The Perceived Irrelevance of the Oscars

On the fiascos surrounding Selma and American Sniper, whether or not the Oscars are out of touch, and if it matters.

Whenever you have a conversation about the Oscars with a group of people, someone inevitably brings up the following gripe: The Oscars are out of touch with the average moviegoer. Ignore for a second whether or not this is true. (It is.) What a statement like that really calls into question is whether or not the Oscars should care. Should the Oscars actually want to be in touch with the average moviegoer?

It’s very easy to understand why they might want to be: ratings for the Oscar telecast. Nearly everything the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) does is financed by the revenue received from the Oscar telecast. Higher ratings equal higher revenue, so that’s not a difficult motivation to work out. One of the highest rated Oscar telecast in history was in 1998, when Titanic was up for a dozen or so awards. Generally speaking, the more invested the public is in the nominated films, the more likely they are to watch the show. When the public hasn’t heard of the nominated films, they could care less about who wins.

But this is a purely financial consideration to a problem that ought to not consider financial implications. One of the major lessons of The Newsroom (aside from “The internet is the devil” and “The current generation sucks”) is that news shows are inherently not profitable. They exist for the greater good, not to make money. They mostly lose startling heaps of money that their conglomerate parents have to make up elsewhere, probably by jamming more Two and a Half Men down our throats. Good plans always have necessary evils and unintended consequences. And we’ve seen what happens when news shows try to be “in touch” with their viewers. We get lots of stories about puppies.

The Oscars should not succumb to the equivalent of puppy stories. They exist to award the annual best of an artistic medium. Whether or not people saw that best makes utterly no difference (or at least shouldn’t). The reason everyone now thinks the Oscars are out of touch is because fewer people than ever are seeing the nominees. This has been written about many times before, and is quite easy to explain--because of the rise of home entertainment quality and movie availability via things like Netflix and On Demand, adults largely don’t go to movie theaters anymore. Because that demographic can no longer be counted on for money, Hollywood no longer makes movies for them. These are the mid-budget, star-driven dramas that used to be widely loved Oscar winners, stuff like Rain Man, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Braveheart, Dances With Wolves, and so many others. Now, movies are largely only made for the two demographics that dependably pay to see them in theaters: teenagers and cinephiles. The teenagers get the summer franchise movies, and the hardcore movie snobs get the art-house movies. The art-house movies now get all the Oscar nominations because, well, what else would? Movies that cost between 20 million and 120 million to make just don’t exist anymore. It’s all one extreme or the other.

Here’s a fun (and depressing!) exercise: Ask the next teenager you encounter if they’ve seen—or even heard of—your favorite movie. Likely, they’ll say no. Does this mean your favorite movie actually isn’t that good, or that your taste is out of touch? This is the exact problem AMPAS runs into every year, just on a much wider scale. They’re hoping a demographic that clearly hasn’t seen their favorite movies might care about which ones win awards. Because this problem is largely unsolvable, the solution is to stop trying to solve it.

Within all of the annual bitching and moaning about how out of touch the Oscars have been over the last decade, what’s lost is how they’re actually more in touch now than they’ve been in almost 40 years. It’s merely a question of in touch with who. Pick any year from the ‘80s, ‘90s, and ‘00s, and look at which films won the most Oscars, as well as which films topped the most critics’ lists. You’ll almost definitely be looking at two different sets of films. Hopefully one or two titles might overlap, but it just as easily might be zero. That hasn’t been the case for the last few years. Last year, critics and film snobs spent all fall arguing over what was better between 12 Years a Slave and Gravity, and those ended up being the two films going head-to-head for the top Oscars, ultimately splitting Best Picture and Best Director. This year, the same thing appears to be happening with Birdman and Boyhood, one or both of which have appeared at the top of virtually every single Best of ’14 list I’ve seen. If they also split the top two Oscars, which is becoming an increasingly more popular prediction, it will be the second straight year in which the two most acclaimed films of the year also become the two most handsomely awarded films. That’s not how it used to go. 

