Why a blockbuster may never win a Best Picture Oscar again
Sure, Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar: The Way Of Water earned Best Picture nods, but the Academy is no closer to rewarding Hollywood's most popular films
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Maybe it was folly but, going into the 95th annual Academy Awards, many fans held out a glimmer of hope that either the universally loved Top Gun: Maverick or the mostly loved Avatar: The Way Of Water would take home the Best Picture Oscar. That remote possibility helped boost the ratings for Sunday’s Oscars telecast on ABC, which attracted 18.7 million viewers, a disaster-averting 12% boost from last year’s lightly watched affair. And a statuette for either film would further inject some life into an Oscars ceremony that has recently appeared intent on alienating its last remaining viewers by giving its top prize to films like Nomadland and Parasite, which were head-scratchers for middle America. This year, it looked like the Academy had finally accepted the stark reality that if it doesn’t start throwing some serious hardware at films that people have actually watched, the Oscars’ slide into oblivion, accelerated by the all-you-can-stream buffet of IP-rich, couch-potato content, will be irreversible.
So who can blame the Academy for bestowing Best Picture nominations onto two films that each grossed over $1 billion worldwide, especially given the reward of a ratings bump? The last time the Oscars rested comfortably on their culture-defining perch as lovers of populist entertainment was when The Lord of the Rings: The Return Of The King, the highest grossing film of 2002, won Best Picture (more recently, the Academy swung and missed on opportunities to reward Black Panther for the Best Picture of 2018 and Joker for the Best Picture of 2019.).
But neither Top Gun: Maverick nor Avatar: The Way of Water won the big honor. Per usual for the Oscars, the biggest films of the year only took home craft awards; Maverick won a single trophy (for Best Sound) as did Avatar: The Way Of Water (Best Visual Effects), while fellow box office hit, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever also mustered a single statue (Best Costume Design). So the Oscars’ desperate play for survival only worked halfway. While the Academy made effective use of the additional five Best Picture slots added in 2009 to ensure more popular films earned a Best Picture nomination, the evening’s four-quadrant hits struck out in the categories that mean anything to the average moviegoer. All of which could anger the millions of halfway-out-the-door Oscar viewers who hoped that a Maverick or Avatar triumph for Best Picture would win them back.
Does Oscars’ future lie overseas?
If one’s takeaway from the evening is that nominating the top two highest-grossing films of 2022 for a headline-grabbing Best Picture prize is the start of a positive trend, a closer look at the 95th Annual Oscars proves that the Academy will continue struggling to give non-craft awards to major films. Consider the four Oscars won by Germany’s All Quiet On The Western Front and the Best Original Song Oscar won by India’s RRR. While Netflix certainly mounted an effective campaign for All Quiet, its strong showing, and the triumph of RRR’s Telugu-language hit, “Naatu Naatu,” hints at the voting strength of the Academy’s recent influx of new members, specifically members from foreign countries.
Since the #OscarsSoWhite controversy in 2016, the Academy began a concerted and painfully overdue effort to diversify its membership. In 2020, it extended invitations to 819 potential new voters. What could be most telling in terms of who wins a future Oscar is that 49% of those memberships were from abroad, representing 68 countries. In 2021, 53% of new invitees were from 49 countries outside the United States, while in 2022, 50% of potential new Oscar members were from overseas. Currently, approximately 20% of the Academy’s entire membership, which numbers around 10,000, are not American. These world-class filmmakers are products of the cultures they’re from and are not necessarily enamored with Hollywood blockbusters nor are they lining up to give Lady Gaga another Oscar. And since international members now comprise a big enough block to skew any category towards more international or indie fare, the possibility of smaller films winning big awards only increases which, in turn, could drive away more Oscar viewers.
Don’t count out the power of Everything
Oddly enough, while Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar: The Way Of Water lost Best Picture—which could further convince casual fans that the Oscars celebrate movies that just aren’t for them—the win for Everything Everywhere All At Once offers some hope. The film’s box office take may be one-tenth of Maverick’s, but the genre-heavy cast, multiverse milieu, and overcaffeinated pacing skews heavily towards a younger demo and Academy members of that youthful vintage will spend the next few decades voting for Best Picture Oscars. Plus, in the recent past, the Academy has thrown a bone to populist fare with Joaquin Phoenix’s Best Actor Oscar for Joker dethroning Heath Ledger’s Best Supporting Actor win for playing the same character in The Dark Knight as the most prestigious award given to a modern genre film.
