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.
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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