The rocky road to this year’s Oscars
Like a good Hollywood screenplay, each Oscar season has burbling conflict, a colourful cast of characters, and a few plot twists. Take the Oscars of 1942, which were held two and a half months after Pearl Harbor. With America at war and a spirit of austerity at hand, the Academy decided to scotch its ritzy banquet, prompting Variety to declare that “the Golden Boy of Hollywood . . . has covered his gilded epidermis with a coat of camouflage.” The Academy president, Bette Davis, quit her post in a huff after the board scoffed at her proposal to move the Oscars from a ballroom to a theatre, give the proceeds to war relief, and present wooden statuettes. Eventually, the Academy decided to go ahead with a dinner, without formal dress (or, in Variety speak, “sans orchidaceous glitter”).
Eighty years later, the Oscars are again taking place amid the outbreak of war, with drama rocking the Academy, a stacked
Best Actress category, and a late-breaking Best Picture faceoff between a coolly mischievous critical darling (“The Power of the Dog”) and a tear-jerking family drama (“CODA”). The central conflict, though, has had less to do with the horse race than with the Academy’s announcement that eight categories would not be presented during the live broadcast.
In the process, the Academy has succeeded in irritating a lot of people. The category-cutting fracas, though, is best understood as a symptom of a deeper identity crisis. The Oscars strive to be two things at once: an industry recognition of the various aspects of moviemaking represented by its branches and a splashy television event that must appeal to a mass audience. In the past few years, those two goals have appeared increasingly incompatible. For one thing, mass audiences don’t watch network television like they used to. But moviegoing has changed, too. The films that make big money are almost exclusively superhero flicks, which don’t typically get nominated for Oscars. In 2009, after “The Dark Knight” failed to get a Best Picture nomination, the Academy expanded the category to up to ten nominees, presumably to make room for Batman and friends. Instead, the category filled up with small, worthy movies such as “Nomadland.” Meanwhile, the kind of movies that are supposed to get big audiences and win Oscars, such as Steven Spielberg’s remake of “West Side Story,” have stumbled at the pandemic- depressed box office. Without a sustainable middle, Hollywood is bifurcated: on one side, “Spider- Man: No Way Home,” which has grossed more than 1.8 billion dollars worldwide; on the other, “The Power of the Dog,” Jane Campion’s enigmatic Western, which got twelve Oscar nominations.
The only thing they have in common is Benedict Cumberbatch.