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It doesn’t seem like it most of the time, but the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has made a lot of progress since #OscarsSoWhite. Newer Academy classes are seeking to equalize gender and racial balances within the voting population of the Academy. In reshaping the Academy membership, Academy Award recognition thus molds and shapes along with it to better match our current era.
And for the most part, recent winners have reflected Hollywood’s changing attitudes and natures. This isn’t to say that there haven’t been setbacks; the 2017 Academy Awards took criticisms of the hashtag to heart and corrected itself through its racially diverse nominees, yet still missed the mark on rising issues and aspects such as workplace harassment through Casey Affleck’s Oscar win. And who could forget when La La Land was first announced as Best Picture before it was revealed that Moonlight was the actual winner of the award? Considering that #OscarsSoWhite happened in the year before, that actually looks way worse than it actually was in a broader sense.
On the contrary, the 2018 Academy Award nominations strongly reflected the achievements of movies from a variety of genres and the work of individuals from different personal backgrounds. It was the year of the wildly successful Get Out, the year of a fantastical love story between a woman and a fish man (The Shape of Water). It was a year of well-overdue, rising female recognition of talent (Lady Bird), and a year of moving narratives of a gay romance via new Internet softboi Timothee Chalamet (Call Me By Your Name). Despite these achievements in diversity and recognition of talent, arguably the biggest and severely underrated achievement was actually in the Best Adapted Screenplay category.
This category would be Call Me By Your Name’s only award during the night, facing stiff competition in The Disaster Artist, the surprisingly-thrilling Molly’s Game, Mudbound, and a little film called Logan. Beating Marvel Studios to the punch by a year, 21st Century Fox’s Logan not only became the first superhero movie to receive a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination but also joins an elite group of superhero movies with non-technical Oscar wins and nominations (Suicide Squad’s Best Makeup and Hairstyling win does not count), such as Batman Begins (Best Cinematography nomination), The Dark Knight (Heath Ledger’s posthumous Best Supporting Actor award), and Big Hero 6 (Best Animated Feature). Even if it didn’t win, Logan’s nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay is just as revolutionary, if not more so than Black Panther’s seven Academy Award nominations, including the one for Best Picture.
But looking at this year’s nominees, they’re just…okay.
Maybe overall 2018 proved to be such a stark and rapidly changing year of movies; after all, it was Black Panther that contributed the most fuel to the fire of Hollywood’s new diversity initiative. Blockbuster films such as Mary Poppins Returns, Black Panther, fellow diversity-pushing film Crazy Rich Asians, even A Star Is Born and Bohemian Rhapsody sought to compete at a level with typical Oscar-bait movies and overstep classifications fitting “the popular Oscar”. But after seeing the full list of Academy Awards nominations, I can’t help this nagging feeling that the Academy is taking a step back.
This seems like an appropriate time to discuss the “Oscars genre.” Based on research, the Oscars genre roughly consists of large-scale serious historical dramas of any capacity — war movies, biopics, historical fiction — with a more “independent” (read: snobby) vibe. Movies in the Oscar genre can still be set in the present day, but they should still carry that overall air of pretension. For the most part, movies in the Oscar genre should also artfully critique larger social themes, particularly Hollywood and the entertainment industry. In some aspects, they should also honor the classics of Hollywood in some capacity. They must also feature at least one member of a creative team — writer, actor, director — that has garnered at least one Academy Award nomination.
Let’s take a look at this year’s Best Picture nominees for context. The Favourite, Vice, Green Book, A Star Is Born, BlacKkKlansman, Bohemian Rhapsody, and Roma are all historical movies of any capacity, mixing elements of both comedy and drama. This iteration of A Star Is Born is set in the present day and tells the story of Ally and Jackson Maine’s singing careers. Based on Marvel’s timeline, Black Panther is set in relatively the present day and discusses larger themes of African-American culture and representation, among many others. BlacKkKlansman and Green Book share similarly related themes to Black Panther while Bohemian Rhapsody attempts to make a statement without being explicit about LGBTQ+ rights. Every single one of these nominations garner production members with some level of past Academy recognition. Even the historic ones — Netflix’s foreign language film Roma is Alfonso Cuaron’s semi-autobiography, and Black Panther features 12 Years a Slave Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o — still feel like they need to jump through so many more hoops just to get recognized, compared to Vice casting Christian Bale and Sam Rockwell, subsequently earning it 8 Oscar nominations.
