Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Oscars a distraction we need, lots of baggage we don’t
We need the Oscars because we need more things in common. As our social fabric frays, as we retreat behind our phone and tablet screens, we need more moments of secular communion.
That is what the show tonight (7 p.m., ABC-TV) is for — not to certify anyone’s taste or to identify the best examples of a particular species of popular art, but to give us something to watch together. Something to roll our collective eyes at. Something to engage each other over.
As far as I can tell, no one likes the Academy Awards; they are either too shallow or too political. They either reward movies that are too obscure or films that play too much to the house. The broadcast is too long and neglectful of the important but anonymous artisans who make vital contributions to the manufacture of motion pictures. Too many movies receive best picture nominations; too few of the right movies get nominated.
Some people take them too seriously; I’ve probably been overly dismissive of them. It’s true that I can never remember what film won best picture in any particular year, that I usually turn the telecast off before it ends, that I don’t try very hard to guess the winners.
But I shouldn’t pretend they aren’t as important as a core sample of the zeitgeist. While the Oscars aren’t really about cinematic quality, there is always a reason for the nominations and the snubs, for the winners and the also-rans.
There have been dramatic changes in the demographic makeup of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences in recent years. In 2012, a New York Times survey of the academy’s more than 5,000 members revealed that the voters were
94 percent white, 77 percent male and 54 percent over the age of 60. In 2016 — the year of #OscarssoWhite — a similar Los Angeles Times poll put it at 91 percent white and 76 percent male.
Since then the Academy has been rapidly taking on new members — 30 percent of the current membership has been added since 2016 — with the goal of making the Academy “look like America” by 2020. This year, 31 percent of Oscar voters were female and 19 percent were nonwhite. I couldn’t find any reliable current figures as to the average age of Oscar voters, but it stands to reason that members who voted in 2016 are now three years older, so the change in that metric likely isn’t as dramatic as in the others.
This ought to mean it shouldn’t be as easy to predict Oscar nominees and winners as it once was. As a class, older white men would probably tend to favor a certain type of movie, so interjecting a bunch of younger, ethnically diverse voters might open things up, especially given the difficult-to-describe method of preferential voting that’s used to pick the best picture winner. (And to decide the nominees in all categories, but let’s not get into that.)
In every category except best picture, a voter simply picks one of the nominees, and the one that receives the most votes wins. It was that way for the best picture category from 1946 to 2008, when there were only five best picture nominees. But in 2009, concerned that popular favorites like 2008’s The Dark Knight had been shut out of the category, the academy re-introduced a voting method used from 1934 (when there were 12 best picture nominees) to 1945.
Voters rank the nominees — there are eight this year — in order of their preference. If one nominee garners more than 50 percent of the firstplace votes, it will win best picture. Since that’s highly unlikely, the next step is to eliminate the film that received the lowest number of first-place votes and to re-allocate its votes to the voter’s second-favorite film on the ballot. The process is repeated until one film has more than 50 percent of the total.
It’s a complicated system that the academy says is designed to favor films with relatively smaller but more passionate fan bases over movies that are just generally well-liked. One could surmise that under the pre-2009 voting system Moonlight probably wouldn’t have won out over La La Land in 2017. It seems likely that La La Land, which was seen by more people than Moonlight, initially had more first-place votes. (Accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers isn’t saying.)
Some voters, maybe a lot of them, didn’t care much for La La Land. Perhaps they were turned off by Ryan Gosling’s admittedly irritating jazz purist character, so they ranked La La Land low on their ballots. As the runoff proceeded, La La Land didn’t gain a lot of votes. Meanwhile, Moonlight had its share of passionate supporters and there was no backlash against it. Think of preferential voting as the academy’s version of the Electoral College — winning the popular vote doesn’t necessarily guarantee a win. The academy says it “best allows the collective judgment of all voting members to be most accurately represented.”
But does it? Just for fun, had I a vote, this is how I’d rank the 2019 best picture nominees: Roma, BlacKkKlansman, The Favourite, Black Panther, Vice, A Star Is Born, Green Book and Bohemian Rhapsody. I’m completely all right with the nominees, though in general I prefer the nominees to be fewer. I’m pleasantly surprised that my top three choices were nominated and am not sure any of them would have been under the old system of voting.
I find Green Book and Bohemian Rhapsody enjoyable but problematic films, but am not surprised they got nominated. Black Panther and A Star Is Born both seem to be the sort of strong commercial movies that the Oscars ought to be about honoring — they’re excellent films that for various reasons didn’t connect with me (though I appreciated certain textures in A Star Is Born and highly recommend watching Black Panther on Blu-ray with Ryan Coogler’s director’s commentary turned on).
As to what will win, I’ve no real idea. I’m surprised that the GoldDerby.com awards tracking site has installed Roma as the 4-to-1 favorite. Green Book is 6-to-1; BlacKkKlansman and The Favourite are at 7-to-1; A Star Is Born 8-to-1; Black Panther 17-to-1; Vice and Bohemian Rhapsody 19-to-1.
Were I to place a wager, I’d back Green Book.
There is a lot of pleasure in emotionally investing in something that has absolutely nothing to do with one’s real life. That’s why people follow sports teams and reality shows. The Oscars don’t matter in any larger sense; that’s the point. There’s nothing wrong with getting wrapped up in them, in rooting for some movies and performances over others.
My only point is that the Oscars have very little to do with my work as a film critic and it’s possible to care deeply about the movies without paying much attention to box-office figures or who gets to read a speech during a made-forTV spectacle and who doesn’t.
I’ll watch the Oscars telecast tonight — or most of it — for the pure-dee spectacle of it and to see if anything unexpected happens. And while I would like to see Roma win because I love the movie, I understand the position of my friend who thinks foreign language films shouldn’t be eligible for best picture. Because they’ve got their own category.
While I’m paid to have strong opinions about the movies, I don’t know that it’s possible to definitively say Roma is a better picture than, say, A Star Is Born. I’m not sure that question has much value. If you want to say A Star Is Born is the best movie you watched in 2018, I’m in no position to argue with you. What’s more interesting is why we respond to a given film in a certain way; all a critic needs to do is to say something interesting about a work of art that could be true.
The academy was wise to reverse the decision to move the presentation of the awards for cinematography, film editing, live action short and makeup and hairstyling to commercial breaks during this year’s telecast. They were wise to — at least temporarily — scrap plans for a “popular” movie award. They have trouble remaining relevant in this Netflix-and-chill age. The broadcast is too long. The Super Bowl is too long too. And sometimes boring. But sometimes we need to get together and get through something — something that may be, in spots, boring and totally irrelevant to the way we live our lives day to day. Very few of us have seen all the best picture nominees; I hear complaints from people all the time that they haven’t even heard of most of the movies that will be celebrated tonight.
That’s not difficult to understand. There are lots of appeals for our attention these days, lots of rabbit holes we can fall down. It’s expensive to go to the movies, there are thousands of entertainment options available to us in the comfort and safety of our own homes. Why should we attend to the self-congratulatory strutting of rich and pretty people engaged in producing shows of light and sound?
Movies are not as universal as they once were; their market share has been shaved. By some measures, more people play Fortnite than go to the movies. (What’s Fortnite? Exactly.)
Even so, they’re something we still have. Because we need a reservoir of common images, a store of references we can draw upon — a civic ritual or two about which we can complain.