The nadir was in 2008, when the two most acclaimed movies of the year, Wall-E and The Dark Knight, received 14 combined Oscar nominations, but only one of which was in a “Big Five” category (Wall-E received a Best Original Screenplay nomination). It was as though every technical and craft category of AMPAS recognized the genius of these films, but the major clubhouses refused to let them in. Sci-fi, action, super-heroes, animation… it was an outdated way of thinking that these “lesser” genres weren’t deserving of playing with the big boys. Meanwhile, The Reader received one of those Best Picture slots. Yikes.

This problem was largely fixed the next year, when both the number of Best Picture nominees changed, as well as the way the nominating votes are tabulated. Since then, the clubhouse has opened up. We’ve seen multiple Best Picture nominations go to sci-fi (Avatar, Inception, District 9) and animation (Toy Story 3 and Up). And although a main-stream super-hero film still hasn’t received a Best Picture nomination, that could be because there just hasn’t been one as good as Dark Knight. And hey, Birdman kinda counts, right? (Just nod.)

In the six years since the rule changes, you’d be hard-pressed to find a critical consensus Top-Ten-of-the-year film that didn’t receive a Best Picture nomination. The Oscars are actually more in touch now than they’ve been since the heyday of the second Hollywood Golden Age of the 1970s, when audiences and critics largely agreed on what the best films were, and there was a run of total-classic Best Picture winners like The French Connection, The Godfather, Annie Hall, and the aforementioned One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, as well as several near-winners like Chinatown, Network, and Apocalypse Now. The only difference now is the “who” that the Oscars are in touch with. Mainstream audiences simply took themselves out of the equation. You can’t bitch about who wins Prom Queen if you don’t even care about going to Prom. There were some painful adjustment years, culminating in the 2008 fiasco, but now we’re in a better place, where the best movies are getting awarded at a higher average than we’ve seen in two generations.

Is everything fixed now? No, of course not. There is no voting body in the history of organized society that has ever gotten everything right. Expecting the Oscars to do so and excoriating them for failing is an argument that will never, ever be fair. Just a few years ago, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close received a Best Picture nomination, and that was a moment that unified us all in its horror. This year, there are equal and conflicting brouhahas over how many nominations Selma failed to get and American Sniper succeeded in getting. In both cases, the arguments are devolving into fights we shouldn’t be having, fights which actively undermine everything the Oscars hope to be about.

There’ve been several high profile pieces written about why Selma only received two nominations, and they all boiled down to the same four theories: The Academy is racist, the Academy has “race story fatigue” (having just given Best Picture to 12 Years a Slave last year), the film’s campaign wasn’t run well enough, or the historical liberties taken—specifically in regards to the portrayal of LBJ—were too far and too offensive. Could any or all of these theories have at least somewhat contributed to why Selma didn’t get many nominations? Sure, I guess. But what I find really sad and pretty offensive is that none of these theorizers theorized the simplest theory of all—that Selma just wasn’t that great.

Does Selma tell a good story? Of course it does, in the same way that reading the Wikipedia page on MLK tells a good story. That’s really what Selma was—a Wikipedia page brought to life. It was the best possible outcome of a paint-by-numbers. But there weren’t any interesting artistic choices taken in Selma. It was a film with the great craft and skill of filmmaking, but without any of the art. After seeing Selma, I went back and re-watched Spike Lee’s daring Malcolm X (1992), which I’d only seen once, ten years earlier. I felt compelled to prove to myself that you could create a worthy portrait of an important figure without sacrificing artistic risk and style. Believe it or not, you can! Malcolm X also only received two Oscar nominations, and in 1992, race may have been a bigger factor in that, as well as The Oscars still having been in the phase of predominantly awarding movies that really connected with a mass audience, which Spike Lee was certainly not doing at the time. (Even The Crying Game, which was partially a transgender story, made 14 million dollars more than Malcolm X at the 1992 American box office, if that tells you anything about how unready mainstream moviegoers were for early Spike Lee.) 22 years later, we’re in a better place, and when you stand Selma up to something like Birdman or Whiplash, where the visceral excitement of great art is just constantly digging into you with every moment, there’s just no comparison. It’s unfortunate that when an un-amazingly told story isn’t recognized as amazing, our collective reaction is to immediately assume race must be a factor.