And yes, I know there are still landmark achievements made by this year’s nominees: Roma as a Best Foreign Language Film nominee premiering on a streaming service with an additional Best Picture nomination, Roma’s Yalitza Aparicio’s Best Actress nomination in her very first performance, recognition for other streaming movies like Cold War (with Amazon Studios distributing in the States), and Black Panther for reasons we are familiar with. Despite these, it feels like the nominations have brought nothing new to the table of the Academy Awards, and instead only add to a long, long list of reasons to not watch the ceremony on Sunday. The nominations of aforementioned “blockbuster films” still fall behind those of films properly within the Oscar genre such as The Favourite and Vice, as if the Academy is trying to prove a point with “the popular Oscar.”
In 2015, VICE’s Ben York Jones defines the Oscar movie as “a film that an artistically minded and socially curious white male over 50 can really sink his teeth into.” In a half-decade where there have been not just one but two instances of #OscarsSoWhite, there aren’t as many artistically minded and socially curious white males over 50 in the Academy membership as there used to be. Yet despite all the efforts that the Academy has made to change the makeup of its membership, an Oscar genre still has a strong foothold in the Academy. It may not be what was previously classified as an Oscar genre, but it still carries aspects of the older one melded alongside newer characteristics and expectations.
The Oscar genre today consists of varying elements of comedy and drama, but drama has to be in there. Specific genres of movies “don’t matter that much anymore,” meaning that they’ll still favor towards historical films despite trying to be more inclusive of others. It has to be large-scale and pretentious, while actively trying not to look like it is. It’s not afraid to embrace the fact that it’s “indie” and must make it very obvious that they’ve been distributed by bigger studio (because to quote Ben York Jones again, “‘indie’ isn’t a genre it’s a way of describing a record label you ignorant bastard”). And they have to make a stance on whichever social theme they need to cover. Oh, and did I mention that someone involved in the movie needs to have at least one Academy Award nomination?
Based on this, movies like Black Panther and Roma fall within the Oscars genre. The major push towards their eventual nominations lies in the fact that they check off certain boxes of the Oscars genre. I cannot express enough how much Black Panther is an amazing movie — and it falls within this Oscars genre. This isn’t a bad thing, and Black Panther and nearly all of the nominated films deserve their recognition for their hard work, but I feel as if I have a clearer picture on what made Black Panther so successful during Oscar nominations this year outside of its cultural impact.
As a whole, the Oscars genre — both old and new — glaringly shows that the Academy lacks an embarrassingly large amount of intersectionality in how it recognizes movies. The Academy still favors tradition and cannot let go of their old biases for the good of their organization, refusing to take risks. Just look at all of the drama regarding their attempts to find a host. In Stephen Galloway’s opinion piece “Why Oscar Host Has Become the Least Wanted Job in Hollywood” in The Hollywood Reporter, he states that the host needs to have name recognition to help boost ratings, “must be funny (without being tawdry), topical (without being controversial), politically savvy (without being too partisan), young (but not so young as to scare the Academy’s governors)” among many other classifiers to satisfy high-ranking members of the Academy and ABC.
There has been plenty of criticism of the Academy Awards this year — for very good reason. Harper’s Bazaar entertainingly sums up the timeline of Sunday’s ramshackled show, which makes the La La Land/Moonlight scandal look normal in comparison. This new Oscars genre shows how contrived the Academy actually is, and how little the Academy trusts their own content — the recognition of great films. Nominated films within categories share traits that can be interchanged with each other. The excessive amounts of changes that have been made — or have attempted to be made are not to improve themselves and their own process. They’re just there to help put on an entertaining show, because, in all honesty, that’s what the Oscar’s are.
I’ve officially lost hope in the Oscars, an awards show that should recognize all types of great movies but has now devolved as a theater to cultivate organizational drama, incite political commentary, and make money through ad space. Ben York Jones states that “We’re going to see the same sort of films get nominated again and again as long as the Academy stays old, white, and male,” but even amidst a diversifying membership, no matter what the Academy does we’re going to see the same sort of films get nominated again and again unless they learn to take risks larger than just attempting to eliminate four categories from the broadcast or nominating a superhero movie.
