nutshell.
Around the time this year’s Oscar nominations were announced — Mank got more than any other film — I happened to watch (and like) The Bad and the Beautiful, Vincente Minnelli’s 1952 film à clef starring Kirk Douglas as a washed-up Hollywood mogul attempting a…
