Ryan Murphy’s version of the 20th Academy Awards gives Oscars to a bunch of fictional characters, but here’s who really won that night
Warning: Do not read this story until you have seen the final episode of “Hollywood.”
For its first six episodes, Ryan Murphy’s “Hollywood” mixed reality and fiction in its portrait of the movie business in the years after World War II. But there’s a good reason why the final episode is titled “A Hollywood Ending” – because it uses the Oscars of March 1948 to paint a picture of Hollywood growing more tolerant, more open to minorities and gays and more embracing of the kind of films that in reality were nearly impossible to make at the time or for decades later.
Like the ending of Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood,” the episode veers into a kind of wish-fulfillment fiction that is the whole point of its existence.
So we’re not really fact-checking when we look at the show’s depiction of the 20th Academy Awards ceremony. No, an interracial drama named “Meg” didn’t win six Oscars that night, and Murphy and “Hollywood” didn’t get it wrong when they show that happening in the episode – they simply rewrote history quite deliberately.
Also Read:Hollywood Gets a Rewrite in Trailer for Ryan Murphy’s New Netflix Series (Video)
But if you’re curious about who really won the big awards that night, about what happened back in the real world 72 years ago and whose big wins got pushed out in Murphy’s deliberate inventions, read on.
WHAT THE “HOLLYWOOD” VERSION OF THE OSCARS DIDN’T CHANGE
The Best Film Editing award really did go to “Body and Soul.
