ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates the theatrical professoriate’s spectacle-archive through a case study of the 2015 Academy (of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) Awards, which marked the advent of the #OscarsSoWhite movement by awarding all four acting Oscars to white artists playing professors:
J.K. Simmons won Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of a jazz instructor in Whiplash;
Patricia Arquette won Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of a community college professor in Boyhood;
Julianne Moore won Best Actress for her portrayal of a Columbia University linguistics scholar in Still Alice;
Eddie Redmayne won Best Actor for his portrayal of Cambridge University physicist Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything.
This unfortunate coincidence pointed to the hegemonic whiteness of both Hollywood’s and academia’s myths of meritocracy, as well as a public fascination with portrayals of professors onscreen that, I argue, stems from what Steven Brint describes as today’s “golden age of higher education,” but a golden age riven by contradictions.
Although 2015’s critically acclaimed cinematic professors used the human scale of live performance to humanize an often-vilified professoriate, they also showcased an academic institution seen as damaged and dangerously out-of-touch. This characterization extended even to independent films produced during this period, such as Kyle Patrick Alvarez’s Sundance-award-winning Stanford Prison Experiment. I demonstrate the ambivalence of this public fascination with professors by analyzing how both Still Alice and The Theory of Everything adapt source material by academic exiles (Lisa Genova’s 2007 novel and Jane Hawking’s 2007 memoir) to portray professors’ mind-body conflicts as well as the structural constraints academia places upon professorial embodiment. Still Alice spectacularizes the expulsion of its protagonist’s body when her mind is compromised by Alzheimer’s disease, and The Theory of Everything spectacularizes the haven that academia provides for its protagonist’s disembodied mind. By comparing the film adaptations with their text-based sources, I demonstrate the spectacularization made possible by the cinematic medium and suggest how it shifts the public’s perception of blame from the structural issues undergirding the neoliberal academy to the personalities portrayed by Oscar-winning actors.
