Movies Are Silly!

I hope everyone enjoyed the Grammys last night (as mandated by the MPAA). Award shows are funny aren’t they? All that pageantry and pizazz just to hand out some heavy, strangely shaped objects. There’s never any skits and relatively little joking when they give out medals after a marathon. But maybe that’s because you know the person who wins first prize at a marathon is getting it because they ran the fastest, not because they have some kind of leverage with the marathon committee or they spent the most on their running shoes. Up next in this “award season” are the Academy Awards AKA The Oscars. These awards are given (ostensibly) for excellence in film and film-making. How convenient for me.

 

Award Shows

The Academy Awards aren’t the only set of awards given to film-makers but they’re certainly the biggest. In 2012, at any given time during the ceremony it garnered an average of 39.46 million viewers and around 77.7 million people watched at least some part of the show. Ad spots during the broadcast can cost close to $2 million.

The awards are presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), hence “Academy Awards.” Comprised of about 6,000 members this professional honorary organization doesn’t do much except hand out man-shaped trophies in late February. Its membership is broken down by profession and each group is responsible for generating the nominees in its respective field (actors decide the Best Actor/Actress nominees, directors decide Best Director, etc.) and special committees composed of members from all professions decide for a few categories: Best Foreign Film, Best Animated Film and Best Documentary. All members decide the nominees for Best Film and all members vote for the winners in most categories after the nominees are, well, nominated.

It’s probably worth noting here that a study conducted by the Los Angeles Times last year found that the makeup of the Academy is 94% white, 77% male and their median age is 62; 86% of them being 50 or older. In other words it’s made up of old white guys. Now, prima facie, there’s nothing with that but it’s not a good sign either. It’s certainly hard to imagine that such a homogenous group can make objective decisions about the “quality” of the films, acting and art/sound direction that come to their attention.

If you were going to give an award titled “Best Film of the Year” or even nominate a film for such an award I imagine you’d have some sort of rubric you would follow, at least loosely. You would look at things like plot, character development, cinematography, music, editing and sound direction. How much the movie cost to make or how much money it grossed would probably not be among the factors you’d consider. Yet somehow it seems as though blockbuster movies get far more attention from the Academy than other films. Whenever they talk about this movie that just broke the record for most nominations or that movie that’s the first to sweep the actor/actresses categories it’s a movie that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make. But this all makes sense once you learn that the production companies for these films spend millions of dollars promoting them directly to the Academy. Can they truly be objective with all that money coming right at them?

And why would production companies spend so much just to get their film an Oscar? Is it all about the prestige? About “winning” in the machismo-driven world of Hollywood? Maybe, but a film that wins “Best Picture” can also expect to generate around 35 million extra bucks. With that kind of money at stake why NOT throw a special screening/lobster dinner for the Academy?

Academy members also clearly feel the pull of politics, both on the national- and Hollywood-level. On the national-level they are swayed by the current sociopolitical landscape and the criticism it produces. Did Halle Berry REALLY deserve to win Best Actress for Monster’s Ball? Or was it just the Academy starting to feel the sting of being in the 21^st Century and never having had an African-American win that award? Perhaps if their membership wasn’t made up almost entirely of old white guys they wouldn’t have gone so long without giving that award to a black woman. And even if she DID deserve to win the merits of her award are called into question by the political influences that clearly sway the Academy’s voting (see: any Holocaust movie).

On the Hollywood-level Academy members also have to shift with the changing tide of politics in the film-making industry. Did The Departed REALLY deserve to win Best Picture and Martin Scorsese Best Director or was the Academy just trying to make up for previous snubs? Did Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close REALLY deserve a nomination for Best Picture or are certain people and events just more popular/influential in Hollywood?

When it comes right down to it can anyone truly, objectively say “This is the best movie made in the past year”? You rank a film based on your own judgements and experiences. So why is so much stock given to the opinions of 6,000 old white people? Why do we give a big bonus to the winners of these awards? When you come right down to it the whole process is just the film industry giving awards to itself. In fact 33% of Academy members are also Oscar winners themselves. We just pretend the judgement given for Best Director or Best Supporting Actor has weight or value, and that’s silly.

-SB