How Much do the Oscars Still Matter?

The idea that the Academy Awards are prestigious was more or less invented by the Academy itself. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences didn’t originate to recognize artistic achievement, it was created in 1927 by Louis B. Mayer to circumvent the rise of labour unions in the Hollywood industry. And the awards was just a part of that with the added purpose of raising the esteem of Hollywood’s product. According to The Academy Awards: The Complete Unofficial History: “…It was decided that the Academy would serve as its own censor before the government got into the act. Though the movies had become the fourth-largest industry in America, there were already rumblings about its often titillating product from concerned mothers and clergymen. The industry needed a touch of class and a public relations coup. The idea of awarding a golden statuette to the best of the best was just the ticket.”

Louis B. Mayer

Much like auteur theory, the value of the Oscars, as it was officially named (by Bette Davis or Margaret Herrick or whoever you choose to believe) was an idea borne out of a desire for movies to be taken seriously as an art form. If something is deemed worthy of a golden statuette, that must mean it is important -artistically, aesthetically, culturally. More than that, it implies that the industry and the form that produces that thing is likewise important. And so the Oscars carried on, for ninety-two years under the same mission statement: to make movies and the movie industry look important, worthy of celebration without necessarily having to BE important. But that did ultimately come as a side effect.

David O. Selznik and Vivien Leigh both

won Oscars for Gone with the Wind

It’s dishonest to say the prestige of the Oscars is wholly fictional, rather the brand attained that through its longevity. As cynical as it may have been at first, the Academy Awards and winning an Academy Award really grew to mean something. It meant being part of a legacy reaching back into the tail end of the silent era, and that legacy wasn’t without its high marks. Though early winners like Cimarron or The Life of Emile Zola, obscure directors like Norman Taurog or Frank Lloyd, actors like George Arliss or Marie Dressler speak little to the sustained significance of the Oscars beyond their cheap origins, beginning with the 1940 sweep of Gone With the Wind, the accolade began to amass a considerable collection of accolades itself in the series of beloved classic films that would come to be associated with their highest honours. Casablanca, All About Eve, An American in Paris, On the Waterfront, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Ben-Hur, The Apartment, West Side Story, Lawrence of Arabia, My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, and Midnight Cowboy would all claim the Academy’s top prize over the next thirty years. In directors it would boast the likes of Frank Capra, John Ford, William Wyler, Michael Curtiz, Billy Wilder, Elia Kazan, John Huston, David Lean, Vincente Minnelli, George Cukor, Mike Nichols, and Carol Reed; in actors Katharine Hepburn, Clark Gable, Bette Davis, Spencer Tracy, Vivien Leigh, James Stewart, Ginger Rogers, Gary Cooper, James Cagney, Ingrid Bergman, Joan Crawford, Laurence Olivier, Humphrey Bogart, Audrey Hepburn, William Holden, Grace Kelly, Marlon Brando, Alec Guinness, Elizabeth Taylor, Burt Lancaster, Sophia Loren, Gregory Peck, Julie Andrews, Sidney Poitier and Maggie Smith. In that line-up of famous names and titles, whatever it started as, the Oscars became something worth striving towards and that small golden man the symbol of excellence in film.

How Green Was My Valley famously won the Oscar in

1942 over Citizen Kane

But the Academy has just as often lionized mediocre to poor movies in the near century it’s been presenting awards. For every Rebecca or Hamlet there was a How Green Was My Valley or The Greatest Show on Earth. As often as actors like Leigh, Guinness, Peck, or Andrews would win for magnificent performances that would go down in history, lesser roles from Louise Rainier, Bing Crosby, Jennifer Jones or John Wayne would gain trophies as well. And often great actors or big stars would win for the wrong performance, such as Davis, Stewart, Bergman, Taylor, Poitier, and Ronald Colman, each of whom are remembered for far greater characters than the ones that got them their Oscar. Of course there are plenty of additional factors and politics at play as to why a particular movie or actor got their award win when they did -something Be Kind Rewind analyzes better than anyone and you should definitely be watching her channel. Often it has to do with campaigns, which of course should have no bearing on deciding what film is “the best”, Oscar voters being less moved by what critics, journalists, and even audiences think, as much as by optics and how hard-fought a particular film or performance is.

It’s how Weinstein and Miramax came to dominate the Academy Awards in the late 90s and early 2000s, racking in twelve Best Picture nominations in six years, among many others in additional categories, for mediocre movies that generally aren’t much remembered. It’s how figures like Meyer and David O. Selznik, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford could manipulate results to their advantage. It’s always been political and it’s always been a popularity contest, “a goddamn meat parade” as George C. Scott, the first actor to refuse an Oscar, famously put it.

And curiously enough it was shortly after Scott’s win that the Academy attempted to rectify their image. Right around the time that the blockbuster took off the Oscars began to dismiss the kind of movies (often genre movies to no one’s surprise) proving exceedingly popular with the masses in favour of movies that looked important, whether or not they actually were. It happened a lot in the 80s, where apart from Amadeus (and maybe Terms of Endearment and The Last Emperor) the roster of Best Picture winners was so bland it even included Out of Africa and Driving Miss Daisy. Around this time the “Oscar-bait” movie became a thing and the beginnings were felt of the Oscars gradually becoming a public joke, more popular for what they were overlooking than what they were acknowledging.

Ellen DeGeneres hosted the Oscars in 2014 in an

attempt to appeal to a youth demographic.

