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Sunday, February 24, 2013

Why I Still Care about the Oscars

StarGazer



       The Hollywood awards season coming to a close for the year. After months of campaigning, press tours and precursors ladled out by everyone from the National Board of Review and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (otherwise known as those weirdos responsible for the Golden Globes) to the Screen Actors’/Directors’/Writers’/[insert other random film industry profession here] Guilds and the recent BAFTAs, we’re finally approaching the queen bee of awards ceremonies: the Oscars. The star-studded, at least three-hour-long event will be held tonight at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles at 7:00 PM EST. For those who follow or are involved in these sorts of things, the arrival of the Academy Awards will probably come as something as a relief, the end of an exhausting and seemingly endless process that began in October with the announcement of the Gotham Independent Film Award nominees and that, by the end, will have spanned roughly five months; if you really want to get into it, awards season arguably starts in January of each year with the Sundance Film Festival.

        There was a time when I followed the movie awards season with an obsessiveness that I now mostly devote to baseball, spending hours on end scouring the Internet for even the most trivial bit of news and memorizing useless facts (can you name every Best Picture winner since 1988? ‘Cause I still can). I paid attention to the film festival circuit, watching eagerly to see which movies garnered the praise and buzz needed to propel them into the front of the Oscar race and which ones would be worth catching in theaters whenever they eventually arrived. I kept up with the latest “expert” prognostications from Variety, Entertainment Weekly, The Hollywood Reporter, Indiewire.com and all those other entertainment magazines and websites, and I read about the controversies and industry politics. I even used to come up with my own awards predictions, sometimes months in advance, and to argue about all these things on Internet message boards. Long story short, I was a total nerd.
                                                                                                                                                       
        I’ve gotten beyond that phase now, though it’s not because I have any more of a life (trust me, I really, really don’t); I just channel all that pointless geekiness in different directions. Let’s face it: the Oscars are a glorified celebrity ass-kissing party masquerading as an important, prestigious celebration of film. The amount of time, money, hype and effort that so many people put into this self-indulgent event, and the fact that an entire industry still essentially revolves around it, is rather incredible. Besides, the awards season often seems to contain as much political maneuvering as actual political campaigns, complete with studio-paid For Your Consideration ads, special screenings and luncheons for Academy voters and press tours filled with magazine covers, interviews and talk show appearances. It’s a media circus that renders the whole affair a cynical publicity stunt and undercuts the idea that the Oscars are supposed to be about artistic merit and achievement.


        Bitching about the Oscars and the Academy’s lack of credibility has become as much of a tradition as Roger Deakins getting nominated (but never winning) and the general, reliable shittiness of the Best Original Song category, so I’m fully aware that nothing I said in the previous paragraph was in any way mind-blowing. And yet, whenever I read online comment sections on, say, articles announcing the year’s Oscar nominations and see yet another person lamenting that Academy voters are just frauds with no discerning taste and declaring that they couldn’t care less about these silly, egocentric awards, I can’t help but roll my eyes. First of all, people who comment on things to declare their total apathy for whatever it is rank among my top Internet pet peeves; seriously, no one fucking forced you to click on that article or asked for your opinion, and the only thing you’re doing is wasting your own time. More importantly, the truth is that, while I don’t have nearly as much investment in the Oscar race as I once did, I still kinda care. I still feel ecstatic when the movies and people I liked and championed in any given year get recognized, and I still get shocked and disappointed when they get snubbed.


Someday your time will come…or not.