All these calculations were never necessary when popular tastes aligned more consistently with Oscar’s tastes. Those happy days culminated during the 70th Academy Awards ceremony in 1998 when box office champ Titanic was rewarded with 11 Oscars, including Best Picture, in a telecast that drew over 57 million viewers curious to see how James Cameron’s disaster epic would fare. Twenty-six years later, with Oscar feigning interest in awarding blockbusters only to shower its highest praise onto smaller films unseen by a vast majority of the planet, we’re looking at a turf war between younger Academy voters and a large group comprised of older voters and those living in countries far removed from, and largely disinterested in, Hollywood’s superhero factory.
As long as this fight for the soul of the Academy continues, the Oscars will try mightily to salvage its cultural relevance by backing whichever blockbusters they’re least embarrassed to nominate while crossing their fingers that voters will send home a couple of big-ticket trophies to satisfy what’s left of their viewing audience. In the meantime, the Oscars may have won the battle in nominating a pair of billion-dollar hits for Best Picture, but, if the 95th annual Academy Awards have taught us anything, it’s that the war is far from over.
84 Comments
Yes, clearly the Oscars need to go to the most popular films. Just look at how The People’s Choice Awards kicks their asses in ratings every year.
I’m not sure I agree that the choices of winners are what draw in or deter viewers; just as there are people tuning in to see “their” films win, plenty of viewers are tuning in to see what movies they need to check out. Relevance doesn’t just come with chasing trends and confirming biases; it can be something you bestow on the winners. So much handwringing over the ceremony comes from whether it can be appealing and relevant, yet the most unappealing, irrelevant parts of the ceremony come from the straining effort to do so.
I haven’t watched the Oscars for a long time now, and one of the (many) reasons I stopped was because the ceremony became too much about itself than about the movies it was awarding. I remember watching the Oscars when I was younger, and I always loved seeing the clips from movies that they would show for each nominee. For acting, it would be a clip of their performance. For other categories, it might be a montage of bits from the film selected to best highlight that feature. Even when I hadn’t seen the movie, I just thought that was the most fun part. Like, I wanted to get some idea of WHY these people may have been nominated for this award. That might make me even want to see some of the movies about which I’d previously known very little.Without that, it’s just a bunch of cringey standup and sketches talking about movies I have mostly not seen and which they are giving me no reason to be interested in seeing (apart from, “look, we consider it award worthy!”).
100%. When I was a kid (and we only had 3 networks to choose from), my “Middle America” family would watch all these awards shows every year. The clips from all the movies, really piqued my interest in a lot of them.
The money is the reward. These huge ass blockbusters will do just fine.
Beat me to it.
Yeah, if you’re offering me billions of cash dollars or a little statue, I’ll take the $ $ $.
I mean, c’mon, if Homer can figure it out…
Oh, no argument!But Hollywood loves it when a hit movie also wins Best Picture, which makes Everything Everywhere All At Once’s wins go down a bit easier in studio boardrooms—even if it’s only a hit in comparison to its modest budget.
I honestly don’t even think the actors expect anything more than that. You don’t sign up to be the villain in Spider-Man 6 or Tom Cruise’s new wingman in legacy sequel to a movie about planes blowing up real good because you miss doing Shakespeare and want to flex those muscles again. You do it because a billion people will see it and you can have a money fight in your new heated Olympic pool.
I wonder if the Oscar nominations for Heath Ledger, Joaquin Phoenix, and now Angela Bassett has made actors redo their calculus for accepting roles in comic book movies. But if you’re producing Star Wars: Episode XI for Disney, then yeah, just accept the millions of dollars and leave the creative awards for the little guys.
Possibly, but I feel like all three of those have some pretty big contextual asterisks next to them: Ledger died, Bassett was probably getting a career award, and Phoenix was in an out-of-continuity movie that featured no other other comic book characters and was basically an art film by the standards of the genre. I’d still say that if you have a choice between a quiet drama about a queer couple separated during the holocaust or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot, the pros and cons of each seem pretty well-defined and only one of them has “decent shot at an Oscar nom.”
