What does the future hold for the Academy Awards?
‘THE EVENT INSULTS ITS AUDIENCE’
‘The Awards are a victim of their own narrowly defined success’
The 90th Academy Awards was supposed to be the ceremony of change – an Oscars for the #Timesup and #Metoo age, in which Hollywood would show the world it was no longer in the thrall of bad old habits.
Yet, for all the talk, the Academy’s voters have furnished us with one of the most drearily business-as-usual sets of winners imaginable, in a plain-sailing, shock-free year in which it was impossible to point at a single result as evidence that the much-talkedabout root-and-branch upheaval was afoot.
Not that any of this year’s winners were, in isolation, hair-tearers. The
Shape of Water is a wonderful film and a worthy Best Picture winner, bringing overdue Academy recognition to its creator, Guillermo del Toro, who also won Best Director. But its girlmeets-swamp-creature premise notwithstanding, del Toro’s monster melodrama mash-up was also a conspicuously safe choice in a year in which its fellow nominees included Lady Bird and
Get Out – and, for that matter, Phantom Thread and Dunkirk.
Safety came first in the acting categories too, where most critics and commentators had the winners picked out weeks ago. You couldn’t individually begrudge Gary Oldman, Frances Mcdormand, Sam Rockwell or Allison Janney their moment on stage, but as a foursome they have spent the past two months collecting Golden Globes, Baftas and Screen Actors Guild Awards, with last night’s quartet of Oscars merely completing the set.
There were cheerworthy moments: Roger Deakins winning Best Cinematography on his 14th attempt, Jordan Peele taking Best Original Screenplay on his first, James Ivory becoming the oldest winner in the ceremony’s history over in Best Adapted. But each of these had been fairly widely predicted.
The whole thing was in dire need of a Moonlightstyle upset that never came to pass. Not a mixing up of envelopes – though under the circumstances, that wouldn’t have hurt – but the kind of out-of-nowhere underdog triumph that Academy voters were still capable of surprising themselves, let alone us.
The sticking point, which only seems to get stickier with every passing year, is that the Academy Awards have become a victim of their own narrowly defined brand of success. Viewing figures for the live telecast may have been in steady decline since 2014 (final numbers for last night’s show have yet to be released), but that hasn’t dissuaded the industry from fixating on it for months on end, to the point at which the event itself can’t possibly justify its own build-up.
The race is now a marathon, run over six months, with the starting pistol fired when the hopefuls premiere in the autumn film festival season in Venice, Toronto and Telluride. (The Shape of
Water first surfaced at Venice last September, where it won the Golden Lion.) The results from countless warm-up ceremonies, from the Baftas and Golden Globes to the various guild awards and Independent Spirits, are all reduced to the latest readouts from the Oscar-predicting machine, rather than celebrated in their own right. Spin out the narrative for that long and you had better work in a twist or two to keep your audience gripped.
Failing that, at least don’t actively insult their intelligence, as the Academy seems to do regularly during the traditional In Memoriam segment. Appallingly, among this year’s forgotten names was a former Oscar winner, Dorothy Malone, who died aged 93 in January, and won Best Supporting Actress in 1957 for Written
on the Wind – hardly a niche title, and a film to which this year’s Best Picture winner owes a significant creative debt.
Other key names absent from the photo montage included the singer and sometime actor Glen Campbell, who was nominated for the Best Original Song Oscar just three years ago, the pioneering horror director Tobe Hooper, Peggy Cummins, the iconic femme fatale from
Gun Crazy, and the widely beloved actors John Mahoney, Frank Vincent and Adam West.
As the Academy continues to reflect on the necessary changes ahead, they would do well to resolve once and for all to get this vitally important part of the ceremony right. The sense last night was of an event that had no grasp of the past nor a clear view of the future but was quite happy talking to itself in a flatteringly lit corner of the present.