Why don't the critics, the Oscars and the box-office audience ever seem to agree on the best movies of the year? This question really bugs some people, but I've never understood it, because criticism, intra-industry acclaim and ticket-sales revenue represent such separate and distinct ways of looking at movies. If they all redundantly reinforced the same choices, what would be the point? (Only the money is necessary to the movie business, which regards reviews reviews and awards as simply part of the promotional campaign.) The way I see it, asking why critics, Academy voters and audiences don't agree is like asking why Democrats and Republicans don't choose the same candidates for president (although I once knew a woman who seriously proposed that Ronald Reagan and Geraldine Ferraro would make a great ticket). The obvious reason is: different constituencies want different things.
Audiences want to be entertained, maybe a little inspired. Critics want to be entertained too, of course, but some also seek the greater pleasures of art. For some of us, the hackneyed phrase "mindless entertainment" is a contradiction in terms: how can something be entertaining unless it engages your attention on more than an autonomic level? Oscar voters... well, who the hell knows what they want? But we all want to feel better about ourselves, don't we? Movies, good and bad, can help with that.
Andrew O'Hehir at Salon ("And the Oscar goes to... 'Twilight'!") makes a modest proposal: "What if the Oscars -- an imaginary Oscars, a thought-experiment Oscars, the Oscars of an alternate universe -- honored movies that people actually liked?" His alt.hollywood version would be "an unholy blend of the MTV Movie Awards and the Indiewire critics' poll" in which "Melancholia," "A Separation" and "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" would go up against "Harry Potter," "Twilight" and "Mission: Impossible."
In a recent Far-Flung Correspondents piece ("How to Win an Academy Award"), Omer M. Mozaffar suggested that the best picture choices usually reflect a deeply American affection for stories of liberation:
The Oscar goes to a film that involves someone in some sort of prison, seeking and achieving some sort of freedom, though death often takes place in the process (along with some sort of love interest, usually).
I think there's some truth to that -- especially since American films (whether studio-tooled or indie-financed) have long shown an exceptional fondness for stories in which tenacious underdogs face seemingly insurmountable obstacles.
But there's something else, and this is true of all elections: the candidates tend to reinforce (and flatter, even appear to ennoble) the voters' views of themselves. O'Hehir sees it this way:
I think we all understand that the 6,000-plus voters of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are a peculiar and self-selected group, and that they aren't selecting the winners based on criteria that are important to anyone else. They aren't picking movies the public likes. Indeed, over the last two decades the Academy's taste has wandered increasingly far from that of the mass audience. And while artistic merit is an inherently nebulous and subjective concept, I don't think that's what they're using either. Seriously, Academy members -- let's go out for coffee, and then you can sit there and look me in the eye and tell me that "War Horse" or "Midnight in Paris" or "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close" (for the love of Jesus!) is a better movie than "Melancholia" or "Take Shelter" or "Coriolanus" or "Drive" or about 30 other things I could come up with.
For that matter -- and this one's just as important -- try to convince me that those nominated films are a better example of what Hollywood does best than such big, spectacular and hugely popular films as "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2," or "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1″ or "Mission: Impossible -- Ghost Protocol." Sorry, but no. The thing is, Oscar voters are picking the movies that make people who work in the film industry feel better about what they do, for reasons that perhaps a highly-paid shrink could puzzle out. When we get involved in obsessive horse-race coverage of the Oscar campaign, we're using voodoo and amateur psychology and meaningless statistics and other forms of hokum to try to get inside the heads of those 6,000 voters. I say the hell with it.
Daniel Radcliffe might agree. As he told E! Online: "I don't think the Oscars like commercial films or kids' films, unless they're directed by Martin Scorsese.... I was watching 'Hugo' the other day and going, Why is this nominated and we're not? I was slightly miffed."
Back in the 20th century, big commercial blockbusters weren't regularly overlooked by the Academy. There almost always used to be a slot in the five nominations for a popcorn picture, whether it had an arty side ("Lawrence of Arabia," "The Godfather") or not ("The Guns of Navarone," "How the West Was Won"). Big popular musicals like "Funny Girl," "My Fair Lady," "Fiddler on the Roof" and "The Sound of Music" were invariably nominated (as were not-such-big-hits like "Hello, Dolly!" and "Doctor Doolittle"). In 1970, "Airport" and "Love Story" were best picture nominees, fer cryin' out loud! And over the next few decades: "Jaws," "Star Wars," "The Exorcist," "Raiders of the Lost Ark," "E.T. -- The Extra-Terrestrial," "Fatal Attraction," "Beauty and the Beast," "Forrest Gump," "Gladiator," "The Sixth Sense," "Titanic"...
