Why I Disagree that the Oscars are Becoming Less Relevant
I’m one of those people who stubbornly keeps using the word film, even when I’m talking about a movie. I’m not trying to be arrogant; when I say film, my nose isn’t turned up and my voice has an inflection of love. There’s a history to the word that makes it about much more than celluloid. When I say movie, I think about one specific production, and I usually think about the tickets and popcorn that go with it. When I say film, I think about how that production relates to culture or cultures at large, and how it interacts with the history of its beautiful medium.
I stumbled across an article in the NY Times which claimed with a lamenting tone that the Oscars are becoming less relevant because the smaller, less-popular-on-a-mass-scale films are winning more. I disagree, and these are the reasons why.
The article reads:
“Following the best picture win on Sunday night by “Birdman” — a brainy film seen by fewer than five million ticket buyers in North America — the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences woke on Monday to soft television ratings for its Oscar telecast and fresh signs that its movie awards have become hopelessly detached from movie viewers.”
Thank goodness.
“It’s sad, but most people have to finally accept that the Oscars have become, well, elitist and not in step with anything that is actually popular,” said Philip Hallman, a film studies librarian at the University of Michigan. “No one really believes anymore that the films they chose are the ones that are going to last over time.”
2 Types of Popularity
Mere popularity as its referred to here is not necessarily — if ever — what makes something last. There’s 5-second box-office popularity: a movie causes a craze, everyone sees it, everyone talks about it. There’s also a different, more intimate, individualized kind of popularity that appeals to the human spirit; the kind that resonates, that grows over time, that stirs both intellect and emotion, stirs in general. It’s more personal between viewer and film. It rouses something in their innermost self, they form a bond with the film, a community forms around people who share similar experiences. This latter type of popularity is a deeper one, and it matters so much more — to me at least.
“The plan was to shift the Oscars back toward relevancy, ‘a history where most of the winning films were also popular with the audience,’ as Mr. Hallman put it on Monday.”
Did “the audience” — setting aside that there are many audiences, of many cultures, and never just one generic mass — used to be more culturally engaged and appreciate films that were as well? Are they that way in other parts of the globe? If they were, perhaps they are becoming that way again, and “popular” is taking on different meanings. If there’s an increasing place for smaller, poignant films — measured by some metric other than ticket sales — shouldn’t we be excited that people are taking their film culture into their own hands, just as they’ve used technology to take governance, journalism, and entrepreneurship into their own smaller-than-the-giants’ hands?
2 Definitions of “Relevance”
The article defines relevancy as something that more people paid to see. I define relevancy as something that equates to more than temporary, superficial entertainment. Relevancy equates to deep engagement with questions that matter most to diverse sets of people. It equates to that intimate form of popularity where a film stirs something in its viewer and forms a community. If we define relevancy in this way, then the Oscars are actually shifting back toward it.
I don‘t know if audiences used to be more culturally engaged and are less or more so now. I do know that I can be harsh on people when it comes to film. I actually glared at moviegoers talking outside the theater after Birdman when I overheard their post-movie critiques. They made it clear that their disapproval stemmed only from not being generically entertained: “well that’s not a happy movie I’d say,” using a tone that travelled from disgruntled to sarcastic to dismissive to self-amused in the course of 3 seconds. These types of edicts were announced by people before they moved on to eat some nondescript food in some nondescript establishment, completely unfazed by the film they had just sat in the same room with. Their disapproval didn’t come from the film’s nature, its artistry, its message(s) or novelty or humanness or sensitivity or technique. It came from the consumer brain and nowhere else within them; the part of them that’s been trained to subscribe value to a certain ticket-selling formula, a brain they inherited with no resistance.
Accessibility + Artistry
Now, I’m not someone who sits around only watching Jonas Mekas and Martha Rosler; the movies I like best do get through to (lots if not) everyone: Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979), Grand Illusion (Renoir, 1937), Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941), Ikiru (Kurosawa, 1952), Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958), The Royal Tenenbaums (Anderson, 2001). But they also get deep into what it means to look at the world through a lens for a duration of time, what it means to live in that context, what’s happening or happened to the human spirit, and what transpires when that specific cast and crew meld together to make something profound/inciting/beautiful/ironic/freeing/…
I actually thought Birdman did achieve those dual pillars (accessibility + artistry), so I’m genuinely surprised to hear it referred to in the article as implicitly inaccessible. It would be amazing if Frederic Jameson would chime in here on Medium. He’d probably chastise me for being too reductive, and bring up some awesome examples from Jaws (1975). (Is expression of that wish itself damning me as academically-minded?)
“The trend was particularly noticeable on Sunday, when one of the big winners was “Whiplash,” which won three Oscars but has been seen by perhaps 1.4 million ticket buyers since its release more than four months ago.”
I am proud to be among that 1.4 million and I still say to everyone, go see it. Also, as a 29 year old, I’m crazy jealous that the director is my age.
What’s Good about the Oscars
The Academy has many flaws, a major one being that it is comprised of mostly old white dudes. It likely has more issues than I am in any place to even know about. But it also inspires so many people, creating a fancy, glitzy ceremony where acceptance speeches like those of Lupita Nyong’o in 2014 or Graham Moore in 2015 compel others to create, to believe in the importance of their voice.
In my book, this is one of the best ripples any one person or entity can generate in the world.
Regardless of its flaws, of the many voices that are still not as heard or recognized as they should be, everything touted as sad in this article gave me actual hope about the state of film and society — and my potential place in it. A few years after a professor told me, “You should be making movies, but Hollywood is only about massive bank deals now, you’d suffer,” I think we could re-open that conversation.
I would venture to say that fewer people may have seen Birdman or Whiplash, but the impact those films made on their viewers may be far greater than the sum of the effect made by movies which were more widely seen.
The Point of Films
The beauty of film is that it is a two way experience. It’s a conversation between person, screen and world. The images go in, but it’s not supposed to stop there. With what I call a film, a lot more happens inside the person viewing it. That stuff then gets projected out through her mind and onto the screen, which then further affects how she sees it as it all goes back in and her brain re-works it, then back out, and back in, back out, and that’s how it goes. This process gets repeated through an accumulation of individual experiences, as well an accumulation of collective experiences; spilling into history as films and people speak to one another, grow, create and morph into legacy.
If anything, films that dig in and acknowledge people as people, films that interact with viewers’ brains and hearts and spirits are much more embracing of an audience than those which treat people as mere ticket-buying receptors.
If a movie doesn’t sell a ton of tickets, then it’s not relevant? It’s being elitist? It thinks its better than people? Quite the opposite.
The most human-loving films are precisely the ones touted in this article as elitist/cerebral/small/“less-relevant”. Was there ever a writer or artist who made a deep, pointed critique of society who didn’t do so because they have an obsessive love for the human race? Was there ever an artful love letter that didn’t come from the same place? These films care a hell of a lot more about human beings — and how media affects their understanding of the world and themselves — than the movies which took more from their wallets. They’re so in touch with people it hurts. Hurts in a good way.
