Impossible to Please Everyone

Why the Oscars Don't Really Suck

Mar 08, 2024

As is DB’s way when writing about film for us this post is ‘too long for email’. So I’ll get to the point. This might be the definitive essay on the Oscars and deserves to be read by everyone who has seen any of this years nominees, or indeed anyone who has ever watched a Hollywood film ever.

Absolutely incredible work here, which I’m proud to be able to showcase via the STSC.

Enjoy

TJB.

I’ve always had an ambivalent relationship with the Oscars. My first real memory of them was feeling like Men in Black got snubbed on Best Makeup Effects by Titanic in 19981, but these issues didn’t have much personal valence until I became interested in filmmaking and curious about the industry itself.

It did not take long for me to find that the awards often went to features I did not care for (or sometimes hadn’t even heard of) instead of personal favorites. The 2005 Best Feature award for Crash landed at a bad time for that mindset: when I was first launching into the heights of college-aged film snobbery and looking for anything to take down “mainstream cinema.”

Crash is regularly cited as a turning point when the Oscars lost a lot of public credibility, but I remember people grumbling about “The Oscars aren’t what they used to be” from way back in the early 90s. Such grumbling is just a perennial part of the experience itself, like how news and culture and the neighborhood – and movies themselves – were always better back in that ‘before’ era that remarkably always ranges from about 10 years before a person’s birth to about 20 years into their lifetime, after which of course society took the wrong turn and ruined everything.

However, I don’t believe the Academy can ever really bridge the mismatch between its audience’s expectations and the Best Picture results. Some of that mismatch comes from audiences expecting something the Oscars isn’t even trying to do; some of it is just the nature and difficulty of curating and selecting award-winners; and a lot of it is the fact that movie distribution and the audience’s relationship to cinema has changed so drastically over the century that the awards shows have been running that it’s fundamentally impossible to find one movie that would please the majority of people.

And lastly, pleasing the majority of people is not necessarily what the Academy is trying to achieve in their awards programming.

Unicorns Are Extinct

I think a general, Platonic model of what people expect from Best Picture are movies like Gone with the Wind.

Gone with the Wind is a unicorn in many ways: a widely recognized critical and commercial hit during the period of its initial release, with continued canonical representation as a classic, that both presents the sort of work Hollywood dreams of doing best while speaking to the interests and concerns of the domestic American audience at the time. It’s an epic with all the design and craft that entails, it’s a costume drama with all the glamour and fashion that enables, it’s expertly written, astoundingly acted, expensive as shit, and its inflation-adjusted box office returns are the metric by which modern blockbusters are measured. And after all that, it won the Academy Award for “Astounding Production” in 1940, later called “Best Picture.” Keep that nomenclature in mind, it’s important for later.

Gone with the Wind is also a unicorn in the sense that it’s a mythic creature from a time that no longer exists.

When people ask “Why don’t they make movies like Gone with the Wind anymore?” that’s the tell. “They,” the financiers and artists that compose the various production studios and companies collectively known as “Hollywood,” do. This year’s Gone with the Wind is Killers of the Flower Moon, a costume drama historical epic about American history based off of a widely read and highly lauded best-selling book. Or it’s Oppenheimer, if you add a little of that post-Millennial non-chronological narrative stylishness to it. Another attempt that didn’t make the nominee list is Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, a subject about as historical and epic as you can get.

If your reaction to these examples is, “But those aren’t the same!” the difference now is that audiences have far more choices of movies to see, far less interest in that genre or epic playlengths anymore, and cinema itself has far less sway over popular culture and imagination. There are no monolithic movies anymore because there’s no monocultural film production anymore. In 1939 Killers of the Flower Moon could be the only movie screening in a small town for several months. In 2023 there aren’t small town cinemas2 and modern audiences don’t understand how Scorsese can expect them to sit through 3+ hour runtime without bathroom breaks.