But O'Hehir has a good point, which is that the Academy Awards have drifted away from celebrating the kinds of movies for which Hollywood is best-known around the world. (I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing -- but then, I agree with the Self-Styled Siren that the ceremonies would do better to celebrate the history of studio movies and the tradition of Hollywood glamor, and to place the new stuff in that context.)
Anyway, O'Hehir's Alternate Academy Award nominees for best picture are "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2," "The Lincoln Lawyer," "Melancholia," "Mission: Impossible -- Ghost Protocol," "A Separation," "Take Shelter," "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy," "The Tree of Life" and "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1" -- only one of which ("Tree of Life") is among the Actual Academy's choices this year. For the most part, I like that list better than the real one. I would nominate "Moneyball," though, a movie that shows off the best Hollywood has to offer, including a genuine movie star performance by Brad Pitt that's also a first-rate job of acting. (See "Why Brad Pitt should win the Oscar.)
But for most of us, whether we're involved in showbiz or not, the Oscars are about watching a show. Do you remember who won what last year? I never can, but that's why we have Google. If I want to recall the best movies of a given year, the ones I'll remember fondly and that are most likely to increase in stature and reputation rather than diminish, I'll look up some critics' lists...
23 Comments
First off - great article.
Even at times critics and audiences agree, the Oscars seems to ignore - *cough* Dark Knight * cough...
Anyway...my belief is that the Oscars have lost their relevance, at least for the watching audience. It's become more of an "insider" thing.
Does anybody really care which movie wins? how many remember, for instance, that Slumdog Millionaire won Best Picture? I think more people will remember it as a good movie than as an Oscar-winning film. There were a few films that I remember saying, 'really? it won?'
It used to be exciting - watching the Oscar campaigns heat up, wondering who will win what. Now - as you said so correctly - the Oscars are about watching a show, nothing more. It also did not help to expand the Best Picture category to 10 films. Why!? also, take a look at the nominated films. It's almost a given that in less than a year, they will be forgotten. Truly great films last decades. And this has happend too many times in the past few years.
I have another proposal: take the top 10-15 grossing films of the year (local or global - TBD...), and pick from those the best films...
"I have another proposal: take the top 10-15 grossing films of the year (local or global - TBD...), and pick from those the best films..."
But that's what the MTV Movie Awards are for.
I honestly don't mind the Oscars these days. Take a look at the best director nominees this year: Scorsese, Woody Allen, Alexander Payne, Terrence Malick, and somewhat of a newcomer Michel Hazanavicius. It's not like they don't know talent when they see it. They can be a bit populist and a bit predictable with their selections over the years, but one thing I'd rather they'd not be is a voting body that simply picks the most popular film of the year as Best Picture. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close's inclusion into the BP nominees is head-scratching, but at least they're trying to give awards to high quality pictures. They don't succeed, but at least they don't completely pander to the public because the public is all confused and mad that they hadn't seen most the best picture nominees. If the public can't find time to see Moneyball, the Descendants, or Hugo, then screw 'em.
"Anyway...my belief is that the Oscars have lost their relevance"
I completely agree, as I remember a time that if a movie was nominated for best picture, everyone, butcher, baker, candle-stick maker, would go out of their way to see it ("Chariots of Fire? Well, if it got a best picture nomination, it has to be great")
But nowadays, after years of being hammered by mediocre movies peppered with show-off performances, it seems that most people I talk to actively avoid oscar-bait movies. And have to be convinced to see a movie despite the nominations.
There are still a lot of people who want to eventually see the films that have gotten Oscar Nominations. The problem comes from the fact we get a lot of people who don't understand what a good movie really is, but they think something like Twilight is a good movie and since their favorite isn't nominated, they decide to diss the awards. I don't think it is Twilight alone, and with the net the way it is, and the way the negative side of things voices its opinion, it tends to get heard more.
