The Oscars Are Bullshit, And Here’s Why
I’ve always hated February. It’s a completely terrible month. It’s when the romance vultures come out and start picking at my self-esteem with their promise of plasticized love wrapped in neatly-tied heart-shaped chocolate boxes. It brings back memories of cold winter mornings, where I’d walk to school blanketed in my six pound North Face jacket and still feel frostbitten by the time I reached the bile-blue school doors.
And, worst of all, it’s the central month of Oscar mania, where every day, respected news sources and TV channels turn out trash article after trash article about the bullshit opinions of 500 old white men, who meet once a year to decide the best and the worst of that year of cinema.
Or so they say.
In reality, the Oscars have become a dated and corrupt institution. Their choices are predictable and uninventive, anchored to some pretentious film conservatism that refuses to embrace the new and interesting. Each year, the same eleven actors and directors collect their trophies, and each year, the art worth remembering is ignored. And, the few times that the Academy deigns to recognize that most of the moviegoers of today aren’t seventy year-old geriatrics raised on Citzen Kane and Apocalypse Now, like last year’s win by Moonlight, their efforts feel like sympathy prizes, bones thrown to a flock of rabid dogs so they can shut up and let business continue.
“You tiny thing. In the face of the fabulous new, your only thought is to kill it?”
— Luv, a character in Blade Runner 2049, an amazing movie somehow not nominated for Best Picture.
That said, the root problem with the Academy isn’t solely that it refuses to acknowledge an increasingly diverse audience. Indeed, the fact that ninety-percent of the award winners are white men is a mere symptom of the disease. No, the root problem here is that the Oscars are hellbent on preserving some dying ideal of film culture that cannot and will not last the 2010s. This is the culture incubated in traditional film schools, and expressed in the traditional November/December releases of the “Oscar Movies.”
An “Oscar Movie” is a very particular style of movie, usually released in the latter months of the year, that’s designed and optimized to win awards. It usually has a historical setting, but one that’s pleasant and whitewashed and allows for escapism. It’s well-written but not edgy, and doesn’t force any self-reflection. It has beautiful shots but no interesting ones, it’s easy to watch but not quotable, it has great performances but none that are truly memorable. It’s a movie that has no obvious flaws, and because of that, it has no real strengths.
And above all, it’s a movie that feels prestigious and inaccessible for no reason besides the fact that it can. It’s a King’s Speech or a Dances With Wolves, and this year, it’s Phantom Thread.
Let’s take a deeper look at Phantom Thread, because it in many ways illuminates a lot of what I’m discussing here. In some respects, Phantom Thread is an exceptional movie. The script is polished and pristine, and the direction is technically perfect. And more subtly, the set and costume design is fantastic, completely capturing the 1950’s. Almost the entire movie is set inside rooms and corridors, and the camera perfectly creates a feeling of constant claustrophobic immersion as it weaves through the dense environments. Every shot is breathtaking, every line well-placed, every emotion unsaid.
And yet, it’s what it doesn’t do that sinks it. Phantom Thread doesn’t take many risks. It’s set entirely within its own arcane, insular world, and nothing there is designed to challenge the viewer. It flows from scene to scene seamlessly, but ends much like it began, with no real progression or change or impact or commitment. It’s a movie that has no reason to exist.
Look at Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, this year’s best Oscar nominee, for comparison. It’s funny, it’s dark, it’s new and novel, both in the subject matter and the way it’s presented, and above all, it has so much to say. There are no pointless homages to films long past, there’s no opportunity for pretentious film critics to wax poetic. There’s only substance.
Its present-day small-town setting strikes close to home in our still deeply-divided society, and it chooses to embrace reality, justifying anger and frustration instead of devolving into the basic feel-good resolution of “we all just need to love each other more.” And, it has the balls to joke about the horrible and the appalling and make it feel human, rather than resorting to the well-worn Oscar trope of remote moral disgust (see Schindler’s List).
And Three Billboards will never win. Neither will Get Out, the another exceptional Oscar nominee. Get Out is a movie that has so very much to say. In a society that elected Trump as president, it avoids the simple tack of lambasting the so-called “deplorables,” and instead turns the finger back on us, on the academy. It chooses to attack a much more insidious form of racism, the same form that Martin Luther King criticized in A Letter From Birmingham Jail: that of the unaffected moderate that masks their prejudice in manners and reverence. And it does so while being suspenseful and interesting and clever and funny, and so completely unlike anything a seventy year-old Academy voter would ever enjoy.
I suppose my biggest complaint about the Oscars is that they optimize for boredom. They penalize movies for attempting new things, and in their search for perfection, they end up rewarding the lukewarm over the passionate: the inoffensive over the interesting.
So, then, after all that, you’re asking what’s going to win Best Movie?
That’s a dumb question.
Here’s a better one: why do you give a fuck?
I lied. That wasn’t a better question at all. As much as I’d like to ignore the Oscars taking a shit on every cinematic achievement of every year, I’m forced to pay attention. Why? Because, as it turns out, events like the Oscars matter. People write down their choices in books and Wikipedia articles and remember them, and attribute value or lack thereof to movies based on them. A successful Oscar showing can give a movie new legs, launching it into new theaters and expanding its box office, while a poor showing can erase a good movie from history.
Yes, this isn’t always true. Everyone remembers Oscar snubs Goodfellas, and Pulp Fiction, and The Social Network. But though it’s only been five years, do you remember American Hustle? You should. American Hustle was a fantastically written and directed movie that featured one of Christian Bale’s best performances, and yet, because the Academy found it less interesting than the tired narrative of 12 Years a Slave, it’s forever relegated to the end of the Amazon Prime Video movie recommendations.
Indeed, the oft-repeated advice of “just stop caring about awards shows and enjoy what you want to” is reasonable and yet completely irrelevant, because it presupposes that all awards shows will somehow be deficient and will not reflect the preferences of most people. But why shouldn’t they? Why are we forced every year to resign ourselves to being disappointed in the choices of our Awards shows? Why is it a foregone conclusion that the Pulp Fiction’s and The Shawshank Redemption’s of the world will never win over the Forrest Gump’s?
I have no solutions for you. There’s no real action that you can take, no moral stance that you can uphold, no protest that you can lead, that will really do anything to change the conservatism and stodgy stuffiness of the Oscars.
But hey, at least they aren’t as bad as the Grammys.
