They Shoot Oscar Prognosticators, Don't They?
In Defense of the Oscars?
By J Don Birnam
March 6, 2014
BoxOfficeProphets.com
To start, it may seem odd to step up to defend the Oscars in one of the few years of late in which they have needed little defending - most people seemed to have liked Ellen as a host and the show itself and few are terribly upset over the crowning of a deserving Best Picture winner alongside another deserving sci-fi masterpiece. Still, I have been an Oscar aficionado far too long to forget that goodwill towards the Academy is a fickle thing, one that evaporates at the sight of the next James Franco and Anne Hathaway disaster, at the next “Crash,” or the next time the ratings become abysmal.
Today I will launch my impassioned defense of the Oscars, arguing that many facets of the awards that people complain about are simply inherent in the giving of awards, that criticism of the Oscars as irrelevant ignores the important work the Academy does for movies as art and, finally, that many problems with the Academy are not unique to it, but are instead endemic to Hollywood, or, worse, to society itself.
The Critique About the Process of Selecting What is “Best”
Start with a complaint we can all agree on: the Oscars are one large self-congratulatory orgy that can reach quite superficial heights. Ellen’s selfie was symbolic of the Oscars themselves: they are the industry’s selfie. That, of course, can also be said of all other awards shows — the Tonys, the Grammys, and the Emmys, to start. Of course, the Oscars are the most popular, so, naturally, they garner the most derision.
Therein lies a key to many critiques you will hear about the Oscars: contempt is directed at the Oscars because they matter the most. No one scoffs at the Golden Globes or the Critics’ Choice or the New York Film Critics.
The same, of course, can be said of criticism about what movie the Academy picks as “Best.” No one remembers or complains, for example, that other bodies passed over Citizen Kane for How Green Was My Valley - we only care about the Oscars because ultimately only the Oscars matter. And criticism about the process of picking what is the best movie of the year suffers from an additional flaw: it ignores that picking a “best” among a field of artistic pieces is an inherently and hopelessly subjective endeavor. Heck, even in sports, where one can look to relatively more objective measures of an athlete’s performance, the process of selecting individuals into a Hall of Fame or of award the “Most” Valuable Player can engender quite the heated debate. Which statistics should matter more? Which player produced more intangibles, etc.? If those questions become intractable in a field where at least some numerical data is available, it is hopeless to try to find a consensus in an almost entirely subjective field - or in any art form, for that matter. It is not the Oscars that are rotten, it is this whole process of subjectively picking the best art amongst a worthy group of contenders.
One solution, of course, is to forego awards season in its entirety. But why would we? First of all, it’s fun. Second, everyone else does it! There are yearly prizes for best albums, best books, and best journalistic pieces. All of these are as subjective and arbitrary as the Academy Awards. The truth is, it is in our human nature to enjoy competition and to crown victors. And this type of competition and award-giving is actually useful in other ways for reasons I will get to later.
Another reason the Oscars engender so much criticism, beyond their high stature, is the emotions that movies generate in people. Because the medium of film is so accessible and so universal, and because the art is designed to evoke an emotional and perhaps intellectual reaction from the audience, we are all able to elucidate our feelings and opinions about a piece with greater ease than for other, less ubiquitous media.
The key, of course, is to not take it personally. The Oscars are anything but that. Trust me, I know this is hard - I am still upset about Brokeback Mountain or The Social Network losing Best Picture. But I have come to realize that some of the Academy’s choices can be so suspect, that it is almost comforting when they do not agree with your selection of what is Best. That is perhaps the easiest way to not take it personally.
Ultimately, however, the fact that the Oscars can engender such passionate opinions in so many people should be a clue to a simple but obvious fact: the Oscars matter.
Critiques About Movies or Artists They Haven’t Recognized
Before we get into why the Oscars matter, it seems pertinent to address another critique that is commonly leveled at them: their failure to crown this or that movie or artist. Citizen Kane's defeat at the hands of How Green Was My Valley or the lack of Oscars for Stanley Kubrick or Alfred Hitchcock are the stereotypical examples used.
The factual ignorance behind those complaints is truly comical. It is true: Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock never won Academy Awards for Directing. Quiz: How many competitive prizes from the top directing body in the country, the Directors Guild, did those two win combined? You guessed it: 0. More fun with quizzes: In the year that The Godfather won the Oscar for Best Picture, what movies won the top prize from the esteemed New York Film Critics Circle or the National Board of Review? Hint: It was not the Godfather. What about two years later, when the Academy gave Best Picture to The Godfather II? Nope, neither supposedly prestigious body recognized that movie as the best of the year. Indeed, the New York Film Critics never gave Francis Ford Coppola their Best Director award, nor did they give it to Orson Wells for directing Citizen Kane, going instead for John Ford, the director of How Green Was My Valley.
Let me spell it out again, then: awarding art is hopelessly subjective. To expect perfect acumen regarding the historical value of a movie is unrealistic. And the Oscars are supposed to have spotless track records where others have failed? Simply because the Academy was the first to come up with the idea of awarding movies?
This complaint some time takes on a variation: they don’t recognize popular movies enough, or, the mirror version of it, they do not recognize artsy, independent movies enough. I will admit, the Academy’s obsession with “prestige” does sometimes peeve me, and the complaints that a movie does not have a great “story” and therefore does not deserve to win Best Picture annoys me insofar as it glorifies the Screenplay award as if the marvelous hard work of technical masters did not matter.