So whether he wants to know the winner or wants to know the "actual" best movies, he looks up a list. The "best" movie is one you like. If it wins an Oscar you like the Oscars. If it doesn't, you don't. Like every other art form, quality is in the eye of the beholder. We all have different taste, which is why the Oscars will never please everyone.
That's my argument: diversity is good. (I'm talking about lists as useful guides to jogging the memory. I already know which movies I like, but when I want a refresher on, say, the best movies of 1989, I'm not going to limit myself to the Oscar selections...)
I find it funny that you can never remember who won the previous year, but you can always correctly guess who will win this year.
I rarely guess correctly.
It's quite obvious that picking the Oscar winners depend (partially, at least) on some non artistic measures. Going back through recent memory lane, I remember some academy members declaring that they won't be voting for "The King's Speech" because, it seems that, King George VI had some "antisemitic affiliations", and of that's too far down the memory lane for you, just look at this year's "Melancholia", which didn't make the best picture nomination, probably because of Von Trier's Hitler comments!!! Yes I think it's pretty obvious that the AMPAS' (and most other award shows/festivals)'s choices can be effected by social and personal restrictions.
That being said, it seems that the critics have always held the middle ground between the audience's favorites and awards darlings, but yes there is always a huge gap between what audiences think is the best and what the Academy does!!
I'm a Nigerian. And for those of us here who are cinephiles, the Oscars is an important event. We also do critics list. But accessibility is a monolithic obstacle.
My general sense is that Oscar voters split the difference, going for well-reviewed "mainstream" movies. Also, they have to see the movies to vote for them (I assume) and even for LA-dwellers it can be difficult to get to all of the Take Shelter's in a given year, especially with more and more movies being made outside of LA.
In an effort to find where audiences and critics actually did agree this year, I ran a rough cross-tab of reviews/box office (based on Box Office Mojo and Tomatometer*) and came up with the following top 10:
Bridesmaids
The Descendants
Harry Potter**
Hugo
Midnight in Paris
Mission Impossible
Moneyball
The Muppets
Rango
War Horse
You've got comedy, drama, animation, big name stars/directors, breakout performances, something for the kids, something for the their parents. And no looming specter of The Help winning Best Picture. Oscar could (and, arguably, did) do worse.
* The same 10 come up running it with Metacritic scores instead of Tomatometer.
** Harry Potter was the only one in the top 15 of both lists.
The movies nominated for best screenplay (original and adapted) are often the most interesting movies of the year. Those are the ones I seek out to watch.
This year the writing nominations include: The Artist, Bridesmaids, Margin Call, Midnight in Paris, A Separation, The Descendants, Hugo, The Ides of March, Moneyball, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
Not a bad list; much better than what's nominated in the Best Picture category this year.
With respect to popcorn movies making the Academy's list in the 70s and earlier...
...one could argue that this is a function of a declining quality of popcorn movie. These days, studios will shell out hundreds of millions to ensure that they get the best looking sets, the most exotic locations, the biggest explosions and the boffiest special effects. But they won't spend a few tens of thousands on quality scripts. So you get a procession of movies that all, at the end of the day, carry a certain homogeneity. Once you've nominated one disaster movie, superhero movie, or horror movie with the same basic plot template, do you really need to nominate another?
In that vein, Jim, I would recommend to you a book my son read for school last year, and I'm working my way through: The Empire of Illusion, by Chris Hedges (if memory serves). It's subtitled "The end of literacy and the triumph of spectacle".
The Academy, as far as I can see, does not reward a movie that is solely spectacle.
Eli Katz: "Not a bad list; much better than what's nominated in the Best Picture category this year." --- well, it can't really be that much better, seeing as five of those ten are actually among the nine best picture nominees.
I don't think it has anything to do with the Academy but everything to do with studios putting out easily digestible fluff. I ate the statement that says a film that makes more money than another film is more 'liked' when in reality it was just what they chose to spend money on because it was more familiar and recognizable to them. The film industry is playing it safe and loading theatres with sequels and franchises that have established fan bases. In cases it's a bad thing (Transformers) and in others it's good (Dark Knight). But these are what people are spending their theatre allowance on because they know what they are getting as opposed to films they may be more uncertain about (Hugo, which btw is a much deeper, compelling tapestry of filmmaking than the Harry Potter finale). It's been this way post-Lord of the Rings. The moneymakers have largely been franchise films and as long as studios keep diluting theatres with them the gap between the box office and the Oscars will continue to widen.
