Are the Oscars Worth Saving?
It was spring 2009 when I had my Chinatown moment with the Academy Awards.
After spending more than half a year geeking out at the idea of The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan’s magnum bat-opus, was going to be nominated for a Best Picture/Director combo — the perfect collision between my “favorite” movie of that year (and of many years) being recognized at the big dance among the heavy hitters (bear with me, I was 16). It wasn’t until I got gently let down by an announcement in my morning class that, no, The Dark Knight had not been nominated for the top two prizes at the show, its spot taken by a tepidly received Holocaust drama (The Reader) that longtime Oscar lothario/industry monster Harvey Weinstein cajoled/threatened his way to the main spots.
It felt like a gut-punch, the kind of “forget it, Woodroof, this is Oscar town,” moment that should’ve been proof enough that you just cannot trust one of the most fickle industries in Hollywood not to fall prey to the schmoozing narcissism of the awards process, the infallible truth that the Oscars are about as good at honoring the “best” in film as Wendy’s is at hocking the “best” in all-natural beef hamburgers. I’m not saying the Oscars are Jack-in-the-Box (the Grammys), but they continue to, time and time again, prove that they just cannot, and will not, function as an arbiter, more of a self-congratulatory brouhaha where the industry gets to pat itself on the back for existing.
It’s not to suggest that the Oscars made the “wrong” pick in that Batman gap year, as if to say there are ever “right” and “wrong” picks in a subjective churn such as awarding a movie for a merit, but it did feel dirty — more dirty than the time Eddie Redmayne beat Michael Keaton for Best Actor, not nearly as dirty as the time the Academy plucked Driving Miss Daisy out as the pinnacle of cinematic racial commentary with a Best Picture win while barely acknowledging Do the Right Thing’s existence. The Oscars expanded the Best Picture race to 10 nominees to prevent a bat-snafu from happening, but to suggest that “fixed” anything is to suggest putting up a picket fence will protect your house from a tornado. It’s just an optic.
Much ado has been made about the fate of the venerable awards show, which has bled viewership and continued to Silent Bob-rake itself through a hodgepodge of controversies and mistakes, including, but not limited to, addressing inequalities in its nominees, finding haphazard ways to address the widening gap in its nominees and a culture that is shifting away from championing the “Oscar movie,” how to field some of its most prominent faces (Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, etc.) being outed as sexual predators, finding ways to keep the awards broadcast itself relevant amidst declining ratings, struggling to figure out how to even conduct its show to satiate the frustration of viewers and the continual, greed-driven apathy of its broadcast partner, the exiling of some of its crafts awards to pre-show fodder to meet that broadcast’s partner’s silly attempts at boosting ratings, overreacting to one of its biggest stars comically slapping a comedian he’s long had beef with over a stupid joke.
To be nice, the Oscars are in a boiling stew and the water is getting hotter while the pot is getting deeper. The Academy has tried to duct-tape various ailments with a blend of tortoise-paced progress in expanding its voting base and jackrabbit-stupid attempts to pander to wider audiences. It’s great that the Academy represents more of an international taste; it’s ridiculous that rabid Zack Snyder, Camila Cabello and Johnny Depp stans found some sort of pathway to shoehorn “Oscar moments” into the broadcast for films that should only sniff the Academy in its occasional Trojan horse category: Makeup and Hairstyling, the home to wonderful films like Norbit, Click and Oscar-winner Suicide Squad.
The Oscars have long been an ineffective, bloated measure of film quality, a crammed mess of classics and films that campaign well. When a film as artistically rigorous and eternal as Roma loses Best Picture to a hokey, outdated race relations dramedy like Green Book, it makes you question why we even do this. When you realize this has basically been the case since the 1980s, when the “Oscar movie” began to overtake great movies being routinely recognized for Oscars. It’s hard to look back on such glorious hits as Forrest Gump defeating The Shawshank Redemption, Pulp Fiction, Four Weddings and a Funeral and Quiz Show, or the whole Crash debacle, and think of the Academy’s lineage as anything but spotty at best. Sure, they do get it “right,” and did so more in the past than present, but that’s not the main issue. The Academy’s biggest threat is a filmgoing audience that is beginning to move past its collective taste and a prowling tiger of a broadcast partner that wants the zebra to be much plumper and less good at lunchtime running.
The Oscars this year might’ve been the low moment for the whole process. Not just because Will Smith slapped Chris Rock and the show went viral for all the wrong reasons, but it became almost a countermeasure to the movie itself. Nothing in the show, save for a few solid musical performances, a historic win for Troy Kotsur and a touching ode to cinema from Kevin Costner, even vaguely reminded anyone of the joy of cinema, the power of the collective experience we’d all lost during the height of the pandemic, or even a celebration of the films nominated. Instead, it felt like a blushing-red apology to all the folks who go to the movies 1–3 times a year.