But, aside from that, do we really want the Academy to veer more into popular movies, or into more artsy movies? Do we really want them recognizing…Twilight? Paranormal Activity 5? And do we really need them to become a mirror of the Indie Spirits Awards or other such bodies and focus on the Mulholland Drives and Blue Is the Warmest Colors of the worldr? This year’s supposed snub of the indie film was Inside Llewyn Davis, a movie that, I might add, received little recognition by other critical or guild circles. And, frankly, if you look at the Academy’s recognition over the last 15 years of product from smaller studios such as Focus Features and Fox Searchlight, it is hard to argue that they are oblivious to non-studio fare. This year’s winner was independently financed. Perhaps the real problem is the studios; they are not making serious fare, making it harder for those movies to be made - but that is as much a fault of audiences not interested in seeing those movies than it is a fault of the Academy.
Worse still, this plethora of complaints about what types of movies get recognized has led the Academy to try to appease more groups to sometimes suspect results. The expansion of the Best Picture field, supposedly in reaction to the snub of WALL-E and The Dark Knight for Best Picture, has led to questionable choices and to the dilution of the award itself. I would rather the old system - imperfect to be sure - than to continue to tinker with something that, at best, is not broken and, at worst, is only broken to the same degree all other awards-giving bodies are broken.
Counter-Point: The Oscars Matter
And tinkering with the formula risks destroying something that matters. Do not make the self-centered mistake of thinking that because the Oscars are self-congratulatory pageantry or because you do not watch them, then they must not matter. The Oscars matter, of course, to stars who get recognized - it is unarguable that people like Marion Cotillard, Ellen Page, Jennifer Lawrence, and Jeremy Renner have careers because of their association with prestige Oscar movies. The Academy’s work in film preservation is also of high importance because film is the most widely accessible and easily disseminated form of art, and art has always served to inspire and move societies.
More importantly, however, the Oscars matter because they dictate what movies may get a green light and, by extension, what movies will have an effect on the popular consciousness. Do you think movies about the AIDS epidemic would get a green light if the Academy turned its back on Philadelphia, a daring movie in its time? Of course not. To be sure, audiences also vote with their dollars, and influence what movies do or do not get made and even recognized. But in a world where most moviegoers flock to mindless horror movies, the Oscars are honestly all that is standing between us and utter movie Armageddon, no pun intended.
That gatekeeping function that the Oscars have unwittingly taken on since the advent of the modern blockbuster should not be taken for granted by film lovers. To be sure, I love mindless summer blockbusters and watch each and every one of them. But if that is all movies were, the medium may well have perished long before it needed to.
Counter-Point: The Oscars Tell Us About and Reflect Ourselves
At the end of the day, I cannot help but conclude that the Oscars are in a way a microcosm of our own tastes and that, to the extent we get annoyed with their choices, we are simply annoyed at ourselves.
Sure, we agree that in some sense the Oscars are (thankfully) out of touch with what the popular box office movies are and in others are (sadly) too snobby to recognize artistic value in technical films. But, on the other hand, to the extent the Oscars have decided they like easier, pleasing movies that do not make them feel too bad (The Artist, Argo), those choices reflect nothing more than what audiences want. Audiences, faced with more and more entertainment choices, demand quick, and easy fun, and do not want to be bothered or exposed to dark realities. Instant gratification and escapism rule our Internet-driven world, and films that do not further those goals or challenge our assumptions (Lincoln, Zero Dark Thirty, The Social Network, The Wolf of Wall Street) do not do well with the general, broader public. And the Oscars are supposed to buck that trend? How?
Yeah, the Oscar race can be a dirty game - a political campaign of whispers, rumors, and favors, where the most money can sometimes result in the most awards. The all but impartial media can sink or make a movie and how it is perceived, and therefore how it will fare during awards season. Again, this is not very different than the “real” world and how politics are conducted in our country. So, again, the Oscars are somehow supposed to be different and above that?
Given all these competing currents, it is not surprising that the Oscars have devolved into a consensus crowd-pleasing endeavor. Lo and behold, I am finishing a column about defending the Oscars by criticizing them. The Academy goes the safe route - they pick what everyone else has picked before them because they do not want to open themselves up to criticism about their tastes and choices. What else explains a year in which the biggest surprise on Oscar night was “Mr. Hublot” winning Best Animated Short Film?
But my ultimate point is that this trend towards pacifying as many people as possible is as much a fault of the Academy as it is of the cacophony of voices launching unrealistic, misguided, and ill-informed criticisms about the Oscars and the entire selection process.
I propose we take a step back and let the Oscars be the only thing they have ever really claimed or purported to be - the collective opinions of 6,000 or so industry insiders that reflect a consensus as a snapshot in time, not really an insurance policy of future value or a personal indictment or referendum on any particular movie.
Perhaps if we move to understand the Academy Awards as simply that, they would have the potential to thrive and even impress us with their choices. In the meantime, the suspect criticism is clearly stifling them, and the entire medium with it.
I would like to thank all the readers who stuck with us throughout this Oscar season. Throughout the next few weeks and months we will have an occasional piece on past Oscar races, and we will endeavor to be back with previews of the next race as soon as the relevant movies start hitting the festival circuits in the spring and summer.