Since then, there’s been the occasional high point in the 90s and those times popular juggernauts Titanic and The Lord of the Rings won big, but in the last decade especially the Academy  Awards have really struggled to stay relevant; generally content with a handful of well-received choices per year yet consistently dipping in viewership just about every year as the ceremony itself desperately tries new gimmicks to stay afloat on television. Nobody seriously believes they are an arbiter of real quality anymore, not when the membership base is still largely so out of touch. There was a little bit of hope when they recognized Moonlight and The Shape of Water, seriously started paying attention to minority subject matter and nominating more people of colour, but then Green Book and Bohemian Rhapsody dominated the results last year…

And I guess that brings me to the 2020 Oscars (for the films of 2019 obviously), and in the nominations alone there seem to be no signs of improvement. Despite a fantastic year for women filmmakers, they’ve been completely locked out in the directing field and with the sole exception of Little Women, most other categories as well. On top of that, there’s a clear preference for legacy nominations over new or lesser-known talent, with nobody in the supporting actor bracket under fifty, and directors like Scorsese, Tarantino, and Sam Mendes taking spots that ought to belong to filmmakers like Greta Gerwig, Lulu Wang, James Gray, Joe Talbot, Lorene Scafaria, or Noah Baumbach. And of course the nomination sweep of a self-indulgently juvenile comic book movie that is at best a sub-par Scorsese clone that threatens to be this years’ Green Book. There’s much more to point out, glaring omissions in just about every category, and a theme that Mark Harris perhaps summed up the best, but I don’t want to turn this into just another Oscars rant.

The Oscars Board of Directors in 2016

The point is to consider what worth the Oscars have in 2020 given the current state of film culture and the Academy’s repeated failure to understand it. It’s now more than ever easier to see the Oscars event as just the last and most grandiloquent in a series of awards shows, themselves of not much worth (the most important now being the ceremonies that aren’t broadcast). We now know too that a lot of Academy voters don’t watch most of the nominated films, picking based off a particular premise, name, or genre. Academy voters are also not critics, which is absolutely fine; it’s fair that each award is voted on by the members who actually work in that field. But not every actor or editor, designer or technician, writer or even director is going to employ critical thinking into their decision. Some directors for example, might be huge fans of Tarantino, a major influence on them, and may let that appreciation (as well as the fact he’s never won an Oscar for directing) influence their vote over fairly comparing his craft on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood to that of his competitors. Film academia has no place in Academy selection. Yet the Academy still strives to maintain this illusion that its choices are important, that they are about the art –thus why in recent years it’s opened up more to foreign language films, their only smart decision of late, choosing one highly acclaimed international movie per year (Roma, Parasite) to stack alongside the American heavyweights. It looks good to include a movie from another country made by a unique filmmaker, even if the Oscars’ coveted demographic has no interest in watching a movie with subtitles. But we’ve caught on. We know their tricks, their cynicisms, that it’s all insincere and that movies with Oscars are no better than movies without.

Douglas Fairbanks awards the first Best Actress Oscar

to a 22-year old Janet Gaynor

Then why, in gods’ name, do we still care? Ask any film writer, myself included, and they’d probably echo a lot of these opinions and complaints about the Oscars …and yet they’ll still write about them, fuss about them, opine and speculate about them. Clearly the Oscars do mean something, even in 2020, even in the acceptance of movies like Crash and Green Book, the knowledge that they are unfairly manipulated and completely irrelevant. Maybe the façade of prestige is worth something after all. An institution like AMPAS still has power and has done a lot of good outside the Awards (particularly in film restoration and the promotion of film appreciation and study through numerous grants and organizations). There is still a legacy to the Oscars, tainted though it may be in a number of spots, and it can’t be denied that though they hardly ever win, Oscar nominations do bring attention to films that otherwise wouldn’t get any. Even this year, films like Little Women, Marriage Story, and 1917 have gotten a push in mainstream popularity due to their nominations, while The Farewell and Hustlers have received ample notoriety themselves for their decried absence –to say nothing of nominees of years’ past such as The Favourite, Call Me By Your Name, Lady Bird, Three Billboards, Arrival, Brooklyn, Whiplash, Selma, and Room, that almost certainly wouldn’t have gotten the interest they did without their Oscar recognition.

And maybe because of its self-made importance, we see a responsibility for the Oscars to uphold. That it can be and should be that romantic ideal it pretends to be. That it can genuinely represent the best of cinema -it has the power to. We want the Oscars to evolve as the industry it purports to celebrate has, to acknowledge the diversity of the form and particularly the greatness of talent that has gone all but unmentioned in almost a century of straight white people giving other straight white people accolades. We need it to be better, because the Oscars can be special again. I’ve been watching since 2008, and for a long time I really loved the Academy Awards, regardless of what I’d seen or whether I liked their choices, because it felt so big and important and comprehensive (I was only a teenager) in every domain. And it always came off as, if nothing else, a celebration of the movies -and I have a soft spot for that. 
       One my favourite Oscar moments in recent memory was from the 2018 show (the 90th): a four minute montage of film history, meticulously edited together with beautiful rhythm and match cuts, full of memorable quotes (including a moving one from Roger Ebert) intercut occasionally with footage of filmmakers and underscored by beautiful musical tracks ranging from Interstellar to Love, Actually. It was criticized as sentimental, but that’s exactly why I loved it, as well as noting the irony that many films featured hadn’t won Oscars. I long for the Academy to live up to that, and knowing that it can, I will be watching the Oscars as I do every year, disappointed immensely by its snubs and rather telling choices, but fascinated and optimistic that someday it will overcome its failures and realize why it matters.

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