Why the Oscars — with their lack of awareness and diversity, and abundance of mediocrity — don’t matter
By Calum Marsh
It is the film critic’s perennial duty, it seems, to address the Academy Awards – a phenomenon that is in no way critic-borne. Round about this time of year, you see, a lot of broadsheet editors and TV news producers with otherwise very little interest in the movies suddenly determine that a multi-million dollar televised awards ceremony in Los Angeles warrants their attention.
And so people like me, who are paid to think and write about films every week as a niche metier, are for a short while called upon by radio programs and morning news shows to offer expert commentary on the year’s nominees. It’s sort of like the Olympics or the World Cup in that way: for a week or so everyone gets to feign a stake in a pastime they could hardly give a damn about any other day of the year.
But at least the Olympics and the World Cup have legitimate claims to authority. Sportswriters deeply invested in the cutting-edge vicissitudes of soccer or track and field day-to-day probably care a great deal about how these games transpire at the highest level, and I doubt very much that even the exaggerated furor of the mainstream media can interfere with the nuts-and-bolts pleasure of watching the best athletes in the world fairly compete. The Oscars simply aren’t that kind of competition…
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Google “why the Oscars matter” and you’ll find no end to reasons why they don’t. The arguments are numerous but simple: The Academy Awards presentation, now in its 89th year, is too old, too staid, too out of touch, #stilltoowhite, what-have-you.
But it remains a vital part of a conversation that continues to evolve around the serious business of “cinema,” the frivolity of “movies,” and whatever side of the coin currently features the grinning face of Nicolas Cage. Without the Academy and its evening-eating awards show, film appreciation would be a lopsided discussion.
There are several ways to measure a movie’s success. Box-office figures give us bums-in-seats – or, more specifically, dollars spent on those bums, which isn’t quite the same thing since the kids clamouring to see LEGO Batman require cheaper tickets than the Fifty Shades Darker crowd.
Critics (ahem) are another good indicator – tireless cinephiles who watch upwards of 300 movies a year and weigh in on what’s best. Sometimes their tastes match the multiplex crowds, as with Zootopia (98 per cent at rottentomatoes, seventh place at the 2016 box office) and Moana (95 per cent, 11th place).
Other times, critics will savage a movie like Suicide Squad (a dismal 26 per cent) but fail to stop audiences turning out to see it; it was ninth at the box office last year, earning $325 million. And the reverse can be found in a film like Hell or High Water, which was one of the highest rated films by critics last year, but barely squeaked into the top 100 at the box office, with $27 million.
These discrepancies also hinge on how widely a film is released; Suicide Squad opened on 4,255 screens, whereas Hell or High Water managed little more than a third of that at its peak. You can’t love the movie you can’t see.
But Hell or High Water also has four Oscar nominations – for Best Picture, Film Editing, Original Screenplay and Jeff Bridges (his seventh!) for Best Supporting Actor. (Though if you ask me, 88-year-old Margaret Bowman was robbed of a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her turn as West Texas’s crankiest waitress.) For many who haven’t yet seen this worthy film, its Oscar nominations might be their introduction.
Which brings us to the third leg of the film discussion; Hollywood, and the people who actually make the films. Say what you will about the pampered moviemaking elite; they know firsthand the difficulty of financing, casting, production budgets and cinematography. Heck, they even know the difference between sound editing and sound design, and how to wrangle both Johnny Depp’s hair and the man himself.
The almost 7,000 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences also comprise one of the largest voting blocks in the industry. The Golden Globes may have been making inroads as the swankier, more entertaining show, but its prizes remain based on the opinions of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, a tiny (about 90 strong) group of foreign (i.e., not American) journalists (i.e., not critics) based in Southern California.
You wouldn’t want the Academy owning the discussion of what constitutes an important film. Over the decades, it has committed some blistering blunders, such as passing over Saving Private Ryan and naming Shakespeare in Love Best Picture, or skipping 2001: A Space Odyssey in favour of Oliver! The last “classic” movie I watched, 1933’s King Kong, didn’t receive a single nomination. Yet who remembers that year’s Best Picture winner, Cavalcade?
But when the Oscars get it right, they can drive film conversations (and conventions) for years to come. The year after Kong, It Happened One Night became the first movie to win all five major awards – picture, director, actress, actor and screenplay. That feat has been equalled only twice since, by One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1975 and The Silence of the Lambs in 1991. It Happened One Night remains a template for the era’s screwball comedies and the rom-coms into which they evolved.
The Oscars can often collide with real-world issues, too; take last year’s Best Picture winner, Spotlight, and the recognition it afforded the mainstream news media, recently branded the “enemy of the American people” by the U.S. President.
Other recent Best Picture winners have turned a lens on slavery (12 Years a Slave), warfare (The Hurt Locker) and poverty (Slumdog Millionaire). Although it must be said that every second year seems to celebrate Hollywood itself – Birdman, Argo, The Artist, etc. – and this would seem to augur that La La Land will beat out Moonlight next weekend; it’s Hollywood’s year to shine.
But an awards show can be at once self-congratulatory, glitzy, superficial AND important. The Oscars are never going to be the Pulitzer or the Nobel; not as long as the chief requirement for entry in the club is being easy on the eyes and looking good in formal wear. But that doesn’t mean they can’t also address reality.
This was true in 1973, when Marlon Brando refused his Best Actor Oscar for The Godfather, and sent a Native American proxy to explain that it was because of Hollywood’s treatment of First Nations actors. It was true last year, when Leonardo DiCaprio used his win for The Revenant to call attention to the issue of climate change, which the White House now refuses to accept.
Related
- Why the Oscars — with their lack of awareness and diversity, and abundance of mediocrity — don’t matter
- Pushing the envelope: Who will win – and who should win – at Sunday’s Academy Awards
- #OscarsSoWoke: This year’s Academy Awards are bound to be political, and that’s not a bad thing
This year’s Oscars could produce a bumper crop of political statements, if recent comments by Meryl Streep at the Golden Globes and just about everyone at the Screen Actors Guild awards are any indication. In fact, it could be a year in which who wins is outshone by what they choose to say, and how it is received by those in power.
But even in less divisive times, the Academy Awards provide a rare confluence of entertainment and introspection. Just what does it mean to be a great movie, or to deliver a great performance? (Or to style hair and makeup superlatively?) As long as movies remain a mirror in which we view our culture and ourselves, we need the Oscars as a way to focus that image even more sharply.
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