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. Nope, 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 rank all the ‘‘Best Film’’ nominees in order of preference from first to last.
Meaning any film that attracts a passionate following, but which some people absolutely hate, is pretty much guaranteed to be bumped down the list. And the winner will possibly not even be the film that attracted the most number one picks. Just as long as it was the film that turned up most often around the top of most voters’ lists.
What makes this process even more odd is that voting for all the other awards is a far more controlled and exacting process. 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 of the night, 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 clear favourite across most of the world’s film festivals, but only one film has ever won both a Palme D’or at Cannes and a Best Picture Oscar. Marty ,in 1955.
Also, forget the idea that Cannes and co are somehow elitist and biased against popular films. Apocalypse Now, Pulp Fiction, Wild at Heart and M*A*S*H all took home the Palme D’or, but were rejected by the ‘‘more populist’’ Academy.
All of which means, we should probably rename the whole shemozzle ‘‘The Academy 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, and this isn’t always the case, 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
We should probably rename the whole shemozzle ‘The Academy Award for the Least Disliked Film in English’ and be done with it.
you watched it on Netflix just to see what all the fuss was about but the kids were being noisy and you were eating dinner and checking Facebook at the same time and you thought it sucked and all it proved to you was that movie reviewers don’t live on the same planet as you and whatever else you felt like writing in the comments on Stuff.
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 or just get back to me in 50 years when it is still being talked about with respect and awe.
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 big-budget superhero movie get a nomination, because it’s a genre that doesn’t get anything like the respect it deserves. 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, although it most definitely is, 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. Both are terrific films, but they are also political and polarising and so the deadening hand of best picture voting will drive them down the poll.
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 of the same story and that The Favourite should take it by a nose.
Whether or not 7000 mostly fairly conservative North Americans feel the same way about such a relentlessly sweary and hilariously cold-hearted European black comedy no-one really knows.
The annual race for the least disliked film of the year is like that.