Movies Have Changed, So Why Haven’t the Oscars?
This is not going to be another article about how the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has lost touch with the moviegoing public. Because of course they have. Because the entire industry has.
All the pre-pandemic moviegoing trends — domination of screens by blockbuster series, with more interesting fare shunted off to streaming services or a shrinking set of arthouses — are still there, only more so. As a result, in 2021, while Shang-Chi and the Legend of Ten Rings and A Quiet Place Part II packed theaters, the Best Picture Oscar went to Nomadland. From the perspective of this writer and fellow toilers in cinephilia¹, this was just fine. We might have disagreed about the year’s best movie but mostly we found Chloé Zhao’s non-Marvel movie to be a singular achievement². For the vast majority of moviegoers, though, the response was a blank stare. That is because Nomadland’s domestic haul was about four percent of what Venom: Let There Be Carnage took in during the first weekend alone.
The question is: Why hasn’t the Academy adjusted for the new landscape?
There has been an increasing divergence between what Academy voters consider the best movies of the year and what people are actually seeing. It is easy to view this as simply Hollywood snobbery. In fact, an entire subgenre of criticism, often but not always from right-wing sources, can reliably be counted on to make that argument every year when the Oscars come around.
It was not always this way. Well into the 2000s, the Best Picture award was presented to movies enjoyed by a large overlap of general audiences and industry/cinephile types: Gladiator, Crash, Slumdog Millionaire, The Hurt Locker.
Things started to change in the 2010s, when tastes seemed to narrow. Some Best Pictures went to smart, well-made, non-blockbuster middlebrow fare like Spotlight and Argo. Increasingly, though, the awards went to experimental fare such as Birdman and Moonlight in years when popular and well-received movies like American Sniper³ and Arrival would have made more sense if the Academy wanted to maintain broad cultural relevance.
But 2020 was the hinge. Unusually, there were numerous big-profile non-superhero movies with critic-beloved directors and broad audience appeal included in the Academy’s expanded nomination list: Ford v Ferrari, The Irishman, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Though Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite was very likely the right pick, there is only so much one can do to convince mainstream American audiences to see a creepy Hitchcockian satire about South Korean class warfare⁴.
The 2021 nominees include just one broad-appeal blockbuster (Dune) and a slew of other critical favorites that were popular on streaming services (King Richard, Don’t Look Up, The Power of the Dog) or if they had been in theaters were largely seen as artisanal fare regardless of their merits (Belfast, Licorice Pizza).
The Academy can go one of two ways. They can throw most of their awards at an artistically deserving movie with narrow appeal⁵ and be viewed again as out-of-touch elites. Or they can split the difference by going with a more traditional audience-pleaser like CODA but still seem out of touch since that movie had very limited theatrical release and is only available via Apple streaming.
At this point, what is the virtue of pretending the Academy is not a rarified institution for moviemakers and cinephiles? With audiences dwindling for the broadcast every year, and continued melodrama over various micro-controversies⁶, what is the necessity of leaving this on a broadcast network at all?
Let the film snobs be film snobs. Move the Academy Awards to a smaller venue. Make it an exclusive event for insiders and people who care far too much about cinema. Let the booze flow like it once did at the Golden Globes. Stream it live somewhere. Or not, and let the gossip flow out via various attending celebrities’ social media accounts. Watch critics battle it out on Twitter about the respective merits of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Jordan Peele.
Then if ABC still wants to, they can host the People’s Choice Awards. Throw together movies, series, fiction, non-fiction, streaming, and theatrical all into one big stew of content. The Rock will be there, along with Vin Diesel, Chris Pratt, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Cruise, Zendaya, and a battalion of TikTok types doing their best Anna Delvey imitations. All the awards can go to Avatar 2 and Thor: Love and Thunder⁷.
Everyone gets what they want.
Notes
¹ Per Oxford’s A Dictionary of Film Studies: “(n cinephile) A loving fascination with, and depth of knowledge of, cinema and films.”
² Zhao’s work on Eternals, which also came out in 2021, less so.
³ This is not to argue that American Sniper was the best movie of 2014. It was propagandistic specials ops fan fiction. But critics generally thought it was a unique kind of war movie that defined the moment to some degree and audiences saw it in droves, so overall it makes sense as a consensus pick.
⁴ Oddly enough, domestic audiences often don’t want to see downbeat movies about their own country, either. Nomadland’s international box office was roughly ten times what it pulled down in America.
⁵ Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car fits this categorization. Fine, elegant, and engrossing for some, but for others almost a too-easily-mocked example of a no-there-there film snob folly.
⁶ Who’s hosting. Who’s not hosting anymore. What jokes are okay. How diverse is diverse enough. And so on. Scott Johnson put it well in his Los Angeles magazine piece on the Oscars: “The organization was out of touch with the moviegoing public when it was mostly white, and it remained out of touch when it became somewhat less white.”
⁷ Unless Cameron pushes back the Avatar 2 release date again. In which case everything goes to Marvel.
