The Academy Awards: Who Actually Cares?

Alright, let’s be honest. How many Best Picture winning movies have you actually seen? Personally, I’ve seen 23. I suppose that seems like kind of a lot, but in realty, it’s only about 26% of all the films that have won Best Picture. There are 88 films on this highly regarded list of films that have been deemed the best film of any given year. But I’d be willing to bet that very few — if any of us — agree with every decision that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has made.

The Academy does not speak for us. It doesn’t represent us. It simply can’t. Yet it gets to deliver the most sought after awards in all of film. That said, people only care about a few of those awards. People don’t care about Best Sound Mixing or Best Visual Effects. But here we start to find movies that people actually spent money to go see. Movies like Rogue One, Doctor Strange, and The Jungle Book. These films were successful in a more traditional sense: people went to see them! But not a lot of people went to see Fences and Lion and Moonlight. Comparatively speaking. But does that mean that these films are lesser than the movies that did make money? Absolutely not!

In just a couple weeks we will have another film to add to this list of “best movies”. A list that includes some of history’s most classic films like Casablanca, Gone with the Wind, and The Godfather. Granted this list also contains films like Cavalcade, Tom Jones, and Spotlight that many probably haven’t even heard of, let a lone seen. It seems to me that we have reached a stage in film in which some movies are made for the Academy and others are made for the people. Therefore, I ask this question: should the Academy change its standards or should we stop caring about the Academy all together?