People’s choice Oscars doomed to fail
They stopped just short of adding a smiley face to the Oscar statue.
But the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences might just as well have done so, since it has abandoned all pretence of being a stuffy arbiter of serious cinema.
The academy’s surprise announcement Wednesday that it is adding a Best Popular Film category to its annual telecast, along with a guaranteed three-hour running time, represents a complete capitulation to the feel-good populism of our age.
It’s the art world equivalent of Ontario’s new buck-a-beer promotion, where opportunism trumps logic — and it’s doomed to fail. “We have heard from many of you about improvements needed to keep the Oscars and our Academy relevant in a changing world,” academy president John Bailey and CEO Dawn Hudson wrote to their more than 7,200 members. “The Board of Governors took this charge seriously.”
Indeed they did. But Bailey and Hudson didn’t explain exactly how they’re going to award a Best Popular Film (the official name hasn’t been stated yet) and how it will square with its traditional Best Picture kudos, considered the top prize in all of moviedom.
Will the two categories be mutually exclusive? We can assume that such 2018 multiplex-fillers as Avengers: Infinity War, Incredibles 2, Black Panther and Mission: Impossible — Fallout would be candidates for Best Popular Film, but does that mean they wouldn’t be eligible for Best Picture as well? Incredibles 2 is also a shoo-in for a Best Animated Feature nomination, meaning it could technically be up for three top Oscars.
We don’t know how it will work yet and I suspect the academy doesn’t either.
We can easily deduce why it is making this drastic change, and also limiting the show to three hours, a feat it will pull off by controversially bestowing some prizes during the commercials. (Which prize winners, I wonder, will be considered not ready for prime time?)
The 2018 Oscarcast ran almost four hours, almost a record length, and it drew a record low TV audience of 26.5 million viewers, a drop of 19 per cent from the previous year.
Critics of the Oscars, and they are legion, claim that there are too many art-house films nominated for Best Picture and not enough popcorn ones. Joe and Jane Moviegoer need something to cheer for on Oscar night, they assert.
I never expected the academy to fall for these bogus arguments.
Which of the most recent Best Picture nominees would we call “too art house”?
The Shape of Water, the most recent Best Picture winner, combines romance and sci-fi. Fellow nominees Dunkirk and Darkest Hour are wartime thrillers. Get Out is a horror movie (and racial satire). Lady Bird and Call Me By Your Name are coming-of-age heartwarmers. The Post and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri are socially relevant dramas.
This leaves just the undeniably arty Phantom Thread, a psychodrama set in 1950s London, but you could also argue that it’s a horror film.
Would any of these movies be considered “popular” enough to qualify for Best Popular Film? I’d argue that most of them would, as long as box office wasn’t the sole determining factor — and nobody is saying yet whether or not this will be the case. Will “popular” become synonymous with “blockbuster”?
What exactly was wrong with the Oscar’s previous feel-good strategy, now a decade old, of expanding Best Picture nominees from the traditional five to as many as 10? It made this move for the 2009 awards year after the popular outcry over The Dark Knight being denied a Best Picture nomination the year previously.
Apparently it’s no longer enough for a “popular” movie to be nominated for an award. There now has to be a guarantee that at least one popcorn pic will take home the gold or else people will refuse to watch the show.
It’s the proverbial slippery slope the academy has fallen down, fooling itself into thinking that populism is the same as quality and that the only way to deal with shrinking attention spans is to make shows even shorter — although I do agree that a fourhour Oscarcast is too long. Catering to people who really don’t like movies is no way to run a movie awards show.
If the academy’s plan is to turn itself into a glitzier version of the People’s Choice Awards, it might just as well look back to its original ceremony in 1929, where prizes were handed out both for Outstanding Picture ( Wings), and Best Unique and Artistic Picture ( Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans).
That event, held at Hollywood’s Roosevelt Hotel at the dawn of the sound revolution (and before TV broadcasts) clocked in at a mere 15 minutes. The new feel-good Oscars could do the same, filling out the remaining 45 minutes of an hour-long show by running ads for buck-a-beer.