The Oscars are one of those things that we care about because we are told to care about them, despite the fact that we say we don't care about them and then every year we vow not to care about them because they clearly don't reflect our taste, and then we write big long think pieces about how irrelevant the Oscars are and how much we don't care about the Oscars. So: uhm... Why don't we care about the Oscars? The general consensus is that it's because the Oscars are less concerned with actual quality or important movies that further the form of cinema as an art, so much as hitting repetitive and predictable Oscar Movie Attributes. Is it character driven? Does it take place in Hollywood? Is Meryl Streep in it? Does it involve the Holocaust? Are the black characters either slaves or beleaguered servants of some sort? Are the Weinsteins involved? Is Leonardo DiCaprio performing some form of desperate self-flagellation, but here is the thing: it wasn't always like this. There didn't used to be a little sub-industry catering to Oscar glory. When did we start using terms like "Oscar Bait"? When did Best Picture go from generally being agreed upon as the most important picture of the year to not? So: rather than doing history of the Oscars I wanted to look at a history of what type of movie is favoured by the Oscars. Because it wasn't always so predictable. CONNERY: "And the Oscar goes to..." LINDSAY: Okay, so first: who is the Academy and how do you get in to it anyway? Well you win an award or you beg your way in, and also someone has to sponsor you if you didn't win an award. It's kind of like being in AA. For instance, George Lucas; he is not a member of the Academy. He actually declined membership, but uhm, Meatloaf is. Heh, and actually Meatloaf considers himself a sign of diversity with him the Academy, you know because War Horse made him cry instead of like the artist. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science was created in 1926 when MGM co-founder Louis B. Mayer and some other studio heads agreed that they needed a film organisation that prestige-ey and also pre-empted the need for unions. Also, for legitimacy, maybe it should give out awards or something. As opposed to almost all other film award ceremonies like the Golden Globes which are awarded by the press or critics, the Academy Awards are voted on by prestiged industry people and that's why they matter more than other awards. And also the Academy is disproportionately made up of actors. So, if you ever wonder why movies that tend to be contemplative, dialogue-driven character pieces that take place in Hollywood are more likely to be nominated / win than perhaps they deserve, there you go. But it wasn't always this way. As a random, for instance, let's look at the 1971 Oscars. Of the five Best Picture nominees, four of them had been in the top 10 highest-grossing films of that year. In 1975, three of the five Best Picture nominees were in the top 10 highest-grossing films By 1980 that number had dropped to two, and it kind of stayed at this level until the 2000s. By 2005, none of the five Best Picture nominees even cracked the top twenty for domestic gross same. For 2006, the year that 'Crash' won Best Picture, not one of the Best Picture nominees even cracked the top twenty. Both 'Star Wars' and 'Jaws' were nominated for Best Picture, but after that we started to see a slow divergence develop. The films that most people saw got less and less awards recognition and awards recognition was used to boost attendance for smaller films that people might not have seen otherwise. There were exceptions... but in terms of broader nominee trends, most films started to follow a pattern. Since the early 2000s a somewhat predictable algorithm has emerged for what type of film will get nominated Hell, two years before Kate Winslet won her Oscar for Best Actress, she parodised how she planned on doing it in an episode of Extras. WINSLET: Now, I'm doing it because I've noticed that if you do film about the Holocaust; guaranteed an Oscar. LINDSAY: And two years later: what do you know? In terms of nominees there's also a lot of money involved promoting films for awards consideration costs money. So, could one say that a trend of films being produced intentionally featuring Oscar Movie Attributes has emerged? That producers and studios are essentially gaming the system, making movies with less attention to quality than to features that Academy Award voters have shown preference for? Yes. Absolutely yes. Yes. Absolutely. People harp on 'Crash' and deservedly so, but perhaps the most overt recent example of this phenomenon is 2011's 'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close', a movie that nobody saw and nobody liked. It had its elite property acquisition topical subject matter, mentally challenged child, elite principals, including Academy favourite Tom Hanks, but this movie got no other major film award nominations from any other major group except for the Academy, and it also has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 45%, the worst score received by any Best Picture nominee in Rotten Tomatoes history. Producer Scott Rudin used methods that had worked for him previously with 'No Country for Old Men' and 'There Will Be Blood', pushed a big For Your Consideration campaign that yes cost a lot of money, and what do you know? Best Picture nomination. You know for all the good it did So when did the studios begin to use the Oscars as a means of marketing a newly released film instead of the other way around? DE NIRO: Yargh! 