CALUM MARSH ON WHY THE OSCARS ARE A BURNING DUMPSTER FIRE OF GARBAGE TRASH
It is the film critic’s perennial duty, it seems, to address the Academy Awards – a phenomenon that is in no way criticborne. Round about this time of year, you see, a lot of broadsheet editors and TV news producers with otherwise very little interest in the movies suddenly determine that a multi- million dollar televised awards ceremony in Los Angeles warrants their attention. And so people like me, who are paid to think and write about films every week as a niche metier, are for a short while called upon by radio programs and morning news shows to offer expert commentary on the year’s nominees. It’s sort of like the Olympics or the World Cup in that way: for a week or so everyone gets to feign a stake in a pastime they could hardly give a damn about any other day of the year.
But at least the Olympics and the World Cup have legitimate claims to authority. Sportswriters deeply invested in the cutting- edge vicissitudes of soccer or track and field day- to- day probably care a great deal about how these games transpire at the highest level, and I doubt very much that even the exaggerated furor of the mainstream media can interfere with the nuts-and-bolts pleasure of watching the best athletes in the world fairly compete. The Oscars simply aren’t that kind of competition. The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, the roughly 6000- member honorary body whose annual responsibility it is to fete and decorate the year’s most exemplary achievements in short and feature film, is a feeble, conservative, wildly ineffectual coterie of self-congratulating elites. They don’t care about the cinema, and seem in fact actively hostile toward it. They’re about as qualified to determine the best movies of the year as the local bricklayers union is to sort out the best of the ballet.
To prove the point, of course, one need only cite the historical record – a nearly 90- year testament to getting it wrong. This is not a matter of suggesting merely that, say, All That Jazz should have been awarded Best Picture in 1979 instead of Kramer vs. Kramer (though it is certainly the better film), or that one ought to cringe to recall the veneration of Dances With Wolves (though feel free).
Not every winner will endure the march of time. The problem is at once broader and more obvious – so obvious that, for cinephiles especially, it goes without saying. How many times has the Best Picture prize been awarded to a foreign- language film, compared with how many of the best films, year over year, were not made in the United States? How has the Academy honoured the independent cinema? How have the Awards recognized avant- garde? Where are the Oscars for black filmmakers? For women? For anybody at all besides the wealthy, the well-connected, and the white – many of whom, despite the Academy’s longstanding indifference, have been making award- worthy films all along?
A great deal was written last year about the tendency of the Oscars to privilege certain voices over others, and it is true, historically speaking, that when the Academy gets it wrong, it gets it wrong in a way distorted indelibly by bias – which is to say that if a star- studded, expensive, conventional, widely distributed American mediocrity is destined to win Best Picture, that mediocrity is likely to have made by white artists, about white characters, for an overwhelmingly white audience. But the Oscars will always favour mediocrity. It is not a coincidence that the Best Picture nominees every year have been produced for tens of millions of dollars, feature recognizable stars, and opened in wide release across the country. Nor is it true, obviously, that the finest films every year simply happen to meet these criteria. The system accommodates these films and excludes all others by design. The game is pay-toplay, artistic merit be damned.
There are a few reasons for this. To begin with, it behooves the producers of an awards show set to be broadcast in prime- time to millions of homes to ensure that the majority of those homes are familiar with the people being awarded prizes at the show in question. We’re all pleased to see Ryan Gosling and Nicole Kidman on the red carpet on Sunday night; less so Shahab Hosseini ( star of The Salesman) or Anna Biller ( director of The Love Witch), deserving of acclaim though they may well be. Hence, one supposes, the existence of the Foreign Language category: Toni Erdmann may have swept critics’ group awards, topped year- end lists the world over, and become something of a runaway arthouse hit, but there will never be any risk of a three- hour German comedy disrupting the Academy hegemony. They can attend to it with a single ghettoized trophy in five minutes and leave the other categories for the proper films, which is to say the ones made in English in the United States. Never mind if it’s better- written, better- acted or better- directed than its would-be competitors.
More tenacious is the problem of awareness. The average Academy voter, if random surveys and anonymous interviews are anything to go by, is not exactly a connoisseur of the vanguard of film, and they are kept abreast of what’s happening – and what’s eligible to be voted on come awards season – mainly by what reaches their door. The Academy’s largely passive constituents are best reached by DVD screener, mailed out by the thousands in November and December, emblazoned with bold exhortations to vote: “For Your Consideration,” they declare, with the desired category of note – “FYC: Best Original Screenplay,” say, or “FYC: Best Supporting Actress” – pinpointed and underscored for the voter’s convenience. A voter who hasn’t been to the movies all year but has been beseeched by screener to write “Lion” or “Meryl Streep” on the ballot isn’t bound to resist. Who could even remember all of the year’s eligible performances? Easier to choose from a smaller pile: the pile of DVDs on your shelf.
These unignorable screener campaigns not only influence but almost dictate outright what talent and what films are ultimately nominated. And naturally this benefits only those films whose distributors can afford a nationwide screener campaign in the first place – no thrifty proposition.
This, in the end, is what elevates films like La La Land or Manchester by the Sea to a higher plane of advantage than something like Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Happy Hour, one of my personal favourites of 2016. La La Land has the weight of Lionsgate behind it; Manchester has Amazon Studios working full- steam. I’d be surprised, on the other hand, if even a hundred of the Academy’s 6000- plus voters took the time to see Happy Hour at all. This is no competition of merit, clearly. It’s about who can afford to get their movie seen.