by Nathaniel R
You guys. WHAT is happening? Not to sound paranoid but award season is trying to kill me. Day after day things worsen. Am I inside a Black Mirror episode through the use of some technology I wasn't even aware of? Or have I fallen through a rabbit hole to an alternate dimension where all obsessions curdle in on themselves to become one's worst fears? Are you also experiencing this nightmare with me? Please tell me it's not all in my own head.
The film year started out so well...
Though we didn't get our Oscar wishes last season it was hard to gripe too much about The Shape of Water taking multiple prizes when it was such an atypical Oscar choice and from a respected auteur with an original voice. The acting awards were similarly okay but not great but it's hard to complain when all four winners have been such consistent dynamos onscreen for years. And there were other signs that the year ahead would be a giddy fantasy come true...
The wonderful trans drama A Fantastic Woman won Best Foreign Film and just two months later its amazing Chilean director Sebastian Lelio was back in movie theaters with an even better movie (Disobedience). Many fine films emerged in the spring and summer (Tully, Paddington 2, Hereditary, Eighth Grade, BlacKkKlansman). Films that the public went absolutely bonkers for in the first 3/4ths of the year were, by and large, strong quality popcorn entertainments (Incredibles 2, A Star is Born, Black Panther) but sometime in November, things went completely haywire and we're now living in a nightmare world where a messy homophobic biopic with a casual relationship to truth that barely survived its production nightmares surrounding its famously and frequently alleged sexual predator director is considered to have the year's best editing (ACE EDDIE AWARD WIN. what the what now?) and best acting (SAG BEST ACTOR) for Rami Malek's lipsynching and wearing of false teeth.
Meanwhile Bradley Cooper, one of the world's finest leading men and most talented actors, made like Warren Beatty and did everything for his movie and then some (directing, acting, writing, producing, songwriting, singing, guitar playing, acting coachery -- oh come on you know he did that, too, for novice Gaga) and gifted the world with a really popular blockbuster romantic drama which Hollywood has now refused to hand even a single trophy to beyond trophies for its signature song "Shallow". All this despite it being Cooper's best performance ever that's up against relatively weak competition in the form of lipsynching mimicry from someone in a bad film and prosthetic mimicry from a strong actor who has already won but is hardly giving one of his very best star turns and letting his Batman voice sneak in a bit.
Not that there weren't warning signs that a personally hurtful but public apocalypse was coming. Oscar's popular film announcement fiasco revealed all of the Academy's self-destructive worst instincts. So did their repeated insistence that only Kevin Hart would do as a celebrity to hand the world stage to --as if there aren't dozens upon dozens of funny, famous, movie-loving celebrities in the world, who have never joked about beating up gay kids. The worst news of all, though less glamorous for the media to cover, was that the Oscar governing body had decided that the problem with the #1 most popular awards ceremony in the world which happens to be about honoring filmmaking was that it wasn't more like all those other less popular awards shows and all that pesky filmmaking was to blame: cinematography, costume design, production design, GROSS! You can happen during commercial breaks because no one cares.
Except, you know, the core audience, the base of people who look forward to the Oscars every year.
Hell even the three short film categories, which used to be the least popular given the difficulty of knowing anything about them (and the most theoretically easy to axe if you wanted to reduce the size of Oscar night each year), have received a noteable uptick in audience interest in the past two decades with online ease of access and the now popular theatrical packages that screen in big cities where you can see all the nominees together. This package release was a novelty idea not so long ago and in a short time it's become a popular arthouse box office tradition. Why isn't the Academy investing in these types of "fixes," ones that actually make Oscar season more fun, more film-loving, and more accessible to audiences?
Sincere question which makes us feel even more insane to have to voice: if no one cares about anything beyond leading actors, household name stars, and Best Picture how is it, exactly, that the Oscars are still more popular than all the other awards shows that no longer or never did award craftsmanship of any kind other than the very "top" categories like the Globes, the Emmys, SAG, Grammys, and Tonys. All of those shows are less popular (look it up) and less culturally obsessed over than Oscars. The Academy itself though, by all recent accounts, propositions, and behavior, believes the polar opposite, the "fake news" if you will that they are irrelevant and unpopular.
