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.