Why Those Patronizing Oscar Changes Are Bad for Everyone

So here’s where I go off on the dumb changes to the Oscars ceremony this year, why they’re so bad and dumb however you slice it, and if there’s any chance for the Academy to salvage their integrity in light of this dumb dumb dumbness. I’ve written a lot about the Oscars even outside of my annual coverage of them, because I am compelled by them. I love them and I hate them and I’m endlessly fascinated by them. Most of all I can see what they’re capable of and I root for them to live up to that. It delights me when Parasite wins Best Picture or a wider array of films on wildly different subjects are honoured by them. At the same time I yearn for them to grow, to reflect an inclusive Academy and film-going public, and to not always fall back on tired and tedious motions of nominating biopics that have no business being in the conversation. Warts and all, I am a fan of the Oscars, and right now the Oscars brand is at a turning point with regards to its’ future integrity.

In case you weren’t aware, this years’ Academy Awards broadcast will be excluding eight traditionally recognized categories from the ceremony taking place on March 27th. Best Film Editing, Best Original Score, Best Production Design, Best Sound, Best Make-up and Hairstyling, and all three short film awards will be presented in advance of the main show and instead inserted in an abridged form into the main telecast. Supposedly this is to shorten the show and free up more time for original segments, comedy bits from the three hosts Regina Hall, Amy Schumer, and Wanda Sykes, and other material designed to cater to new viewers. Among these are two new bits functioning as de facto awards themselves: the Oscars Fan Favourite and Greatest Cheer Moment contests, whereby Twitter users can vote for their favourite movie of the last year and favourite of five pre-selected arbitrary “cheer scenes” from across the last twenty-odd years of Hollywood cinema -and the winners will be announced in the main show.

Unsurprisingly, all of these choices have received considerable backlash from film professionals, critics, journalists and fans, and ambivalence or less from those average viewers whom such moves are intended to pander to. Nobody is really happy about this, nobody sees it for anything more than the transparent ploy that it is; and yet unlike in 2019 when they attempted something similar and were forced to rescind, it appears they are going full steam ahead with this heinous mutilation of the Oscar show. All of it came from the Academy, they announced each of these changes through their own channels, but as the Hollywood Reporter later confirmed, it seems the real architect is ABC, which has been the broadcast home of the Oscars for forty-six years. Apparently, they had wanted to go further, to entirely split the number of categories in half, keeping only those likely to be awarded to figures with some kind of entertainment standing: the actors, name directors, name studios. But the Academy negotiated it back, picking four categories of those on the chopping block to deem worthy of recognition. But of course, all of them are.

On the subject of these omissions, it has been widely and rightly derided as a slap in the face to editors, composers, designers, make-up artists, sound technicians, and short filmmakers everywhere. The Academy has tried to paint it over, to point out that those snubbed awards will in fact be recognized during the first hour of the show in a reduced capacity, though it’s likely just to be a fragment of each winners’ speech that can be conveniently edited down (ironic that) if it at all expresses any displeasure in the recipients and nominees in such fields being made second-class citizens. Producer Will Packer has staunchly defended the changes, stating that his first priority is to make the show fun and is proud of his “wild swings” to revitalize it. In an interview with the L.A. Times, he insists on the narrative there is no erasure happening, stating that those awards will have their own ceremony with their own host, without understanding that it is effectively an act of segregation. And by not platforming them in the same way, any notion they are “separate but equal” is voided. He doesn’t say it in so many words, but it’s viscerally clear he and his ABC handlers do not care about the artists in these categories.

And I get it, these aren’t the flashy categories, they’re not the ones that attract the most eyeballs and nobody could tell you which films won Best Makeup and Hairstyling in any given year. But part of the wonderful democracy of the Academy Awards is that it does celebrate each discipline with at least theoretical equality. Sure, the show always leads up to the big categories at the end: Best Actress, Best Actor, Best Director, and Best Picture are always the last four awards handed out. But throughout the rest of the show, these lesser known artists are given just as much time to shine. And they make for some wonderful Oscar moments. Some of the sweetest speeches in recent Oscar memory came from Ruth Carter winning Best Costume Design for Black Panther or Hildur Guðnadóttir winning Best Original Score for Joker; how about Travon Free’s passionate acceptance of Best Live-Action Short for Two Distant Strangers just last year, or the statement made by The Salesman director Asghar Farhadi being unable to accept his Oscar for Best International Film in 2017 due to Trump’s travel ban? Remember how Kobe Bryant and Glen Keane won an Oscar for Best Animated Short for Dear Basketball and what an incredible moment that was? All of these people deserve their limelight on the stage, all of those who are even just nominated deserve their names and their work acknowledged on such a scale. 