And that’s just talking strictly about the American domestic box office, before we enter the complications of international competition, streaming, platform fragmentation, and new forms of competition from popular and digital media. It’s impossible for any one movie to have the sway and influence movies had in 1939. How do you measure “Best Picture” in a world where a production the scale and ambition of Killers of a Flower Moon is largely considered the indulgence of quirky late career film brat rather than the dominant form of commercial entertainment?

The Middle-Brow Paradox

Motion pictures don’t have the monocultural influence they had in 1939, but that’s also not a bad thing. Personally, I prefer the modern film world with its lower cost of entry for niche productions and specific audiences, even though there are significant concerns about the sustainability of distribution and rights management with our modern streaming platforms. It raises the question, however, of how to recognize and award movies from such a fragmented landscape.

On a high level, there are two common complaints about what’s nominated and what wins. There’s the fairness argument that the Academy is unfair to horror, action, science fiction, and even comedy, genres historically deprecated as low-brow, in favor of dramatic and historical works traditionally considered high brow. Then there’s the populist argument that the Academy deprecates blockbusters and popular entertainment in favor of vanity projects.

Even in my own limited exposure to Oscar news over the years, I see that the Academy is always appraising and struggling over the fairness issue. This is why it’s constantly tweaking stuff like how many movies to nominate, what categories to nominate movies in, which categories are available, and even the composition of the Academy voters itself. Many of these adjustments lead to more criticism than praise.

And the second complaint is entirely beside the point of the awards. The Oscars have been diverging from blockbuster entertainment for some years, and that’s not an oversight, that’s its mission statement. To wit, the project of having an awards ceremony is to highlight the qualities of art you value and therefore incentivize its production. The Academy doesn’t hide this goal, the host recites it at the top of every award show every year.

If you want to know what the biggest hit of the year is, follow Box Office Mojo. Audiences can and do vote with their dollars and attention. But the most popular movie of any given year is not always the best movie. This argument sounds strange until you break it down to its constituent parts: is the most popular movie of any given year the best edited movie? Does it have the best sound design? Does it have the best makeup effects? Do the same with your personal favorite from the last year: did it have the best score? The best visual effects?

Move from there up the ladder: the best performances, the best cinematography, the best directing… and you can see how a movie can be the best of something without being the biggest hit at the same time, or how a movie can be the biggest hit of the year without necessarily having the best example of a specific area of film craft.

Where that argument goes south is when we reach Best Picture, but hold that thought. We’ll get there.

The problem still lies in the issue of genre. Obviously a serious drama about a college professor is going to have less unique, cutting-edge editing than John Wick 4. So the question becomes how to honestly recognize the craft of editing if you discount action movies for awards? And can’t Best Script ever go to a horror? Can’t Best Acting in a Leading Role go to a scifi or superhero movie?

The other risk is that if the genre films are invited into, and then sweep, the Awards, that will still read as declining critical quality. “We used to award classics, now we award money-grabbing superhero sequels,” is the counterpoint concern to “Why couldn’t they recognize The Dark Knight?” Does Barbie stand up to Gone with the Wind?

The Best of the Best of the Best, SIR

This leads to the complaint more common among my community of grumpy experimental and independent filmmakers, the sorts of cinephiles that flood FB movie groups with underground and obscure home movies found in the closets of Eastern European psych wards: the awards should go to most novel, unique, profound pieces of art made worldwide.

Firstly, these cinephiles are impossible to please: contrarianism is fractal and they could never collectively create a best of list they themselves approved of entirely on their own. I know this because I’ve made best-of lists in various cinephile communities before. And there’s a reflex in that sort of thinking that when something does go mainstream, it’s necessarily deprecated in significance from something that remains underground. Many cinephiles are just punks.

But despite the Academy’s tussles with the problem of how many or few independent or foreign films can truly compete on an equal footing (not to mention recent issues like, “Does the movie have to have theatrical release or can it just be streaming?” or even if it did, “Does anyone need to have actually seen it?”), we always have to be realistic that “The Academy” is 10,500 people who mostly work in the traditional commercial film industry collectively called “Hollywood,” whose intentions and focus are to award excellence within that domestic commercial film industry.