I don’t think it’s a weird notion that actors can take pride in their work. Look how many films have been elevated by actors giving 100% to even the cheesiest roles; or dragged down by actors who clearly consider the job beneath them.
It’s one thing to say “I’m going to bring my A game even to this fun pulp,” and another to say “I expect the organization that mostly rewards quiet character pieces, topical dramas, and movies about themselves to give me a statue for playing Dr. Tentoculus in Punchmaster IV.”
Yeah, of course. Just saying it wouldn’t be weird to get invested in work like that nonetheless.
Or maybe they just weren’t very good….
It was a weak year. My picks for 2022 were Emily The Criminal, Pearl, and Triangle of Sadness.
1. Avatar and Top Gun never had a chance to win the Oscar for Best Picture, and if you are a pop culture writer who legitimately thought they did, you need to do some serious consideration of how you approach your field. There was no glimmer of hope ever.2. A statuette for either film would inject some life into an Oscars ceremony that has recently appeared intent on alienating its last remaining viewers by giving its top prize to films like Nomadland and Parasite, which were head-scratchers for middle America.I hardly know where to start with this sentence, it’s so full of WTF. First, how would either film winning Best Picture in the last award announced of the night inject some life and viewership into the broadcast? Do you really think that people uninterested in the art of film are going to tune into the Oscars for 2+ hours just to see if Avatar or Top Gun won? Do you think that most people who saw/like Avatar or Top Gun even knew they were nominated?And what evidence is there that Nomadland or Parasite were “head-scratchers for middle America? First off, that casts all of us in middle America as bumpkins who can’t appreciate film as an art form. So fuck off with that. Nomadland and Parasite were always smaller films than blockbusters in all American markets. So kindly do us the favor of not maligning the entire middle of the country. I saw Parasite in an absolutely packed theater in Ohio. For a non-English language film, Parasite was a huge hit. Basically the equivalent of a blockbuster for a foreign language film.Whew. We’re two sentences into the article and we’re not off to a great start…3. This year, it looked like the Academy had finally accepted the stark reality that if it doesn’t start throwing some serious hardware at films that people have actually watched, the Oscars’ slide into oblivion, accelerated by the all-you-can-stream buffet of IP-rich, couch-potato content, will be irreversible….If either of them won, it could help redefine the Oscars as a lover of high-grossing entertainment,Or, it could render the entire exercise meaningless by abandoning what the Oscars are actually about: awarding achievements in the art of filmmaking. We have recognition for the highest-grossing films: They’re released every Monday with the box office earnings reports, and films get to call themselves #1 if they earn the most. The Oscars aren’t about money, the Oscars are about artistry., and I mean that in the least snooty sounding way possible. Blockbusters rarely are about the art of film in that way.* Is anyone really able to make the argument that Top Gun makes a more innovative use of the medium of film to tell its story than Everything Everywhere All at Once or Banshees of Inisherin? That’s why it lost. Not because of some inherent bias against blockbusters, but because there were better films out there that deserved the award more.Don’t get me wrong: I love blockbusters. Give me a bucket of popcorn and set me loose on them. I had tons of fun in Top Gun. But if we start making commercial success the key metric in what deserves an Oscar, then the Oscars become meaningless. And the Academy knows this. If they dilute their brand, they don’t save it, they condemn it to further decline.4. Oddly enough, while Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar: The Way Of Water lost Best Picture—and ABC’s Oscar telecast may have lost some future viewers as a result…Again, what? Do we really think there will be a mass exodus of Oscar viewers who boycott due to Avatar and Top Gun not winning? Or that some viewer is going to look at them not winning and decide they won’t watch next year because blockbusters don’t win? C’mon.5. It’s not like the Oscars are outliers here. Have Avatar and Top Gun racked up a whole bunch of Best Picture type awards at other ceremonies, only to be shut out of winning an Oscar due to bias? No. Avatar won an a bunch of effects awards, but biggies, hardly anything. An AACTA for Best Film, and a Satellite for best director. This is hardly indicative of a film that deserved an Oscar for Best Picture. Top Gun’s accolades are similar. One or two best film awards from more minor ceremonies, and a lot of sound/cinematography awards. Absolutely no one is recognizing either of these films as the best overall achievements in filmmaking. The critical consensus is overwhelming.Will a blockbuster ever win best picture again? Almost certainly. Will it be difficult to do? Sure. Because winning an Oscar is difficult and most studios are uninterested in trying to make a movie that straddles both worlds as a blockbuster and an awards darling. They like to keep those separate (and I actually think this is where you could make a really interesting argument about how the economics of studios drives this divide and makes it harder for blockbusters to win, but that’s an argument for another day). The decisions that cause blockbusters to lose awards are far more about the decisions studios make long before a film is even shot rather than the decisions that voters make when they cast their ballots.*That said, I do think that the Oscars are willing and eager to award blockbusters when appropriate. Avatar wasn’t a great film. But it had great visuals and it won for that. Likewise, Wakanda Forever wasn’t a great film. But the costumes were excellent and it won for that.
