What's Wrong with The Oscars

The Academy Awards used to excite me like nothing else. I would pour over nominated movies from all categories, taking every recommendation deep into my heart and winners as absolute gospel. This was in the early to late 2000s, as the Oscars trended towards more popular films that were made from indie studios. The number of Best Picture winners was cut off at five at the time, and in 2009 when The Dark Knight wasn’t nominated, I started to wane in my excitement.

There have been a lot of problems with The Academy Awards since it began back in 1929, but over the past few decades, there are not only disturbing trendlines that have shown up, but behind the scenes badmouthing, monetary necessities, and blatant pandering. For clarity’s sake, I’ll be using the year the awards ceremony took place to describe it, not the year the nominated films came out.

I’ll start with one of the more off-kilter trends that have continued to rear its ugly head. Once again, as it rightfully continues to be pointed out by many celebrities, the 2019 Oscars will not have a woman nominated for Best Director. Last year, Greta Gerwig was the first woman since Kathryn Bigelow won in 2010 for The Hurt Locker to even be nominated, and she was just the 5th ever. One can make the argument that there wasn’t a large pool of great female-directed films that released in 2018, and they’d partially be right. This points out another endemic problem in Hollywood as a whole, but Leave No Trace, You Were Never Really Here, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, and The Rider, all films that garnered quite a bit of awards buzz and even racked up some other Oscar nominations, were directed by fantastic women. Arguments can easily be made to take Adam McKay off the Best Director nominee list for this year, as many agree that Vice (somehow nominated for eight awards) was not his greatest work and, if anything, a downturn from The Big Short. He could be replaced by a better-directed film with its much-deserving filmmaker, but that did not happen. Respect for women in Hollywood has been in a huge spotlight this past year, and The Academy has shown once again that they often don’t care to showcase great female talent behind the camera.

Since the beginning of time, people have been talking about others they don’t like behind their back for their own benefit, and if you don’t think this happens for The Oscars, you’d be wrong. Whisper campaigns are a staple of the awards show elite and very often, we find that soon before nominations are made, and winners are decided, that inaccurate and rash claims are made about other movies to stop Academy members from voting for them. Zero Dark Thirty was caught up in a government investigation for allegedly receiving classified information from CIA intelligence right before winners were voted on for the 2012 Academy Awards. When the heavily favored film lost to Argo for Best Picture, the charges were mysteriously dropped. We’ve had producers say that voting for Avatar would be bad for the movie industry as a whole and the wrong thing to do in some leaked emails. The Shape of Water was accused of being a rip-off of a screenplay the creators had never heard of before last year’s ceremony. These are just a few examples of events that may have led to certain films losing or winning an award, and this kind of talk is often hired help from PR firms which takes some money to get on your side.

Now, it’s even less of a secret than backstage mudslinging that it takes quite a bit of cash to campaign for a film to win awards. It’s estimated that 2-10 million dollars is spent to campaign for an Oscar. The money that needs to go behind a movie in buying billboards, creating screener copies of the movie for Academy voters, and generally staying in their minds for months on end is a lot for smaller production houses and especially films with smaller budgets. This falls on the movie’s distributor and there were a lot of articles earlier this year about certain studios deciding which of their films they would choose to champion for the awards. One under the most scrutiny was Disney, as both Black Panther and Avengers: Infinity War were great movies in their own ways. Mary Poppins Returns and Ant-Man and the Wasp were left somewhat by the wayside for semi-obvious reasons, but much of that comes down to two things: cultural relevance and domestic popularity. Disney smartly chose to go with Black Panther for their backing dollars which ended up with seven nominations this year, which is pretty notable for the highest grossing domestic movie of 2018. The last movies to do something similar in my memory are Avatar and Titanic, and this is indicative of something we’re seeing this year.

When I said that The Academy blatantly panders, I mean this regarding its biggest honor. The Best Picture nominees have always followed trends of different types. For a long time starting in the early 80s, the large and sweeping epic was the kind of film to win the award. Later in the late 2000s, much of smaller Hollywood and critical darlings were frustrated that their indie efforts were getting no love, and of late, these smaller films with bigger names attached continue to dominate the competition. This trend coupled with the public’s view of Hollywood as an institution that didn’t really embrace the changing tide of diversity in the world, made for what I felt were very obvious picks for Best Picture with 12 Years a Slave in 2014 and Moonlight in 2018. Moonlight especially was a movie that embraced its main character as a queer African American in a film that was well-reviewed by critics but seen by very few of the general public. That movement is now over, as last year’s Oscars continued a downward trend in viewership for the ceremony. It is no surprise to me that Black Panther is nominated for so many awards in a huge effort to have more people watch, but I don’t think it deserves its Sound Editing, Sound Mixing, Original Score, and especially Best Picture nominations. The auditory awards were all done better by Infinity War, but as mentioned earlier, Disney didn’t put much effort behind awards buzz that movie. The highest grossing movie in the United States instead makes a ton of headlines that include “The Academy Awards” in the title and creates an enormous publicity boost for them.

The Academy Awards have carved out a weird space for themselves, as people who care enough as I do about movies feel that the show is bogus for a variety of reasons, the general public doesn’t care enough about the industry to watch the awards show at all, and The Oscars are stuck in the in-between for viewership. They constantly try to please all sides, and with the inclusion of Bohemian Rhapsody and Black Panther in the Best Picture category this year, you can tell that they’re trying to capture the general public audience they’ve been missing out on for a while.

I learned long ago that I won’t agree with the Academy on a ton of their decisions, and I think it’s just a matter of time before the ceremony means next to nothing and people watch movies more due to general interest, star power, and word of mouth than awards buzz. The Oscars couldn’t even find a host for this year, as they got stuck in another situation trying to find someone that the general public will watch and isn’t involved in some sort of past controversy. It’s an antiquated awards show with what I believe has very little meaning anymore, and I don’t think there’s that much that can be done about that. For now, I’ll wake up on February 25th to see who won, and wait and see what will come of these once prestigious honors.