In an effort to sway more casual moviegoers into caring about an awards show, the hosts tossed harsher-than-necessary jokes at the nominees, and one venomous jab at The Last Duel, a big-budget, thoroughly excellent, morally complicated medieval drama about rape culture that regrettably flopped at the box office. The joke, delivered by Wanda Sykes, essentially tossed away the film’s existence as not one even its own director had seen. You might toss it away as a bad pun, but it felt more laser-focused than that. The very network — ABC — is owned by the company that lost money on that one, that bought 20th Century Fox and has been gutted it for its IP and Hulu content, that saw its main late night host blast the show he’s hosted multiple times for not nominating popular billion-dollar MCU megahit Spider-Man: No Way Home in place of a movie like Netflix disaster-satire Don’t Look Up.
Even The Power of the Dog, Netflix’s critically adored and majorly nominated cowboy epic, got a jab for its runtime. Celebrated auteur Jane Campion, to add insult to injury, threw in-the-moment shade at Costner’s open-hearted tribute to the movies that made him right as she won Best Director for the very movie the Academy had not recognized all night outside of being the butt of a quick joke. If not for Campion’s win, you’d barely have known it was a 12-time Oscar nominee. Thank goodness for Amy Schumer’s Spider-Man bit, though, right? Where’s Kimmel’s “celebrities interrupt a movie and torture normal people” bits when you need them? Gotta get those TikToks!
A beautiful thing that’s started to happen with the Academy Awards in the last few years is the expansion of possibility for global cinema. 2020’s historic Parasite win opened a door that, indeed, an international film can capture just enough of the zeitgeist and curry enough favor among voters to win Best Picture, and 2022’s Drive My Car nomination proved that even a film that hasn’t even done that, but has garnered historic critical support, can sneak in the night’s biggest category. In fact, this year’s Best Picture nominees were an encouraging cross-section of represented films: a mega-hit sci-fi blockbuster (Dune), a Steven Spielberg movie (West Side Story), two starry comedies (Licorice Pizza, Don’t Look Up), a rigorously artistic Western (The Power of the Dog), an underappreciated hit from an auteur that got more visibility because of the Oscars (Nightmare Alley), a crowd-pleasing step forward in representation (CODA), a highly respected international work (Drive My Car) and two classic “Oscar movies” that by no means are embarrassing inclusions (Belfast, King Richard).
Hypothetically, this year should’ve been a victory lap for the Academy, a year where the snail’s pace of expanding votership is beginning to pay off, where a widely diverse set of films got a special platform. For a movie fan, it should’ve been a relief of a night after years of watching the Academy shoot itself in the foot under the weight of Weinstein-driven Oscar campaigns and self-important Best Picture wins. No, the Oscars aren’t and never will be perfect, but for one damn year, at least they assembled a heck of a roster.
They’ll villainize Will Smith for the slap and blame him for the show’s ruin, but the Oscars failed so flagrantly on a night that should’ve been a gimme because they’ve lost all sense of identity and purpose. They’ve become an institution, compiled more now than ever of capable voters that can wipe away the sins of yesterday, but beholden to a future the public might not care as much anymore. 2020’s Oscar show garnered nearly 30 million viewers with audience hits like Joker, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, Knives Out, Little Women, Ford v. Ferrari, 1917, Toy Story 4, Rocketman, Avengers: Endgame, The Irishman, The Lion King, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and Ad Astra all up for nominations in various categories.
The 2021 show dipped because film stopped being a cultural currency in the temporary shutdown of theaters, and the 2022 struggled as a mix of pandemic offshoot and a 2021 filmgoing audience that hadn’t quite returned just yet for anything than IP — a symptom of more carefully selected trips out of the house than a radical shift in taste.
Hypothetically, the question “are the Oscars worth saving” is silly. They don’t need to be saved. As annoying as the awards show has long been, it functions through a symbiotic relationship with non-IP film itself. Without the Oscars, a streaming company like Apple might not throw 200 million at Martin Scorsese to make a movie. Without the Oscars, Netflix likely never gets in the Oscar game in the first place. Though deeply imperfect, the id of public recognition is too good for the industry to pass up. Wanting to pat itself on the back for non-financial accomplishments is, for better or worse, part of what keeps cinema alive and healthy. Though the climate changes, film cannot function without its awards bastion, if only because, then, studios will stop having reasons to fund the awards film, in whatever version, outside of general patronage of the arts, which is, and has never been, a major goal for an entertainment company outside of the God-bless-’em independent companies who champion art for art’s sake.
The Academy Awards are trending in the right direction in terms of the films they award. While actors are doomed to recognize the most obvious performances until the end of time, and the Academy as a whole seemingly hellbent on making up for missing previous, more sensical moments to honor stand-out peers, the biggest threat to the Oscars — and the very idea of an awards film (A.K.A a great film with great resources) is the air of self-loathing, the continual de-evolution of a night that’s supposed to represent Hollywood’s best and only seemingly wants to court Hollywood’s most.
The Oscars will survive if they learn to love themselves again. People mock the old Billy Crystal days of the show, but at least back then, when the awards would make you enraged and the show would go too long, you were able to revel in your love for the movies. Just for a few hours, it’s nice for those of us who have our souls wrapped up in this craft to get to share in that love with the whole world. This year’s show felt like a referendum on all the nights I had growing up, learning about the wider world of film from by couch. If not for the Oscars growing up, I’d have never had an access point to even the most obvious good movies. That’s why they matter — they serve as an ambassador to the movies to new generations and reaffirm the joy of the movies in a cumulative experience you can only find on something televised across the world. Nothing beats when the lights go down at the multiplex, but in terms of film culture, nothing carries as much weight as the survival of the Oscars.
