Why the Oscars make no sense at all
It’ll be Monday in New Zealand by the time we learn from a group of people who presumably know far more about films than the rest of us, just what the Best Film of 2018 was.
Or at least, that’s what The Academy Awards would have you believe. Naturally, like pretty much everything else Hollywood manufactures, it’s mostly bulldust.
In an unexceptional year, with no Moonlight or Twelve Years a Slave to upend expectations, the Academy will do what it generally does, which is to pick something crowdpleasing, preferably with no public scandal yet attached to it and with just enough of a patina of being a ‘‘quality’’ film to not actually get laughed out of the theatre.
And that film, for no reason that makes any real sense at all, will go down in the annals of cinema history as being ‘‘the best’’ film of the year.
It will leave us to believe that in the past 90 years, the best film has only once been directed by a woman and has only ever been written in English, despite English being the first language of barely one in five people in the world.
So how did we get to this farce? Well, the clue is in the name. Unlike every other film award in the world, the Oscars are not judged by a panel of great film-makers, writers or even critics, they are judged by the voting members of The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, all 7258 of them (as of 2018).
The vast majority of them live in the United States, and many of them, although they might work in the film industry, don’t really know any more about what makes a film great other then the ‘‘hey, I liked it’’ scale the rest of us poor fools use.
And then, just in case a vote taken from a membership of 7000 plus wasn’t already guaranteed to produce a result that would automatically exclude anything too controversial or polarising, the members aren’t even really asked to pick the best film of the year. Nope, the Academy ranks all the ‘‘Best Film’’ nominees in order of preference from first to last.
What makes this process even more odd is that voting for all the other awards is far more controlled. Most voting is limited to members who work in a specific part of the industry. Only sound technicians vote for best sound, etc.
But for the big prize, everyone gets a say. Which is why occasionally Oscar will throw up a ‘‘best film’’ that didn’t even get as far as the shortlist for best director or best screenplay. Which, when you think about it, offers some compelling evidence of just what nonsense the Best Picture process is.
And which maybe explains why it is not unusual for one film to be a favourite across most of the film festivals, but only one film has ever won both a Palme D’or at Cannes and a Best Picture Oscar. Marty, in 1955.
All of which means, we should probably rename the whole shemozzle ‘The Academy
We should probably rename the whole shemozzle ‘The Academy Award for the Least Disliked Film in English’ and be done with it.
Award for the Least Disliked Film in English’ and be done with it.
So, knowing all that, what are we to make of this year’s lineup and their chances? Well, firstly, the best film I saw in 2018 is actually in the shortlist.
Yeah, I know, you didn’t like Roma because the first half hour was kind of slow, and filming in black and white is a pretentious move and who can be bothered reading subtitles anyway and you watched it on Netflix just to see what all the fuss was about and you thought it sucked and all it proved to you was that movie reviewers don’t live on the same planet as you.
But you were wrong. Roma is a flat out masterpiece. And if you don’t agree with me go and see it in a cinema with a decent screen.
Not that Roma will win. It’s just nice that the best picture of the year is there at all. Neither does anyone seriously believe Black Panther will win.
I’m happy to see any bigbudget superhero movie get a nomination, because getting any sort of recognisable human emotion to emerge intact through a storm of computer generated effects, generic storylines and daft costumes is a near impossible task.
That Marvel and DC and co manage to do it at all still fills me with some wonder.
Neither is Bohemian Rhapsody going to win. Not because it’s a load of fraudulent old rubbish, but because director Brian Singer has finally been publicly outed as being an absolute creep, at best.
And we can scratch Vice and BlacKkKlansman as well. Which leaves Green Book, A Star is Born and The Favourite. Any of which would be an unsurprising and controversy-free pick.
Personally, I think Green Book is too slight, A Star is Born is an inferior copy of the Barbra Streisand/Kris Kristofferson iteration and The Favourite should take it by a nose.
Whether 7000 mostly conservative North Americans feel the same way about such a sweary and hilariously coldhearted European black comedy no-one really knows. The annual race for the least disliked film of the year is like that.