These are of course artists without whom we wouldn’t have movies. Can you imagine your favourite movies without their scores or the production work that bring their worlds to life? Editing is one of the most vital disciplines of the medium, crucial to so many a great movie -hell, perhaps the most popular movie of all time, Star Wars, was notoriously saved in the edit by Marcia Lucas. Many other movies have been as well. And a lot of the brightest new filmmakers get their start in short-form cinema: Taika Waititi’s first Oscar nomination came for his 2003 short Two Cars, One Night, and just three years after Domee Shi took home an Oscar for Bao, her feature debut Turning Red is out and defining a new direction for Pixar. These professionals matter, these categories matter, and for a ceremony that claims to be about “movie lovers” it’s quite clear the figures running the show don’t love movies much at all.

What they love is ratings and whatever cynical ploy inches them a little further in the ratings game. Hence the inclusion of additional contests that so opaquely cheapen the Oscars it’s a wonder they don’t just go the next step of turning the whole thing into a fantasy football bracket. Let’s start with the Oscars Fan Favourite and call it what is, the consolation prize for Spider-Man: No Way Home. Because the internet is terrible, there was a passionate push by Marvel fans encouraged by Kevin Feige to campaign for No Way Home as a serious Oscar contender. And maybe a decade ago it might have made it -like Toy Story 3 did. But now with a more diverse, broad-reaching Academy, one that considers movies made outside of the American system like Drive My Car and Parallel Mothers, it didn’t seem likely. As many pointed out, No Way Home’s immense box office success should have been reward enough. I’ve already talked about Marvel’s sad desperation for awards recognition, so I won’t go into it here, but the “snubbing” of No Way Home caused a pathetic furor from figures like Kevin Smith and ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel in addition to Marvel fans everywhere, that it seems ABC needed to contrive a reason to include it in the Oscars show (despite the fact that with a nomination for its’ sub-par visual effects, No Way Home still has one more nomination than highly acclaimed films The Green Knight, Titane, and The French Dispatch). And so, the Oscars Fan Favourite contest on Twitter was announced following the nominations announcement, ensuring that the most popular film will be recognized in the show alongside those deemed worthy by the Academy. It was kind of funny for a moment there when it was looking like No Way Home wasn’t going to win that contest either, but eventually it pulled through, and is currently expected to be the “winner” come Sunday night.

This is a juvenile idea, reducing the Oscars to a tactic reserved for the ilk of the People’s Choice Awards and for as much as it is designed to give some love to No Way Home, it’s also nakedly pandering to it. Far from putting it on the same pedestal as The Power of the Dog, Drive My Car, and Dune, it in fact emphasizes this movies’ exclusion: it can’t be one of the Best Pictures, so we’ll give it’s own trophy -its’ participation award if you will. A more insulting gesture to No Way Home -which as I’ll reiterate, though not Oscar-worthy is a good movie- than its’ absence would be on its’ own. No Way Home is in fact doubly nominated in the cheap pandering sweepstakes, the other fan-vote contest for Oscars Cheer Moment including the ‘Spider-Man team-up’ scene from that movie. This even more embarrassing bit, not restricted to the last year, features two other superhero scenes as well as the seemingly arbitrary choices of the bullet-time sequence from The Matrix and Jennifer Hudson’s song from Dreamgirls. Opening up a movie cheers list to a wider range of cinema and yet featuring just one moment pre-2000 -which incidentally is the only one that will be remembered much past the end of the next decade.

I like to think that the average movie-goer is on to the con. Certainly I know that if their favourite movies aren’t nominated these kind of transparently patronizing choices aren’t likely to win them over. Nobody genuinely upset about No Way Home not being up for Best Picture is going to tune in to see it win some twitter poll. They know it’s just a move to vapidly satiate them. On Oscar night, they’ll probably just be watching No Way Home again -the Oscars aren’t for them and they’re smart enough to know it. ABC and the Academy however are desperate to court them, and the former especially is willing to subvert the integrity of the Oscars in a heartbeat if it brings them into the fold. What they can’t admit is that in this current movie climate, they’re not going to be able to attract new people to the Oscars, certainly not in the old ways at least. Ratings have been dwindling the past decade, not because the of the show necessarily or the movies nominated (though obviously either are liable to turn off some audiences). When big hits like Black Panther and Joker were nominated for a ton of awards it didn’t change anything. 

