'Come on, Oscar! Let's you and me get drunk!'
That's the infamous, immortal line from "The Star" (1952) featuring Bette Davis, quite ironically, in one of her 10 Academy Award-nominated roles, once a record. There is no movie scene more revealing about how utterly worthless an Oscar can really be — and therefore a sober lesson for us all now — than what follows her utterance of that invite. Portraying washed-up actress Margaret Elliott, broke and at wit's end, Bette picks up her Oscar statuette (Davis used the real one she nabbed for "Dangerous" as a boozy fallen actress), hops in her car at night and goes out for a tipsy spin. The big money scene comes when she plops Oscar on her dashboard and raises her whiskey flask in a toast, slurring, "To absent friends!"
In retrospect, the camp film classic is full of other saucy ironies. As she drives through the Beverly Hills neighborhood where Elliott once lived in, er, high style, she barks at the mansions of real celebs who've supposedly eclipsed her fame — Mitzi Gaynor, Jeanne Crain and Barbara Lawrence (who has a cameo in "The Star) — actresses largely forgotten today by the MTV Generation. When she arrives at her own former manse, she clutches Oscar tearfully outside in the dark and purrs to him, "I remember the day you came home. That was the day! Going . . . going . . . gone!"
Then Bette — oops, I mean Margaret — hops back in the car, gets chased by the coppers and ends up in the clinker.
Gaynor and Lawrence were never nominated for Oscars, but Crain earned a bid for "Pinky" in 1949 (she lost to Olivia de Havilland in "The Heiress"). Now her name is among many relatively obscure nominees you can spy looking over a list of past contenders in that category: Ruth Chatterton (a double nominee back in the 1930s for "Madame X" and "Sarah's Son" — go ahead and admit that you've never watched them) and many, many others, some even of recent times, including Elizabeth Shue ("Leaving Las Vegas," 1995), Janet McTeer ("Tumbleweeds," 1999) and Catalina Sandino Moreno ("Maria Full of Grace," 2004).
(Twentieth Century Fox)
At least Bette had a ironic sense of humor about the fleeting nature of fame and was rewarded well by the academy for it. Not only was one of her Oscar wins (the other was "Jezebel" in 1938) for portraying an actress on the downslide in "Dangerous" (1935), so were her last three nominations: "All About Eve" (1951), "The Star" (1952) and "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" (1962). In 1952, Bette lost to Shirley Booth ("Come Back, Little Sheba"). Amazon.com sells the DVD of "The Star" — a perfect Christmas present for your Oscar-obsessed chums — CLICK HERE