What's to be done and how much worse will it get? Why do all the people in charge of the Oscars seem to hate the Oscars and its traditions? Why are they incapable of understanding that, even if its subconcious, the public values showbiz tradition and institutional history in the same way they enjoy, say, familiar holiday traditions; they bitch about them because they love them. How else to explain Oscar's perpetual dominance in two fields (awards shows in general / movie industry specifically) through 90 years of changing public tastes?
We can all accept a tweak here and there to keep up with the times. Some of the recent changes -- like expanding their voting body to diversify their membership in age and ethnicity and nationality -- have been smart and welcome. But a full scale misunderstanding of your own identity -- a movie award wanting to ignore movies -- is all but courting suicide. Which speaking of...
How are we to continue covering our favorite showbiz tradition if that tradition loses its own identity? The winners of the acting categories presenting to their parallel category each year is corny, yes, like a beauty pageant winner handing the next reigning queen her tiara, but it's also adorable; it grants a sense of succession and immediate history to proceedings which all too often seem embarrassed about their own lineage. We see this all the time in their shunning of previous generations of stars in favour or whoever is hot that year -- remember when Miley Cyrus was suddenly a favourite presenter despiting having very little in the way of movie connections because she was popular with kids at the time?
And even in the matter of CELEBRITY Oscar's current leadership is hopelessly delusional and confused. They haven't asked last year's winners to present because they aren't famous enough but these are hardly obscure celebrities: Frances McDormand is beloved for her iconoclastic grumpy behavior and constantly memed on social media when she shows up to events. Gary Oldman has also been famous and respected by multiple generations for 30 years now. The public has proven over and over again with their eyeballs in high-rated series after high-rated series, that they love watching Allison Janney on the regular. So what does Oscar want exactly? They say they want famous people that the general public is interested in but then they toss out these beloved people while threatening to axe song performances by household names like Jennifer Hudson and Emily Blunt, the latter of whom starred in TWO blockbusters this year. Lady Gaga reportedly straightened out that mess by threatening not to perform if the other nominees were shunned but the very fact that Oscars powers-that-be thought that the public wouldn't be interested in hearing Jennifer Hudson (who?) and Emily Blunt (who?) sing just goes to show how truly, well, stupid they are about both celebrity and the appeal of their own show. (Note: Emily Blunt won't be singing but they've found someone else famous to sing her song. And listen, that can't have been hard to do as the world has plenty of famous singers.)
If the history of other awards shows is any indication, Oscar's plans to jettison 'a few' of their creative categories to commercial breaks will devalue those awards so greatly that they will never return to the ceremony and all craft categories will eventually be off air entirely. By 2022 will anyone care who wins Costume Design/Cinematography/Production Design if they have no memories of who won before or of those joyful moments with important artists who they might not know as celebrities but can enjoy as more 'real' kind of people having the biggest moment of their lives? Has anyone in charge of the Oscars even realized how often those categories have the most surprising speeches and emotion? Has anyone in charge of the Oscars ever noticed how popular some of those moments become? Think about Sandy Powell's oft-quoted over-it "I already have two of these" curtness on her third Costume Design win or all the chatter about that credit card dress for weeks after Priscilla won costume design.
If Costume Design or Production Design are presented off air this year we might lose totally historic televised moments in which the first African-Americans EVER win in those categories (via Black Panther, not so incidentally the public's very favourite film this past year). If Sound Editing or Sound Mixing goes to First Man off air we'll lose the totally historic moment of seing the very first Asian win either of those categories. What's more any of those four prizes could easily go to women and women are sometimes in short supply on Oscar night outside of the female acting categories -- that inequality never reflects well on Oscar.
In conclusion...
DOES ANYONE IN CHARGE OF THE OSCARS EVEN LIKE THE OSCARS?
DOES ANYONE IN CHARGE EVEN LOVE MOVIES?
Asking for a friend who is me (and presumably many of you), who loves watching the Oscars but might not continue to love it, once it stops being the Oscars altogether.