I was going to respond to this article, but you have done so far better and more eloquently than I ever could. Kudos. Thank you
Awarding popular movies can have an increase in viewership though. The year Return of the King won a bunch of awards, viewership peaked (was up over 25% from the year before), and then the next year, it dropped right back down. But probably why it won was because everyone knew it was going to win a bunch of awards, so they wanted to see the filmmakers/actors/etc they knew and liked give speeches. A surprise win doesn’t help them at all.
Agreed on all points. It matters less if the movies win, and more if the blockbusters are frontrunners/in legitimate contention. Neither Avatar nor Top Gun were in contention. When popular movies are frontrunners and have drawn big audiences, more people tend to tune in to see if the big names win (although I would argue that effect is lessened in the internet era, with all the speeches being available immediately on YouTube).
But then shouldn’t the take away be that *nominations* for blockbusters bring in more mainstream views and not actual wins? Correlating wins to ratings of the current year makes no sense when victories are never guaranteed
There has never been another movie like Return of the King, though, and probably will never be again. Back then, filming a trilogy all in one go and releasing it in yearly installments was a fresh and daring method of filmmaking, and only really acceptable because they were adapting a major literary work that for decades was considered unfilmable. Return of the King’s Oscar coronation was basically the capstone to three years of excitement over these films. It was a situation unique to that moment.
Awarding popular movies can have an increase in viewership though.Yeah, I think pretending like popular movies being nominated doesn’t significantly affect ratings is a little naïve – however, I would argue: at what cost? If ratings drive which movies get nominated, you ultimately cheapen the award’s prestige.
Beautifully said.
Take it easy, Thunder. We all know you people aren’t capable of appreciating the art of film. You can’t help it; it’s because of the extra bone in your brains.
I know! I just wish they would stop reminding me of that. It hurts the one feeling I have left.
Well…you said that much more eloquently than I would have. I was going to use maybe two-three sentences rife with “fuck” and “bullshit”.
Everything Everywhere All at Once was a huge critical success that globally made over $107 million so far and rightly soPeople often don’t realise Parasite grossed well over twice as much with about $263 million while it was completely in Korean while at least some of EEAAO was in English.
But if we start making commercial success the key metric in what deserves an Oscar, then the Oscars become meaninglessIt becomes The Billboard Awards for movies
I feel like the real context for this article is the months of breathless coverage AVC has given to Top Gun and Avatar, in an attempt to present a dichotomy between them – “real cinema” – and Marvel movies.
Huh. From the snark, I always assumed AVC fell on the side of Marvel movies being “real cinema.”
I’d also add that Avatar:WoW made 2-3 times more money internationally than domestically. Even Maverick, which was literally made with help from the American Navy, made slightly more abroad. So this notion that an increasingly internationalized voter base will hurt these movies chances at nominations seems questionable at best. You can make a better case that Avatar in particular got nominated in the first place because there were more international voters this year than you can that those voters stopped it from winning.
