The Oscars are already a mess. Let’s make them even messier
The disruption caused by pandemic opens door to long-overdue changes
The 92nd Oscars took place a little less than a year ago, on Feb. 9, 2020, making them one of the last normal public events of the past year. A whole lot of people thronged — maskless! — into an indoor space, sang songs and made speeches, spraying aerosols every which way, and then piled into limousines and headed to unsocially distanced parties. Can you imagine? Many of the rest of us gathered at parties of our own, having seen at least a few of the nominated films in actual movie theatres.
Whatever happens at the Dolby Theater on April 25, it won’t be anything like that. Even if the most optimistic pandemic projections come to pass, the road to this year’s Academy Awards is all but unrecognizable. The Cannes Film Festival, where last year’s Best Picture winner (Bong Joon-ho’s “Parasite,” in case you forgot) made its debut, didn’t quite happen in 2020. Neither did Telluride, one of the autumnal springboards for Oscar contenders. The other major fall festivals, Venice and Toronto, were shadows of their usual bustling selves.
The kinds of movies that traditionally contend for awards — midbudget dramas with recognizable stars and respectable historical subjects or social themes — were thin on the ground throughout the year, although a handful did show up on Netflix. The audience and the industry floated in a strange pandemic limbo. There were a lot of movies to see, on streaming platforms or video on demand and even, for intrepid or irresponsible cinephiles, in cinemas. But the usual cycles of buzz and backlash, the word-ofmouth and blaring hype that have defined awards season for better and for worse over the years, didn’t materialize. As a result, nobody knows quite what to expect and even the most brazen professional prognosticators are holding their tongues.
Of course, it’s possible that the producers of the broadcast and the voting members of the academy will cobble together some version of show business as usual, on the theory that it’s what the people want.
They are professional peddlers of make-believe, after all, and an understandable response to the current situation would be to try to make us all believe, once again, in the oldtime religion — in the glamour of stars, in the power of Hollywood, in the magic of movies.
I hope not. It would be a shame if the academy let this crisis go to waste. As in so many other areas of contemporary life, the desire for a return to normalcy can be a mechanism for nostalgia and outright denial, an excuse for papering over what was wrong with the old normal in the first place. And let’s face it: before the coronavirus turned everything upside down, the Oscars were a mess.
Yes, I know. There were moments of real delight — the “Parasite” victories, the “Moonlight” win in 2017, the serial triumphs of the Three Amigos — but they always arrived on a tide of expected disappointment. For at least a decade, the awards have struggled to fulfil an array of increasingly incompatible imperatives.
The broadcast itself is supposed to appeal to a global audience, to stand as one of the last and proudest real-time, massviewing events in an increasingly fragmented and asynchronous universe of cultural consumption. At the same time, it is supposed to glorify a specifically American ideal of cultural production: popular and commercial but also high-quality and high-minded, not narrowly nationalistic but welcoming. The academy upholds a friendly, inclusive imperialism, built on a cheerful consensus.
As the industry has invested more and more of its talent and capital in franchises, its prestige products have gotten more specialized. The budgets and boxoffice revenues of Oscar-worthy movies have shrunk, a fact that is often blamed for the telecast’s decline in ratings and the perceived loss of relevance.
A few years ago the academy tried to address this problem by floating a new Best Popular Film category. That was quickly abandoned amid widespread ridicule. But the actual Best Picture winners have been a mixed bag. The category has provided a few bright spots and breakthroughs (“Moonlight” and “Parasite”) as well as occasions for puzzlement.
The new was struggling to be born, but the old wasn’t ready to go away. The academy’s effort to make its membership more youthful and more diverse seemed to be vindicated by the “Moonlight” victory, but two years later the triumph of “Green Book” felt like regression, if not outright backlash. In between, “The Shape of Water” felt like a strange compromise — I liked that movie, but I’m still not quite sure what it was. And then “Parasite” swung the pendulum in a radically new direction, without necessarily fixing the underlying structural problems.
So now what? The prestige and authority of the Academy Awards have always rested on two fundamental assumptions: that film is the flagship of the popular arts and that the eternal capital of the cinema is Hollywood. Maybe these axioms were always arguable, but in 2021 they are self-evidently untrue.
It’s time to tear up the blueprints and start again.
What does that mean, in practice? For one thing, it means continuing to expand academy membership in the interests of geographical, generational and cultural diversity. For another, I think it means treating the “Parasite” victory not as an outlier but as a harbinger. That movie, a twisty, impeccably directed, brilliantly acted thriller laced with stinging, humanistic social criticism, fulfilled the Oscar ideal better than any mainstream Hollywood production since, I don’t know, “Silence of the Lambs”? And there are more where it came from, by which I don’t just mean Bong’s dazzling imagination. The academy should abolish the Best International Feature ghetto and make Best Picture an international category.
Or else — and in addition — find new ways of designating excellence. Get smaller and bigger at the same time, by giving space and attention to the odd, the experimental and the handmade as well as the gaudy and the grand. What if there were genre- or budget-level categories (Best Comic-Book Film; Best Million-Dollar Movie), and those films were also eligible for Best Picture?
The Dolby Theater isn’t a temple. It’s a bazaar. And the answer to the Oscars’ decadelong malaise may be more emphasis on commerce, rather than less, if we understand commerce to mean not the passive consumption of dead commodities but the lively exchange of ideas and information.
When I said the Oscars are a mess, I guess what I meant is that they aren’t messy enough, that they have projected a bland, consensus image of cinema that is increasingly at odds with the anarchy that is cinema’s only hope for survival. We’ve had the fairy tale. We need the train wreck.
The new was struggling to be born, but the old wasn’t ready to go away