They aren’t gonna award a 24-hour montage of timepiece insert shots or a viral liminal-space horror for much, if anything. I was disappointed that this year they did not nominate Steve McQueen’s Occupied City for Best Documentary, but I’m clear eyed and realistic that a four-and-a-half hour long essay film that lists off significant locations of the Amsterdam anti-Nazi resistance groups is a tough sell to any meaningfully large cohort of people, regardless of whether they’re a film snob or general audience.

So if the Academy awarded the most daring, edgy, avant-garde films pushing the form to new limits, they’d alienate their audience with elitism and obscurantism; but if they washed the awards out with big hit genre entertainment, they’d be blamed for cynical commercialism and selling out. As a group of industry insiders, they’re interested in expressing their values for the greatest quality of work. As a group of industry insiders, those greatest qualities have to come from commercially viable productions.

The results are always going to be Hollywoodized and mainstream, yet prestige and elite focused. This compromise displeases everyone. The Best Pictures are always ‘mid’ because if they were too pop they’d be selling out, but if they were too challenging they’d be pretentious.

What’s Deserving?

So what’s nominated is largely the movies that film artists working in the production of theatrically-released motion pictures enjoyed making most and want to see more production of. The second order issue becomes which of those nominees wins, and introduces a second paradox: how to recognize what’s being awarded.

As an editor, I’m often pulled into the “invisible editing” versus “stylized editing” debate. Is it necessarily better editing if the audience thinks, “Oh, I like this editing” rather than just being immersed in the story? One movie may have flashier editing, but another may have been a turgid drama saved by keen editorial choices that discovered a tighter, more meticulous way of telling the story and brought out the best of the actors’ otherwise uneven performances. How would we know about the latter if we didn’t see an earlier cut? What might have just looked like a ‘normal’ edit could have been some of the most insightful craftwork of a generation.

I like thinking about this insider context to the craft of editing because it explains why occasionally the Academy Awards results in a situation like the Best Editing award for Bohemian Rhapsody in 2019. This award was immediately met by confusion as even hobbyist editors and YouTube content creators jumped in to show their issues with Bohemian Rhapsody’s edit3.

However, there’s an inside story behind the difficulties of editing Bohemian Rhapsody. The production of Bohemian Rhapsody had a contractual agreement with the living members of Queen that each bandmember had to have equal screentime. Bohemian Rhapsody was also a very difficult production with a lot of changeover. The editors not only had to franken-scene moments shot by different crews, they had to do so while making sure that each and every character was visible on screen an equal amount of time regardless of narrative relevance to that scene or the movie as a whole.

If you’re an editor, you already recognize what a nightmare this could be. There’s an issue of fitting it all together cleanly. There’s likely one producer who translates ‘equal screen time’ as equal amount of dialog, while a different one translates ‘equal screen time’ as equal number of total frames in the final render. Then when I watch John Ottman accept the award and thanking his team, maybe I’m reading to much into this, but what I see is a guy who probably sat with producers literally timing how long the character Roger Taylor is on screen and arguing about whether it lives up to the contract. It really does look like he was given a movie impossible to edit and made it work anyway..

In other words, Bohemian Rhapsody might be a case where the end result is poor but the editors deserved the award for achieving the nearly impossible. I don’t think the movie deserved the award, but I think the editors did. I am not sure if the editors deserved the award more than other editors that year, but they do deserve an award for getting that movie done.

The Most Picture

Or maybe I’m sentimental. After all, another good conversation that helped me understand the Oscars in better context was when my friend Ryan said once:

“Don't remember who said it but Oscar doesn't hands out awards for Best [Category], it gives 'em to Most [Category]
Bohemian Rhapsody: Most Editing
Leo in The Revenant: Most Acting
Birdman: Most Directing”

Similarly, a study a few years ago noticed that Best Actress tended to go to actresses with the most screen time per group of nominees.