I've never understood this issue either. The Academy is a body made up of 6,000 or so movie professionals who vote either for the films they like or the films they want to represent their industry. This often leads to absurdities, but so what? Awards based on quality, however ostensibly, would mean nothing if the nominees were culled only from popular hits. In effect, that would mean the moviegoing public made the nominations, and, as others have pointed out, that's why we have the People's Choice and MTV Movie Awards.
If the result is decreased viewership and interest in the awards, then the Academy will have to decide if they want to change their mandate strictly to chase TV ratings.
Here's some kind of paradigm when it comes to critics' assessment of a year versus the Academy's. For 1989 the National Society of Film Critics voted its awards for Picture, Director, and Screenplay to Gus Van Sant's Drugstore Cowboy. Its closest competition was Steven Soderbergh's sex, lies & videotape and Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing. When Oscar season rolled around, the Soderbergh picture received precisely one nomination, Original Screenplay; the Lee two, Original Screenplay and Supporting Actor; and Drugstore Cowboy, zilch. Eventually the Oscar for Best Picture went to Driving Miss Daisy, which had a total of nine nominations in its goodie bag.
I dunno, I'm not sure all these other lists are that much better. I mean, as a cinephile, I would much prefer that the actual BEST movies of the year are the ones that get nominated and win, and everyone pushing forward the most populist ones seems sort of counterproductive to me. I mean, just cuz a lot of people (mostly from a very narrow demographic anyway) like Twilight, does O'Hehir really think it should be called one of the best of the year?
I do think there should be some variety, I guess, since it is Hollywood celebrating itself, and ten nominees is plenty of space to get in a couple hits along with the indies and art films, but I would prefer the balance to go to the smaller, better films, rather than bigger-because-they're-bigger. And really, until the last year, when populist Oscar-bait The King's Speech won, the Oscars actually had a pretty darn good track record for several years there.
2009: The Hurt Locker beat Avatar
2008: Slumdog Millionaire, not best of the year, but definitely best of the nominees
2007: No Country For Old Men, a stone cold masterpiece
2006: The Departed, not Scorsese's best, but they still finally rewarded him
Of course, before that, Crash won. But I think a fairly significant point is that several of these winners are exceedingly dark, weird, violent films that the Academy isn't supposed to like. So really, generalizations about Oscar always going for fluff are misleading. Even this year, if we switched out Extremely Loud and The Help (which actually might be the biggest hit), the nominees would be very very solid. Maybe toss in Harry Potter and Take Shelter instead, and (while it still wouldn't match my top ten) it would be pretty much phenomenal as far as quality and popularity are concerned.
I wrote a quasi-corollary to this piece, about how the Academy just hates on big comedy, and especially big comedy leads ...
http://www.indiewire.com/article/for-your-consideration-the-10-best-comedic-performances-that-werent-even-nominated
StephenM: Perhaps you could share with the Academy your formula for determining "the actual BEST movies of the year." :)
It's simple. You plot a graph for each movie. On the Y axis is the quality of the movie, and on the X axis is the social relevance of the movie. The best movie has the most area on the graph...
Excellent piece. (As always!) The idea of three different audiences is clearly true. The analogy of three different political parties not choosing the same leader perhaps is not the strongest, however. Each of the three groups (Popcorn movie goers, Academy members, Critics) are looking for kinds of movies, multiple films, to appreciate, not just one.
O'Hehir has it about right. AMPAS was founded by the Industry, as it used to call itself, back when the movies were denigrated as artistically worthless popular entertainment, and the men who produced them were suspected as a bunch of Jewish vulgarians peddling trash and moral corruption to the ignorant masses. Its purpose was then and has always remained to present the Industry as serious, respectable, and devoted to art (but not dangerous, radical art) and to quality. That's gotten harder and harder to do as the taste of the predominantly teenaged mass audience has diverged from the upper middlebrow self regard of AMPAS's members. Since Titanic, there haven't been too many big commercial blockbusters that have broken out of the teenaged ghetto.
Leave a comment