The truth of the matter is that broadcast television as a form is not as powerful as it once was. The Oscars will never again have the ratings they had at their peak in the 90s and early 2000s, because people aren’t watching live television much anymore. I believe that just as many people are tuning in as in the past, but through alternative outlets like streaming and following on social media. And while one can point to the Super Bowl’s consistent ratings as a counterpoint, that’s an altogether different beast. Sports fans are much more intense than movie fans, a larger percentage of them are likely to still watch cable television, and there’s just a lot more of them. Their big event operates differently as a giant competition that lasts months and of course Super Bowl commercials and the Half Time Show have become their own entities of advertising real estate (not a bad idea: new movie trailers premiering at the Oscars instead of the Super Bowl).

What the Oscars should be doing is embracing those fans it does have who appreciate its’ principles if not always its’ choices and stop pandering to those who would most likely never watch it anyways. If the ceremony needs to be shortened so be it -there are plenty of other ways to do that: cut the rarely funny comedy bits (that preview of Amy Schumer’s jokes already forewarns a night of cringe), tighten presenter speeches, eliminate gimmicks and maybe even the performances of Best Original Song -which always seemed more fitting for the Grammys or Tonys. But realistically, runtime shouldn’t be an issue. If the show goes over three hours it’s not a big deal. All that Twitter contests and shafting “boring” categories does is diminish what the Oscars mean, what they should be a symbol of for the movie industry. And for what, so that a few Marvel fans whose intelligence is being insulted, can feel represented in a show that has otherwise nothing to do with them. Accept that the Oscars are not going to get high ratings anymore and cater instead to those with investment in its’ legacy.

But I fear that’s not what they’re going to do. Just as I write this, I’m hearing DJ Khaled, Tony Hawk and Kelly Slater -none of whom have anything to do with movies- have been booked as presenters and Amy Schumer tried to get a cameo from Volodymyr Zelenskyy! Clueless Hollywood will continue to be clueless Hollywood and in that case I wonder if the Oscars should just abandon ABC for some other network, preferably not attached to the machine (someone floated PBS as a good idea). Streaming is an option too, but any of the major streamers would be a mess of conflicts of interest -unless the Academy made their own. It’s clear though that ABC doesn’t much care about them in their outmoded pursuit of relevance. Despite these “big changes” nothing substantial is going to change about the Oscars telecast. It will once again get poor ratings and rather than attribute it to a changing media world, ABC is going to double-down until none but the biggest awards are given their full due -all the while probably pressuring the Academy to nominate more populist films.

“Movie Lovers Unite” is such a cynical slogan. And in trying to appeal to those casual moviegoers as Packer puts it (who don’t strike me too much as ‘movie lovers’ if they see maybe half a dozen studio blockbusters a year), it’s only going to put off everybody. Populist movie fans will know they’re being pandered too while genuine Oscar fans will rightly decry the cheapening of the greatest movie awards brand in the world. However there is a ray of hope in that so many movie lovers have united against these motions, and they’ve been making their criticisms heard. Dozens of big name Hollywood figures signed a letter urging the snubbed categories to be restored -among them director nominees Steven Spielberg and Jane Campion. Best Actress nominee Jessica Chastain won’t be doing Red Carpet interviews -she’ll be attending the earlier ceremony in support of her make-up artists. Campion is the odds on favourite to win in her category and Chastain may well win in hers as well. They can make a public statement in the live show and I hope they do. I hope many of the winners do, making the show as awkward as possible for Packer and the ABC execs. I hope enough of a fuss is made that it dissuades them from doing this next year. 

Because cinema is so layered and multi-faceted, so much work is put in on all fronts, and each department and discipline deserves respect. And populist movies don’t need this shit that ultimately does more to derogate than celebrate them. Nobody wins with these choices, and all that’s accomplished is a tarnishing of the Academy Awards greater than any “wrong movie” winning. Because if this is allowed to be the pattern going forward, the Oscars can no longer carry any honest weight in the movie industry ever again. And for an institution as old, respected, and ubiquitous as it is, that would be devastating.

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