Michael Schulman (Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep) offers a tasty overview of the Academy Awards, namely the scandals, upsets, wrong decisions and juicy gossip. Unlike Mason Wiley and Damien Bona's Inside Oscar, which devoted a chapter to each year's Oscar ceremonies, Schulman's massive (600+ pages) Oscar Wars is more selective, and its chapters are organized by topics, such as "Tokens," which discusses how Oscar wins for Hattie McDaniel, Sidney Poitier and Halle Berry broke the Oscar color barriers in 1940, 1964 and 2002.
Individual chapter topics also include the Hollywood blacklist period; why Citizen Kane won only one Oscar out of its nine nominations; and how Bette Davis in All About Eve and Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard lost the 1951 Best Actress Oscar to Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday. One of the funniest chapters covers caftan-loving "Glittermeister" Allan Carr's production of the 1989 awards show, the camp-fest that resulted in the Academy issuing a public apology.
In the final chapters, Schulman deftly covers recent gaffes, such as when Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway were handed the wrong envelope in 2017 and La La Land was announced as Best Picture, only to have the Oscar stage managers leap into action to reveal that the winner was actually Moonlight. He also dissects Harvey Weinstein's award show tactics and how Shakespeare in Love won the Best Picture Oscar over Saving Private Ryan. The book ends with Schulman's firsthand account from the Dolby Theatre's mezzanine of the live 2022 ceremony when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock. Film buffs will savor this tantalizing and gossip-filled overview of the Academy Awards. --Kevin Howell, independent reviewer and marketing consultant