Fuck yeah, this is a pretty asinine article. “The Oscars should start intentionally awarding popcorn movies to keep viewers” is such a soulless argument to put forth earnestly. “Pander to the yokels, or else!”It’s not like big, commercial movies can never win. Titanic and Return of the King are prime examples. But insisting the Oscars should purposefully hype up popcorn movies to appease some imagined viewer in Peoria, ceding even more power to a small handful of massive studios and their behemoth $250M+ productions, is some idiocracy shit.Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar are not underdogs. Wakanda Forever is not an underdog. Everything Everywhere All at Once cost a fraction of what those movies did, is excellent, and deserves recognition infinitely more.
If anyone is interested in one of Daniel Scheinert’s early shorts, this from a Sidewalk film festival filmmakers scramble in 2004. I’m pretty sure he was in HighSchool at the time
Does it have anything to do with the navel gazing artsy braggadocios ways that indy movies and “artistic” movies that play in just a few theaters get a lot of awards? It is like the “you have never heard of this cool indy band” for grown ups.
I think it’s more that the only way that the more character driven dramas that tend to be popular with the awards get made now is by smaller studios or the arthouse subsidiaries of major studios. Not saying that spectacle can’t be Best Picture worthy (EEAaO is a great example of where filmmakers found a happy medium combining spectacle with character drama), but most major studios care a lot more about action and explosions than they do fulfilling character journeys fueled by high quality scripts and performances.Look back at Best Picture winners from the 1980s and earlier. A lot of those movies would not be major studio films if they were made today. They would only get made by “the navel gazing artsy braggadocios” you describe. Shit, in 1979 Kramer vs. Kramer, which was basically just Marriage Story 40 years earlier, was both BP winner AND highest grosser at the box office for the year. Can you imagine Marriage Story having been highest grossing picture a few years ago? It would be completely insane to imagine. (And yes, I know limited release, Netflix, etc. – imagine it getting a wide theatrical release. There is no way in hell it would likely even be top 10 box office for the year. For reference, EEAaO was wildly successful for its budget and coming from a smaller studio, and it was only #27 in domestic box office for the year.)
EEAAO might be a shitty film, but Daniel Kwan was onto something when he said that Hollywood has no answer for media and pop culture cycles that come and go in hours, not months, like they used to. It takes months or years to make a movie. More and more movies are not getting theatrical distribution. Online viewing is the new paradigm. And Hollywood is not able to handle this future. The art of cinema may never die, but cinema is losing its relevance by the year.
Sure. The only metric that should matter for artistic achievement should be how much money it made. And why stop at film? Give Colleen Hoover the Nobel prize for literature! That’s a person I just heard about today, and apparently her romance novels have been absolutely dominating the best seller lists. She must be the greatest writer of our generation, just based on that alone. Right?And why do we keep rewarding actors for their roles in these pretentious “art” films? The highest-paid actor and actress should win their Oscars by default. That would really shake up the Oscars.
Remember when they floated the idea of adding a “Best Popular Film” award, and then couldn’t give any kind of explanation of what exactly would qualify a movie for that award rather than Best Picture, because it was an obvious attempt to just make sure Black Panther got something? Yeah, that didn’t go over very well.
Hell, the expansion of the Best Picture nominees was supposed to make it possible for more “populist” movies to occasionally get nominated, but what actually turned out to happen? It just meand MORE indie movies that very few had seen got nominated with maybe 1-3 movies that had more recognizable names, if any at all. And those blockbusters basically have no chance of winning since what the Academy voters seem to be looking for in a Best Picture is rarely what is being created by studio blockbusters.
Blockbusters usually don’t win Best Picture, because — get this — they’re usually not the best movie made that year!Like… this is obvious? And self-evident? A big four-quadrant hit is a movie that everyone likes, and to make everyone like you, you have to be careful not to make anyone dislike you. Really great art takes bigass swings and makes a point, content with people hating it so long as other people love it.And this isn’t a knock on either blockbusters or arthouse films, either. I love popcorn flicks. I love genre movies. They’re great! But the awards aren’t for “most fun you had at the movie this year”. This is like wondering why the guys who throw during home run derbys never win the Cy Young, since they send the pitch right down the middle every time and it produces such spectacular hitting, whereas those elitist pitchers who always win have really low ERAs, most of their pitches just hit the catcher’s mitt, it’s boring and the ball moves so weird.You want the Oscars ratings to go up? The problem isn’t the nominees. It’s the show — a self-congratulatory, staid slog of a thing. Bring on a host who’s actually funny, and let them cut loose instead of employing an army of hacks to produce tiresome shtick designed to offend neither the thin-skinned millionaires in the audience nor aging Baby Boomers. Play clips from nominated works long enough to actually show people why they were nominated, instead of generic, divorced-from-context 15 second blasts of white noise.And for God’s sake, remember that the movies are supposed to be fun! They should be celebrating, it’s another year of movies. And just because films aren’t nominated doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have their moments. Play montages of the best romance/action/horror/sci-fi/superhero/fantasy from that year! Hell, then bring the people who were in those montages out to present the next awards! Do SOMETHING.