That’s why everyone is trying to fix them, after all. We all know, deep down, this industry can’t survive without a healthy Academy, and the very fate of that seems to be guided by an organization desperate for relevancy and beholden to a broadcast partner that wants to parrot its own successes and jab at its own failures. When Scorsese warned us that Marvel films were becoming the “theme park” of cinema, it shouldn’t be a surprise when Mickey Mouse is willing to challenge the show to change, in part to advertise his most popular attractions and get more folks in at the gate for rope drop.
When a Marvel film crosses the barrier into cultural relevancy, historic representation and artistic achievement, it’s called Black Panther, and it wins numerous awards. The Academy has never shied away from recognizing the spectacle-driven and/or money-making studio blockbusters with more on their mind — films like Inception, Toy Story 3, Avatar, District 9, Get Out, Inglorious Basterds, Gravity, Joker, La La Land, Dunkirk, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Martian, Django Unchained, American Sniper, Ford v. Ferrari, Dune,The Wolf of Wall Street, 1917, Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, The Revenant, Arrival, Life of Pie, Bohemian Rhapsody, and Les Misérables all have been nominated in Best Picture in the last 13 years alone since the category expanded back to roughly 10 nominees in 2009.
The problem with the Academy is threefold: they are driven by bad ideas, they are in a state of flux for what they want to be and they are not being patient in a changing, healing world.
The best future of the show would be for ABC to sever ties due to its inability to recognize the show’s status as still the premiere awards venture in show business and for a streamer like Netflix or Amazon to ink a 20-year contract with the Academy for rights to broadcast and, therefor, eliminating ratings concerns. If that happens, the Academy can finally stop worrying about placating Disney’s craven demands for a show that, for some reason, seems opposed to its nominees not all being Marvel movies, and it can finally go back to actually being a night that celebrates the movies, rather than be a night that seems to want to hide the fact that that’s what they’re about.
In 2020, right before the pandemic, the magic of Bong Joon-ho winning Best Director for Parasite swept up the night. It’s still one of the most beautiful moments in the history of the show, a moment where the past and present collided to paint a beautiful future, where one rising auteur got the chance to salute his contemporaries, the ones that inspired him to make movies and championed his work while he was fighting for stateside attention. To see a visibly emotional Scorsese get a standing ovation, or to see Quentin Tarantino heartened for his years of supporting international filmmakers — that’s what people watch for the Oscars. Sure, folks love the red carpet, the cult of celebrity will always be part of the game. But, whether the Academy and ABC want to realize it or not, people love watching because people love movies.
If the Academy and ABC will be patient for audiences to return to their regular moviegoing habits (as they did in 2019, when Oscar-ready movies like Joker, Ford v. Ferrari, Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, 1917, Little Women, Toy Story 4 and Knives Out all performed well at the box office, and The Irishman wound up one of Netflix’s biggest streaming hits. In 2023, the Oscar ratings will go up again, just like they did with 2022’s shitshow. The pandemic dampened moviegoing out of necessity; before this, folks were going to the movies to see all types of movies, and they’re already starting to show in 2022 that they will get back to it as time goes on and more movies come out.
The Oscars have to survive because they are the official support system for the movies so many of us love and are worried will one day disappear. No, high-school me is still pissed about Batman, as I am with so many Oscar decisions over the years. The voting body is a fickle mistress, and the campaigning process has historically been a bloody mess. Bad wins have and will continue to happen, but the expanding voting body gives you a lot of hope. It just comes down to if the Academy realizes that people aren’t dwindling in interest as aggressively as they think. Yes, not as many folks are into this process as they were in the 90s, but that’s the cycle of time.
The Oscars should always be for the movie fan. It should be a night of unironic jubilation at the magic of the silver screen. Sure, comics can come in and jab at the big whigs in the room, and even joke about the films in question, but the reason for the season is one of stark positivity and appreciation. It used to be like that. This year’s Oscar show felt like a roasting on an open fire for an entire world of cinema that so many of us cherish, and one that the very voting body in those seats is finally starting to get better at recognizing after years and years and years of occasional incompetence. Sure, CODA isn’t nearly as good as most of the films it got nominated against, but it’s no Crash.
If the Academy can be patient, find a new home and learn to love itself again, they’ll be fine. We can gripe about bad decisions just as we can celebrate new ones, because that’s what we always do. The one thing that cannot happen is the continual degradation of a process that quite literally is engrained in the spine of movies themselves.
If the Academy really does loathe itself this much and is this desperate to pander to the whims of ratings, they might as well just stop handing out any awards and only invite Kevin Feige. This isn’t the People’s Choice Awards, and there’s a reason nobody cares about the People’s Choice Awards and people still care about the Oscars. There’s a reason fan votes always go awry, no matter how many times the Flash enters the speed force.
The Oscars are absolutely worth saving; they are vital. I’m just not so sure anymore if they will actually make it.
