Much has been said about the controversy surrounding this year’s Academy Award nominees. Anora was slammed for not using an intimacy coordinator while Emilia Pérez has been heavily criticised by the LGBTIQA+ community, not to mention the lead Karla Sofía Gascón’s racist tweets and Mexico’s criticism of the film. Best Picture frontrunner The Brutalist has copped it too, after they admitted to using generative AI. Yet all this noise around the Academy Awards race seems pointless, because I don’t think The Oscars should exist at all.
Why should we care about what a small group of Hollywood elites have to say about movies? It’s simply the industry giving themselves a pat on the back, and telling audiences what they should enjoy. I don’t have anything in common with this group of rich celebrities, so what I value is obviously very different. It’s a self-serving exercise that fuels the Hollywood ecosystem, and can be influenced by money, power and fame. Did we forget that disgraced Harvey Weinstein was able to use marketing to secure Shakespeare in Love’s 1999 Best Picture win? Surely that in itself should deem these awards as meaningless.
The Oscars has predominantly rewarded white males since its inception and was rightfully called out in 2015 with the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite. But has anything really changed? The Academy has since claimed to introduce diversity and inclusion standards, but some critics told The New York Times that it’s more for appearance rather than actually making a difference. Director Spike Lee told Variety that their “heart is in the right place”, but the Academy’s DEI rules have “a lot of loopholes”. From the outside, it seems like a way for the rich elite to pretend to be progressive and applaud themselves, but it’s the bare minimum — if even that.
The Korean-language film Parasite’s win for Best Picture in 2020 was unusual. It appeared that the industry was so proud of themselves for finally awarding a non-English film, but it should be noted that The Academy chose to celebrate a “model minority” that they could stomach. It was palatable enough and not confronting, as Korean culture has become so widely accepted and popular in the West due to the rise of K-Pop and K-Dramas. Yet there’s one thing that stands out here — it hasn’t caused a pattern, and hasn’t appeared to pave the way for other non-English speaking films.
Oscar voters like to vote a certain way once and be stunned by the publicity surrounding a historic first. What about the second, the third, the fourth? Isn’t the point of making history once, to keep breaking down these barriers? Only two women of colour have won Best Actress at the Oscars, Halle Berry in 2002 and Michelle Yeoh in 2023. Halle Berry was celebrated as the first Black woman to win, and Michelle Yeoh as the first Asian woman to win.
You could argue that The Academy wants to have a rebuttal when they’re accused of being unsavoury or excluding minorities by bringing up the one time a person of colour was included. If all these historic firsts are supposed to open the door, where, I ask, are the historic seconds?
Don’t get me started on “Oscar Bait”, either. Audiences are no longer fooled by films made solely for the chance of getting an Oscar, and quite simply, I don’t want them. A UCLA study looked into films that had “Oscar Appeal” — which often includes dramas about history, war or biographies — and I’m not alone. According to researcher Gabriel Rossman, audiences “don’t like the kind of aesthetics that are characteristic of Oscar-worthy movies”.
“The movies tend to be serious and depressing, and audiences don’t like that, so making Oscar-y movies is a riskier strategy than an average moviegoer might appreciate,” Rossman said. “There’s something really recognisable about Oscar-ness, and I don’t think it’s just quality. It’s more like a genre convention.”
This need for “Oscar Bait” films is driven largely by money, because Rossman and Oliver Schilke’s research shows there’s a “considerable” increase in ticket sales. Some nominated films rake in two to three times more than their competitors without nominations. It’s seen as “valuable”, yet this means an uptick in films being made solely for awards and monetary value, while completely disregarding audiences. That’s a dystopian sentiment that shouldn’t be tied so closely with art.
And look, I get the appeal for actors who can nab a cheeky salary bump if they add Oscar Winner to their resume. But even then, not all things are equal. A master’s student at Colgate University looked into the salary increases for both Best Actor and Best Actress, and the data is a bit depressing. While a male actor’s salary could jump by around 6.1 million AUD (3.9 million USD), female actors are looking at an increase of around $782,420 AUD ($500,000 USD). Should we be rewarding this system that is clearly faced with so many unresolved issues?
The Academy Awards push boring, passionless and sometimes truly terrible movies on viewers (I’m looking at you, Emilia Pérez). It’s heavily flawed and while DEI rules can be introduced, nobody in power actually wants to see real change because the status quo benefits those up top. I’m sick of the empty promises, so it’s time to stop paying attention and giving oxygen to this self-serving vanity project.
The post The Oscars Are Irrelevant And Outdated, Sorry! appeared first on PEDESTRIAN.TV .