The race fatigue argument might be even worse. To suggest that 12 Years a Slave winning last year might be why the Academy showed indifference to Selma this year is to assume the two films operated on similar levels of worthiness, and that discredits the accomplishment of 12 Years a Slave. The single scene ofSolomon Northrup hanging from a tree, barely kept alive by the faintest tips of his toes, forcibly shown to us with no music, no dialogue, and no cutting away for nearly three full minutes, represents more risk and a more ambitious level of art than Selma even remotely flirts with at any point in its 128 minutes. If anything, the Academy’s lack of awe towards Selma isn’t about race fatigue in regard to 12 Years a Slave, but rather in remembrance to how great 12 Years a Slave really was, and recognition that Selma just doesn’t operate on a similar level.

American Sniper finds itself in an entirely different controversy. Instead of a movie that requires the public to manufacture reasons why the Academy didn’t laud it enough, here’s a movie that the public is trying to understand why the Academy undeservedly lauded it too much. Or did they? American Sniper received six nominations, and at least three of them (Film Editing, Sound Editing, and Sound Mixing) are probably deserved no matter how awful you think the movie is. Bradley Cooper also received one of the nominations, his third in a row for Best Actor, and it’s useful to remember here that a nomination for acting is not an endorsement for a film. Whether or not Cooper deserved to be among the final five names is a more subjective argument than I’ll get into here (I’d say no, but whatever), but he did do a good job in the film, and the Academy clearly loves him. If you want to argue that his nomination is proof the Academy irrationally likes a bad movie, then you also have to pretend to forget his Best Actor nomination last year, for American Hustle, which equally caught prognosticators by surprise.

The gist, then, of the “Why does AMPAS love American Sniper so much?” controversy rests solely on the shoulders of the Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Picture nominations, with the Screenplay nod being the especially tricky one. But here’s what no one is seeing, saying, or realizing: Captain Phillips was nominated for the exact same six Oscars last year. Phillips also received highly deserved nominations for Film Editing, Sound Editing, and Sound Mixing, a we-love-him-and-he-was-good nomination for Tom Hanks, an okay-sure-I-guess Best Picture nomination, and a deeply suspect Best Adapted Screenplay nomination. In both cases, AMPAS chose to recognize a highly tense, well acted, and technically well-crafted movie, which largely ignored the moral quagmire of the US military celebrating the sniper assassinations of poor, third world brown people. Am I over-simplifying the political stance of both stories? Of course! But the problem is, so do the movies themselves. Neither film digs deep into the morality of the situations they play in, and neither film has any idea what it’s trying to say. So yeah, both Adapted Screenplay nominations are pretty problematic. But remember the part several paragraphs ago where I reminded you that no voting body ever gets everything right? Yeah, this is one of those. A bad result in Oscar voting does not invalidate the Oscars in the same way Michelle Bachmann having won four congressional elections does not invalidate the American government.

As to the Best Picture nominations for both films, you just have to chalk that up to what critic Anne Thompson calls “The Steak Eaters,” which are the faction of AMPAS that want a Best Picture nominee to look like such, with a budget that visibly appears on screen and a result that screams “We are Hollywood and this is what we do bitches!” This year, the Steak Eaters only had one kind of steak on the menu, so we can’t be too surprised that they ordered it.