But then you enter a sort of chicken-and-egg issue: are the actors on screen longer because the performance was so good that the editor chose to cut away less? Or longer because the role was more central to the focus of the movie, and therefore the actor was given more time and more range to work with?

It suffices to say that visibility creates bias. If you can “see” the editing decisions made, you’re more likely to vote than for equally competent editing that is invisible. But also if you’re inside the industry, you see more of what’s going on behind the scenes than people on the outside, and so difficult or dramatic behind-the-scenes stories may influence your vote in ways that the audience doesn’t perceive. An editor just showing up for work and rocking it is good, but an editor showing up for work and rocking it against punishing limitations and mixed quality footage is better.

And here lands one of the biggest misunderstanding of what the Academy Awards are actually rewarding versus what most viewers and audiences think they’re doing: the issue of the Best Picture of the Year.

Best Picture is the sticking point for most people’s disappointments and frustrations with the Academy Awards, and the issue with it is mostly semantics. To say a movie is “the best movie of the year” is a bold assertion every critic, listmaker, and ranker runs into during the course of their end-of-year listicles. It’s a subjective argument bound to displease everyone because rarely is there going to be a majorian consensus on any one movie.

But taking that subjectivity issue aside, it’s also difficult to apply Ryan’s framework to Best Picture: what does “The Most Picture of the Year” mean? It certainly doesn’t mean the longest motion picture of the year!

But Best Picture is something of a mislabeling for some historical, some marketing purposes. Best Picture really means Best Producing.

Back when the Academy was founded, the producers were widely acknowledged as the key, top talent responsible for the final result of a film. That hierarchy is still true in many ways today, but some French intellectuals went and mucked it all up with auteur theory, movie studios stopped having consistent internal teams and divided the executive and creative producing sectors, and various new formulations of ‘producers’ were created via Hollywood accounting and contracting gimmicks to get actors and directors and other talent extra residuals for work otherwise wage limited by union or other financial limits. These days audiences respond far more to director as brand (“a Christopher Nolan film”) than producer as brand (“an Emma Thomas film”4).

Notice that there’s no Best Producing category at the Academy Awards. But that doesn’t make sense: producers are the key talents responsible for delivering a final commercial film to a studio at the highest possible quality within budget. There’s literally no way the Academy would neglect producers the way they neglect stunt work5: the group was founded by producers!

Best Picture means Best Producing, and Most Producing means “wrangling and enabling the greatest amount of talent and resources considering budgetary and commercial restraints toward recognizable box office success.” It’s a recognition of the movie produced during the year that had the most synergies between the artistic ambitions of the Academy membership and the commercial requirements of the modern audience and its taste.

Best Picture is rarely going to be your favorite movie. When producers tell other producers that they’re the best producers, they’re talking about the achievements they made making deals, wrangling talent, keeping a complex project from derailing, making it look good, and then finding the audience for it.

What Best Picture is not:

The most crowd-pleasing entertainment of the year. For that, see Box Office Mojo.
The best story of the year. For that, see Best Scripts awards.
The most important movie of the year. Time will tell.
The most unique movie of the year. For that, be curious and use your judgment. In my opinion, those are usually made by some weirdo hacking away at a personal project in their garage or something.
The most critically acclaimed movie of the year. The same critics publish their own lists of bests, or you can use the Tomatometer®.

Remember the award Gone with the Wind won? It was called Astounding Production, a lot closer to the intended meaning of the award. Always remember, this is an industry event where insiders are rewarding insiders for their achievements.

Politics

At which point comes the next complaint: “Well it’s all just politics and nepotism.”

…. Yes. If you have an industry awards program where people in the industry award people in the industry prizes for doing good stuff in the industry, you’re going to have alignment between their work and their relationships to each other.