        The key, I believe, to enjoying the Oscars is to accept them for what they are. Given the majority demographics of Academy voters (i.e. old, white and male), it’s not surprising that their taste typically skews more toward traditional, prestige pictures still rooted in the conventions of classical Hollywood than either the commercial genre blockbusters favored by mainstream audiences or the edgier, niche films championed by art-house aficionados and film buffs. To be fair, as someone whose tastes run roughly in the middle of the road (that is to say, movies that are entertaining and fairly accessible, but also smart and thought-provoking), I generally like most of the big awards contenders, at least as far as the Best Picture nominees go; they may not usually be the most daring options out there, but they’re rarely outright bad. My point is that the Oscars don’t recognize movies based on their artistic or technical prowess or their mass popularity so much as a nebulous combination of likability, timeliness, momentum and industry politics; talent still plays a role but is far from the determining factor. They may be decided from a larger sample size than most opinion polls, but it’s still just that: an opinion. People who seem to expect the Academy to somehow match up point-for-point with their own personal preferences and go ballistic when that doesn’t end up being the case are as ridiculous as those who act as though the Oscars are determined by some massive, conspiratorial hive-mind instead of individual voters making their own decisions. The “Best” in any of the categories should be taken loosely rather than as a definitive, inarguable statement.

        What really makes the Oscars important, however, is the weight they hold from a marketing standpoint. While it may not always mean much in terms of actual artistic quality or talent, a nomination, let alone a win, can transform a person’s career and shine a spotlight on movies that would otherwise have slipped under the radar unnoticed. Just looking at recent years, without the Oscars, many people probably would never have even heard of Winter’s Bone, and Jennifer Lawrence might never have been cast in The Hunger Games and become the wildly popular star she is now. The same goes for Jeremy Renner, Marion Cotillard and any number of other people who only rocketed to fame after being recognized by the Academy. Documentaries and foreign films in particular can benefit immensely from the additional publicity that comes from an Oscar nomination, and quirky, unconventional works like 2011’s Best Picture winner The Artist can reach audiences who otherwise would never have paid even the slightest attention to them; after all, a black-and-white, silent, technically foreign movie with no A-list names attached doesn’t exactly scream box office hit. While The Artist ended up with a relatively modest U.S. gross of around $44.7 million, that’s certainly more than it would’ve made had it not won Best Picture. As an added bonus, lead actor Jean Dujardin landed a role in Martin Scorsese’s next project. This is why, although I think Ben Affleck and Kathyrn Bigelow both undoubtedly deserved to get nominated, I’m glad their spots at least went to Benh Zeitlin and Michael Hanake, whose films, respectively Beasts of the Southern Wild and Amour, are in greater need of the publicity boost. Of course, not everyone who finds fame through the Oscars ultimately has a successful career (Cuba Gooding Jr. anyone?), but the fact of the matter is that they do make a difference, even if it’s hard to measure. Plus, I imagine it must be pretty nice to see the words “Academy Award winner/nominee” in front of your name in the trailers and ads for everything else you do for the rest of your life.

        Yet, perhaps the main reason why I still always look forward to Oscar season is that it’s the one time during each year when people actually talk about movies. Obviously, I indiscriminately blather on about them all year-round, but it’s nice to have a couple weeks when I don’t have to feel like a complete dork about it. I like seeing films and the people who make them become part of a national discussion for once, even if that discussion is relatively fleeting and insignificant, and when those films and people happen to be ones I personally really enjoyed and support, that’s even better. The Oscar ceremony itself may be a self-serious, pompous affair, but it’s also over three hours of ogling elaborate, dizzyingly expensive dresses, watching celebrities mingle and pretend they aren’t pissed off when they lose and, most importantly, celebrating movies from the year that was. What’s not to like (besides a lot of things)? Okay, fine, the actual ceremony is rarely all that great, but if you go in with the right mindset and low expectations, it’s not a bad way to spend a Sunday evening.

       Good luck trying to follow up these two ladies, MacFarlane.

        In a way, the Academy Awards function best as a time capsule. They serve as a reminder in the years and decades down the road of the movies, performances and people that struck a chord now for whatever reason, even if they don’t maintain that relevance in the future. And so, I for one will sit down tonight to watch the 85th annual Academy Awards telecast and revel – or at least tolerate – the glamor and extravagance, because the Oscars are as good an excuse to pay tribute to the awesomeness of movies as any occasion. Besides, if they got it “right” all the time, we couldn’t spend the next twenty years debating whether Pulp Fiction or Forrest Gump (or The Shawshank Redemption) deserved to win more or lament other innumerable Oscar travesties, and where’s the fun in that?



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