In any case, what’s great about the Oscars right now is that we generally expect the nominations to get it right. (Just go ahead and mentally add “for the most part” to the end of every sentence in this paragraph. Thanks.) We’re having these arguments because what happened with Selma and American Sniper actually shocked people. Comparatively few people were shocked in 2008 when Wall-E and The Dark Knight failed to receive Best Picture nominations, or Do the Right Thing in ’89, Malcolm X in ’92, Boogie Nights in ’97, Being John Malkovich in ’99, or so, so many others. We spent almost three whole decades from the dawn of the ‘80s to 2008 expecting the Academy to screw it up with regular frequency. Then, in 2009, when The Hurt Locker became the lowest grossing Best Picture winner in history, it was like AMPAS screamed from the rooftops that they no longer cared about being in touch with what audiences were seeing, if audiences couldn’t bother getting themselves to the right movies. Two years ago, Grantland writer Chris Ryan referred to the Oscars as a “first draft of history.” It’s a great way to think about them, and what’s even greater is that lately the first draft has needed far less work-shopping.

For the most part.

Predicting the 2015 Oscar Nominations

Tomorrow morning at an unreasonably early hour, two people going on virtually no sleep and a lot of coffee will read something like 120 nominees in 24 categories, much of which will be predictable and a fair amount of which will draw gasps and agents worrying about their job security. Predicting where the specific gasps will fall is an exercise in futility and counter-intuitive logic, but it’s fun, so we (I) do it anyway.

I won’t bother predicting the 18 sub-major categories, because that’s a crapshoot that even I don’t have the time and patience for. But before we move onto the Big Six, here are a few hopes I have for the 18 other categories:

*Wild Tales, which was my favorite film at TIFF ’14, made the shortlist of 9 contenders for Best Foreign Language Film, and I deeply hope it gets a nomination. It’s the horse for which I have the most unbridled passion.

*While these are all expected nominees, Birdman, The Imitation Game, and Theory of Everything each had Original Scores that blew me away, so I hope none get left out.

*Aside from Citizen Four, which is considered the shoo-in, my favorite documentaries of the year were Jodorowsky’s Dune and Life Itself, so I’d love to see both of them get nominated.

*It’s unlikely to get nominated anywhere, but Under the Skin was my favorite under-seen/under-talked-about film of the year, so I hope it shows up on the ballot, regardless of category, if only because that will force more people to see it.

*Ida, the black and white foreign film contender from Poland, is one of the most gorgeously shot films I’ve seen in a while, with an unmoving camera that carefully composes each frame to look like a beautiful old photo. I’d love to see it honored with a cinematography nomination.

*Whiplash was the most impressive editing I saw this year, and that category will feel sorely lacking without it.

Best Supporting Actress

This race often has the most surprises, both in nominations and winners, so predictions here often run risky (everyone wants to predict the outlier) and frequently wrong. Patricia Arquette is a sure thing, and Emma Stone probably is. After that, no one knows anything. Keira Knightly and Meryl Streep are reasonably safe bets, the former because of overall support for her film, and the latter because she’s Meryl F-ing Streep. The fifth nominee could be anyone from Laura Dern (Wild), Rene Russo (Nightcrawler), or Jessica Chastain (A Most Violent Year)--the three “safest” bets--or some other name that even fewer people saw coming, like Carmen Ejogo as Coretta Scott King (Selma).

The Prediction:

Patricia Arquette, Boyhood

Laura Dern, Wild

Keira Knightly, The Imitation Game

Emma Stone, Birdman

Meryl Streep, Into the Woods

Where I’ll Be Wrong:

Dern is an iffy prediction, especially because support for Wild seems tepid. The Golden Globes picked Chastain as their fifth nominee, but I’m not sure if enough people in the Academy’s Actors branch actually saw A Most Violent Year. Support for Nightcrawler keeps growing, so Russo could squeeze in here.