The internal politics are really about how the Awards are structured and voted on. This has actually been reconsidered and changed a lot, especially recently. For instance, foreign films used to rarely breach into the Best Picture section because the Academy was almost entirely Americans – now the Korean movie Parasite is a Best Feature winner.

The Academy has specifically worked to expand its membership to non-American filmmakers, women, and people of color in order to diversify the slate of nominees: this year’s Best Picture slate has three women-directed films and three foreign language films, for one example, when the previous years’ record for women-directed films was 2 (2021) and foreign films was 2 (2006). The increase of the Best Picture slate from 5 to 10 was also part of that initiative.

Over time the composition of the Academy morphs and changes, so their tastes and values change. In the 90s Miramax came out of nowhere and upset the incumbent studios; these days A24 followed the same path and that’s why we have ‘that A24 style’ in even non-A24 movies. “It’s all politics” can equally be a reason to watch as a reason not to: to get a sense of what Hollywood collectively is paying attention to these days, and to see what new power brokers are breaking in where previous incumbents sat.

This also reflects people’s concerns with Hollywood’s cultural agenda. The broadening of the Academy membership and attempts to diversify the slates came out of criticism from the American left of the largely monocultural selections from previous years. However I just want to throw out there: I know from experience that voting for ‘the most woke’ movie to win each category loses the Oscar pool. And also, Angel Studio’s success with Sound of Freedom points the way to new independent reach into conservative communities; who knows, maybe one day an Angel Studios production will compete in the Oscars. If conservatives are concerned about such, they should fund more independent film production6.

The above begs the question: if Best Picture is recognition of producers’ influence and power in the industry, then why should the audiences care?

An Industry Event with a Fashion Show Tacked On

Ages ago7 I met an aspiring filmmaker named Dan who made the following dismissive argument, paraphrased from memory:

“People don’t turn on the Clios to spectate on the award-winning advertisements of the year. Nobody cares which automobile wins best truck of the year but truck manufacturers and enthusiasts. The Academy Awards shouldn’t matter to most people, but the Academy made it into an entertainment event for advertising dollars. It’s an industry event with a fashion show tacked on.”

Even though my friend Dan was mostly deprecating the show with that statement, I found it remarkably helpful in contextualizing how it actually works.

The Academy Awards broadcast has not just a fashion but a varietal show tacked on, complete with old-school standbys like musical, comedy, and even brief vaudeville performances. This is meant to entertain the television audience while indulging in the performances and talent of the industry. When people complain that the Academy Awards are self-congratulatory, well, that’s the point: industries deserve to celebrate themselves, and artists and performers deserve to be celebrated.

The other side of my friend Dan’s comment is, however, that broadcasting the awards begs the question as to whether that celebration is or should be interesting to the average television viewer. Once upon a time ‘average television viewer’ was a fairly good stand-in for average American, or average consumer, or average person. Now those various ‘averages’ are, on average, not watching broadcast television, and when they are, they’re definitely not watching varietal shows – at least those that don’t feature some snarktastic Brit ribbing the performers after their accomplishments8.

The Academy has been asking that question and struggling to find the answers. In real data the Academy Awards broadcasts have seen declining viewership for some time. In the current media landscape, it’s difficult to entice people with 3-4 hours worth of rushed speeches and performances (embedded into an endless array of commercials), and they’ve been tweaking formats and doing studies and trying to adjust from what they think they’re understanding from audience feedback ever since. It’s unclear whether there’s really anything they can do to grab people’s attention in this attention economy.

I feel that context is really important when most coverage of declining viewership is read through the political-tinted lens of opinion-editorialists and cultural critics. If the Academy Awards is supposed to represent the best of Hollywood cultural production, then it also becomes a metonym for Hollywood cultural production. The award show’s failure represents the rot of Hollywood’s quality, the argument goes.

However, it’s unclear to me that Hollywood can make the broadcast any more interesting. For comparison, how many people really tune in to the Tony Awards? 9It doesn’t matter how good a play gets, the average person is neither going to see it, nor care to.