'The Deer Hunter' is well a) it's really long and b) it's really hard to watch. When the movie was about ready to go the filmmakers had dropped a film on the studio that was a critical darling, but near impossible to market. "Hey everyone, I know the Vietnam war just ended in disgrace barely three years ago, but, heh, wanna watch Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken suffer horribly for three hours?" So, the producers had this great idea of, "Hey, let's get in the absolute barest minimum requirement for Oscar nominations for the following year, namely limited release in New York and L.A., and also some other minor stuff. And then go into wide release after the nominations come out in January. CANNON: The winner is Christopher Walken in 'The Deer Hunter'. LINDSAY: And, lo and behold, success. The film won five Academy Awards including Best Picture, Director and Supporting Actor for Walken and obviously this did not change the industry overnight but over the next 30 years strategies like that used with 'The Deer Hunter' went from outliers to pretty much all of the Oscar contenders were using it, especially in the Actor categories. In the following decades the more popular films that made lots of money became less and less concerned with prestige and more and more concerned with appealing to as wide a demographic as possible. As it turns out the masses don't really care about awards all that much. Why wasn't 'The Dark Knight' nominated for Best Picture, the normies wondered? Why was 'Wall-E' relegated to the ghetto that is Best Animated Feature instead of Best Picture like 'Beauty and the Beast' was? And yeah, this would kind of end up eventually backfiring because the movies that got nominated were seen by so few people in the weeks and months leading up to the Oscars. And viewership has been on a pretty even keel downward since the 90s, bottoming out in 2008 with its lowest ratings ever. At which point the Academy was like "Yeah, we should probably include some more mainstream fare in the Best Picture category because no one is watching our show anymore. And we want to stay relevant." HANKS: The last time 10 films were nominated for Best Picture was 1943. LINDSAY: In 2010 when they upped the Best Picture category back to 10 as it was in the early days we got nominees like 'District 9' and 'Avatar'; a flaccid attempt to push back against the Academy's own internal biases concerning what is indeed awards-worthy. That said it still mostly been the awards as marketing movies that get nominated? Especially in the acting categories with a few mass appeal when sprinkled in there for technical awards and Best Picture. Though the fact that 'Mad Max: Fury Road' was nominated this year for as many awards as it was (granted, mostly technical) is a minor miracle unto itself, and I'm honestly kind of surprised that it was nominated for Best Picture. So, progress? Eh. So moving forward there has been a lot of talk about this Oscar Bait strategy in recent weeks, and how it ties in with pushes for greater diversity, especially again within the acting categories. I mean yeah, it would be great if it was a meritocracy, and yes these 20 people just happened to be the best choices that came out this year, but come on. It's political and The members of the Academy in terms of demographic are a touch homogeneous. Academy membership is kind of like being a Supreme Court justice. It is lifelong and historically it has comprised mostly of crusty old white guys, even greater in proportion to the overwhelmingly male, overwhelmingly white film industry as a whole. So in a panicked move to outrun total irrelevance the Academy has announced that voting rights will be limited to ten-year cycles If a member has not been active in the industry within the last ten years they will be moved to emeritus status, meaning they can enjoy all the privileges of membership except voting on the Oscars. Unless you've won an Oscar that guarantees you lifetime voting privileges. Needless to say some of the olds in the Academy are not happy about this. Anyway. They've also pledged to double their minority / female membership by 2020 which may sound like a lot until you remember again this should not be difficult even if you are trying to match proportion to the industry's demographics which are not great. So you hear that Meatloaf? You better do another movie about truckers if you want to keep voting. It is my understanding that you'll do anything for love, Meatloaf. Will you do that?