Best Supporting Actor

J.K. Simmons is a sure thing, and Edward Norton, Ethan Hawke, and Mark Ruffalo are pretty close to sure things. Ruffalo might be vulnerable because of recent Foxcatcher controversy, but it’s unclear how many voters actually care about that stuff, especially in regards to the acting races. The fifth slot doesn’t seem to have a good choice. The Globes and others went with Robert Duvall (The Judge), in what felt like an obvious Hey we had to pick five move. If he doesn’t show up here, it’ll most likely be because either Tom Wilkinson or Tim Roth—two Brits playing Southern politicians in Selma—beat him out. But that’s starting to feel increasingly unlikely.

The Prediction:

Robert Duvall, The Judge

Ethan Hawke, Boyhood

Edward Norton, Birdman

Mark Ruffalo, Foxcatcher

J.K. Simmons, Whiplash

Where I’ll Be Wrong:

No one knows who’ll end up in that fifth slot if it’s not Duvall. I’ll go with Tom Wilkinson as my back-up pick, but I don’t feel great about it.

Best Actress

A lot has been written about what seems to be the boring consensus of this race, but I slightly disagree. When people talk about the consensus five nominees, they’re talking about Reese Witherspoon, Julianne Moore, Rosamund Pike, Felicity Jones, and Jennifer Aniston, but I don’t see that conclusion as foregone as others, because of the three names lurking on the outside. Hilary Swank’s performance in The Homesman seems under-seen, but the Academy clearly loves her. Marion Cotillard is a past winner who anchored two well regarded films (The Immigrant and Two Days, One Night), but votes for her could cancel each other out. Amy Adams, a Golden Globe winner for Big Eyes, is probably the biggest threat to spoil, and she is very good in a film that may just be too forgettable for her performance to get nominated. Picking between her and Aniston for the fifth slot is a toss-up, but I’ll play low risk and go with the pack in predicting Aniston.

The Prediction:

Jennifer Aniston, Cake

Felicity Jones, Theory of Everything

Julianne Moore, Still Alice

Rosamund Pike, Gone Girl

Reese Witherspoon, Wild

Where I’ll Be Wrong:

I won’t be surprised at all to see Amy Adams’ name show up on the final list, and even Swank or Cotillard wouldn’t be that shocking. Moore and Witherspoon are the only two names that feel like real locks to me.

Best Actor

This is the most difficult race to predict this year, because six people feel like sure-things. Obviously, one of them isn’t. Michael Keaton is the only one who surely can’t fall out. The others are all varying degrees of vulnerable, with Benedict Cumberbatch and Eddie Redmayne probably the safest. The other three—Steve Carell (Foxcatcher), David Oyelowo (Selma), and Jake Gyllenhaal (Nightcrawler)—are all preparing for potential disappointment, or at least should be. If Gyllenhaal is the one that falls out, that means the category would have five first-time nominees, which feels kind of fun. If Oyelowo falls out, it would be an all-white category, which always feels inappropriate. Oyelowo is the one who missed out on the SAG nomination, and because Selma feels (to me) like more of a SAG movie than an Academy movie, I think he’ll miss the cut here too. And all of this already assumes that Timothy Spall (the Cannes winner for Mr. Turner) and Bradley Cooper (American Sniper) don’t even have a chance, which feels a bit premature and risky.

The Prediction:

Steve Carell, Foxcatcher

Benedict Cumberbatch, The Imitation Game

Jake Gyllenhaal, Nightcrawler

Michael Keaton, Birdman

Eddie Redmayne, Theory of Everything

Where I’ll Be Wrong:

Oyelowo, or even Bradley Cooper (who’s been nominated both of the last two years in this category), knocking out Gyllenhaal or Steve Carell, who voters might see as playing too similar characters and deciding to pick one or the other (Ye old “I can only pick one sociopath” rule of voting).