In that sense I’m wondering how long before Academy Award complaints will switch from punching up to punching down. I’m not saying the film industry doesn’t deserve criticism, but I am saying there’s very little they can actually do to please any significantly large audience. The metonym is read as declining audience = declining quality, but it could also go the other way. The Academy Awards’ declining audience is also a declining audience for the art of cinema broadly, no matter how good the movies are.

Actually Good

Despite all of the above, the thing that always gets lost in these discussions is that the Oscar nominated films for the most part are, actually, really good.

They are. Any given slate of Best Picture nominees are above-average, well made pieces of art that are deserving of critical and audience attention. The downstream awards tend to nominate more than competent work in performance and craft. They’re almost always critical and financial successes. Oscar cynicism seems to amplify far outside the scope of the proffered goods.

Above I discussed Barbie in terms of commercial genre films’ access to the roster. Despite its pop art appeal and clear commercialist marketing campaign, if we return to the concept that “Best Film” means “Best Producing,” Barbie is an extraordinary synergy of name-recognized independent talent (Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, indie darlings if there ever are any) to drive the identity and narrative of an old brand. It was a truly risky choice that ended up paying off in a billion dollar box-office haul that came from cinemas surrounded by pink-wearing audience members for months. You can turn your nose up at it, but from a producing perspective, the producers lined up their best talent, swung for the fences, and hit a home run.

Past Lives is a great example from the other direction, a quiet and loving personal film from a new director about two romantic lovers fated to pass each other by. The title is very dependent on a Korean concept of inyeon and dealing with the placelessness of being an immigrant not fully absorbed into two different cultures. On paper a story like that gets a short run in theatres in New York and LA before being delegated to the back catalog of Netflix, only popping up for those that the Dear Algorithm determines to be into K-Pop or romantic indies. Instead it played nationwide for several weeks and grossed $11million in US domestic box office. The producers took the risk on a small project with heart and ended up with widespread box office success, relative to movies in that niche.

The point is these movies don’t get there through merely happening to be feminist or about immigrants or whatever. They actually do earn the attention they get in their craft work and talent, in addition to often touching upon values and concerns of the Academy membership. They may not be the best movies on the face of the planet, but they are definitely better than the average movie made any given year.

“You Have to See It”

Does that mean you have to see these movies? Of course not. As a cinephile, I’ve had enough of the phrase “You have to see this movie!” I don’t have to see anything. There’s one Best Picture nominated movie this year I personally do not want to see at all, as I’m not fond of the director’s work and also not really interested in the concept. If it wins, I’m still not going to see it!

But I’m not saying it’s not a good movie. I’m saying I probably won’t like it. If you can’t tell the difference, then you’re not a very good judge of movies10.

Oscar nominated and winning movies aren’t going to please everyone, but that’s no reason to dismiss the enterprise itself. There does need to be an institutional push to celebrate the artistry and possibility of the medium itself, even if that medium is declining in relative cultural influence. With a fragmented media-attention landscape and the crumbling of monoculture, it’s impossible for the Academy to please everyone, but even their middling results are worth attending to if you’re interested in movies as something more than cynical cash-grabs.

We need institutions like The Academy to continue to incentivize the production of artistic work within the world of media, entertainment, and commerce. The results may not work out to every person’s favor, but the project is a net good for the industry and its community.

The world of independent cinema is more robust and open than ever before in history, and filmmakers overall are creating variety and stories than audiences have ever had access to. The movies that land at the Academy Awards are ultimately the major studios’ and production houses’ attempts to compete with that level of output, to give the world something other than serialized franchise ouroboros eating their nostalgia-poisoned fat tails to oblivion.

The Academy Awards do point the way to the better quality films, and should now be considered more like the gateway to the true independents rather than the height of craft itself.

If you think “they don’t make good movies anymore,” you’re watching the wrong movies.

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