Cary Elwes and Robin Wright in The Princess Bride ... a classic in its own right? (Courtesy photo)

In keeping with the lengthy movies awards season (and since my wife, the discerning Holly Lash, told me He’s Just Not That Into You was a must-avoid), I thought I’d come up with a new category: cinematic fallacies.

The nominees are:

1. The 1970s marked the greatest era in Hollywood filmmaking.

The ’70s were a great time for innovative filmmaking and produced an extraordinary collection of great films and legendary filmmakers. So has every other 10-year period before and since. As an exercise, I once listed every officially great film from the ’70s and tried to come up with just as many in the much-maligned ’80s. It wasn’t that hard. The movies themselves are nearly impossible to compare—no one would dare suggest that The Princess Bride should stand with The Godfather, but would anyone say it isn’t a classic in its own right?

We’ve put the ’70s far enough behind us, and we overlook that:

• Much of the creative freedom was enabled by the century’s low point for attendance, just as many of the great movies of that decade did as poorly as our art-house movies of today.
• The decade was filled with sequels, remakes, and the reigning champions at the box office: disaster movies. The ’70s truly were significant years for film. They’ve simply been lionized to a myopic degree.

2. The artistic achievements of the silent- and black-and-white movie era can never be equaled in the sound and color era.

The same people who believe this kind of nonsense like to say that the Hays Code censorship guidelines destroyed movies in the ’30s, and the end of the Hays Code destroyed movies in the ’60s. Movies as an entire art form aren’t qualified by whether or not they’re in color or allow sex or use digital effects. That’s like saying great paintings should only be done in blue and green, or that great music should always avoid C sharp and E flat. These are all tools of the medium. All that can be judged is what filmmakers do with them.

3. The Academy Awards are meaningless and self-congratulatory.

The Oscars started as a private dinner in the late ’20s to recognize the creative achievements of the young art form. Yes, they awarded each other, just like every Little League and Plumbers Association does each year. If people wanted to watch the Plumbing Awards, believe me they’d be televised as well. The public’s hunger (and the prospect of turning it into a money-maker for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) turned the Oscars into the behemoth they’ve become today. I can’t think of a single friend who admits to caring about the Oscars, yet somehow a billion uncaring viewers worldwide manage to tune in. We all watch movies, and we can’t help but invest in them. Are the awards highly political and subjective? Absolutely, just like every MVP award and Nobel Prize. At their best the Oscars bring smaller movies and performances to a much bigger audience (Slumdog Millionaire, Melissa Leo). At the least, they spark discussion and debate. The Oscars aren’t so terribly important, but the real point is they don’t need to defend themselves.

4. They don’t make them like they used to.

In some ways this one is true. They don’t put people in front of rear projection screens anymore to recreate lion attacks. But outside of numerous technical variations, the statement is uselessly vague. “Anymore” is a dumb word to begin with, endowed as it is with a smug knowledge of the future as well as the past. More to the point, storytelling styles constantly evolve. They’re not really designed to be compared. Movies from the ’60s, like Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider, were attacked for abandoning the class and nuance of earlier years for explicit sex and violence. Now they’re the classics we apparently don’t make anymore. Except of course that we do, depending on your perception. This phrase has been used every decade since movies began, usually to celebrate the “rare” film that does in fact harken to another age. Isn’t it another favorite pastime to bemoan that the film industry has no new ideas? How does Hollywood swing this, making no original movies and yet not making them like they used to? In short, my feeling is that if you look at any period in film history you’ll find a fair amount of junk, a lion’s share of okay-to-very-good movies, and a small percentage of great ones. As time separates the current greatness from the rest, we’ll feel pretty good about this era too. Even the ones that aren’t black and white.

Alex Manugian lives in Sherman Oaks, California. He grew up in Groton and has reviewed movies for Harvard residents for many years.