Best Director

This is the race where we know the least. Richard Linklater (Boyhood) and Alejandro Inarritu (Birdman) seem like sure things, but when Ben Affleck and Kathryn Bigelow were left out of this race two years ago, we emphatically learned Best Director has no sure things. But for the sake of making things easier on myself, I’m assuming they’re in. From there, it could go anywhere. There’s the True-Story-With-Wide-Support Group, which includes Morten Tyldum (The Imitation Game), James Marsh (Theory of Everything), and Ava DuVernay (Selma). There’s the Hey-We-Like-This-Guy-And-We’ve-Nominated-Him-Before Group, which includes David Fincher (Gone Girl) and Bennett Miller (Foxcatcher). There’s the How-Has-He-Never-Been-Nominated group, run by Wes Anderson (The Grand Budapest Hotel). There’s the Holy-Jesus-Exciting-New-Kid, which this category famously honored Benh Zeitlin with two years ago for Beasts of the Southern Wild, and Damien Chazelle (Whiplash) definitely qualifies. Then there’s the OMG-It’s-Clint-Eastwood category, which (obviously) includes Clint Eastwood (American Sniper).

So how do we reduce those eight possibilities down to three? Quickly, I’ll do it like this: First, I’m knocking off Wes Anderson, because it just seems like, at this point, the Academy’s Directors branch isn’t a fan of his work. Next, Clint Eastwood gets crossed off. Been there, done that. So now we have three groups left, and I’ll take one name from each. I think Chazelle will get in, because this race often likes the new kid, and Whiplash was an amazingly directed film. (That should be worth something, right?!) Between Fincher and Miller, I’ll take Miller. Gone Girl just might be too slight for some voters (it’s a dreaded genre film), and Foxcatcher is probably the more impressive directorial achievement anyway. I’ll eliminate Ava DuVernay because of my belief that Selma just wasn’t that artistically interesting, and hope voters agree. Lastly, between Marsh and Tyldum, I’m going Tyldum on what is basically a coin flip, and the added power of having a Weinstein name running your campaign.

The Prediction:

Damien Chazelle, Whiplash

Alejandro Inarritu, Birdman

Richard Linklater, Boyhood

Bennett Miller, Foxcatcher

Morten Tyldum, The Imitation Game

Where I’ll Be Wrong:

Possibly, everywhere. But most likely with Chazelle or Miller giving way to DuVernay or Anderson.

Best Picture

We know there will be at least five, no more than ten. The key is that a film needs to get at least 5% of the first place votes to get a Best Picture nomination, so being passionately loved by a small number matters more than being fairly loved by a large number. Because of that, I’ll immediately eliminate Gone Girl and The Grand Budapest Hotel. I just don’t see 5% of the Academy thinking either of those was the best film of the year.

Birdman and Boyhood, the front-runners, are definitely in. I think The Imitation Game, Theory of Everything, and Selma all get in because of the huge portion of the Academy that wants a Best Picture winner to feel like a BEST PICTURE WINNER, as stuffy and outdated as that sentiment may be. I also think Whiplash will get in because it’s the exact type of film that you can easily imagine 5% of the Academy ranking #1 on their ballot. Its support may not be wide-ranging, but it is loud and fervent.

From there, the big question becomes “What to do with American Sniper and Foxcatcher?” Sniper is likely to appeal to the classicist voters, and Foxcatcher may appeal to the same type of voters that also love Whiplash. In both cases, they run the risk of being cancelled out by voter overlap. But ultimately, I think both will get in.

The Prediction:

American Sniper

Birdman

Boyhood

Foxcatcher

The Imitation Game

Selma

Theory of Everything

Whiplash

Where I’ll Be Wrong:

American Sniper and Foxcatcher could both easily be left off, and a nomination for Grand Budapest Hotel would be a surprise, but not a complete shock, especially given its Golden Globe win proving that it may have more support than people anticipated. Though remember, the Golden Globes and Oscars have no voter overlap, so its Globe win could just as easily mean nothing at all.