You need to go no further than comparing Everything Everywhere All at Once to that other multiverse film of 2022, Doctor Strange 2: The Multiverse of Madness.EEAAO buried DS2:MoM in every creative aspect you wanted to mention, EEAAO was just the vastly better film. DS2: MoM will just have to console itself with over 9 times as much gross (which until this changes, fundamentally nothing will).Well, that and a People’s Choice Award.
Also, why does it even matter that the Oscars stay relevant or have good ratings? The film industry will do fine either way. People are still going to watch movies that interest them even if they don’t care about watching an awards show. If it fades into irrelevance, it would mean reduced influence for industry gatekeepers, which would probably be a net gain for the good of society.
As someone that rolls their eyes every time a montage starts during the Oscars (other than in memoriam, obvs), I feel personally attacked.
It’s not like the actual winner (EEAAO) was standard Oscars fare. It’s an action-comedy with a butt plug fight scene…
Look at cinematography: each year films with camerawork that are exquisite by any metric are completely overlooked. It is a relatively small group of people voting on things where I’ll wager many don’t even take the opportunity to watch all the nominees. This is promotion. It’s not purely about excellence.
Giving an Avatar the Best Picture thotchke would’ve been the Oscars finally and definitively jumping off a cliff on purpose. Everyone saw it. Everyone knows it isn’t very good. If the Oscars *wanted* to become another Grammys, sure they could give an Avatar a shiny. But they at least have more sense than that.
Also this just in, Black Panther, both the 1st and latest, are merely “good” movies. That’s it. Good.
Nah, you know what? EEAAO absolutely WAS a blockbuster, by the standards of its budget and release. With a $100 million take it was easily A24’s highest-grossing film ever, and it pulled that off with a relatively tiny budget and minimal advertising. Top Gun and Avatar both had gigantic advertising blitzes which bombarded consumers for weeks, and they were both sequels to major hits.
EEAAO still managed to break the $100 million barrier despite an ad budget that was likely about 1% of what Top Gun’s was. Its success was driven by word of mouth, not tie-in merchandising deals and boomer nostalgia. And EEAAO came out an entire year before the Oscars ceremony; it had to keep that hype train rolling for much longer than its competitors (which almost all came out in the fall) in order to win the big prize. There’s a reason why most Oscar contenders come out in fall, right before the deadline for Academy voting: people have short memories. But EEAAO overcame that disadvantage and walked away with 7 Oscars anyway.Both Top Gun and Avatar movies made over a billion dollars, which is what they were MADE to do. They accomplished their goal. They don’t need to also get a Participation Trophy Oscar just because it’ll excite the largely imaginary rubes who make up “Middle America.”
I distinctly remember listening to sports talk radio the weekend after EEAAO opened. For 30 minutes, three football bros gushed over an indie movie that most of their audience had likely never heard of. That’s how I knew EEAAO was going to be a different kind of movie. To hear a radio crew that rarely talked about any movies other than Marvel movies devote so much time and give rave reviews to EEAAO really stuck with me.
Beat me to it. EEAAO had the strongest chance of winning because it had artsy prestige cred AND was wildly successful. The Oscars skew towards films that are only seen in entertainment insider/film nerd circles, but it’s still a popularity contest—the buzziest and most likely to be seen by most of the voting body are the ones that get votes. Out of all the nominees, it was the movie I heard the most people talking about irl besides maybe Top Gun. I’m not in entertainment, so the fact that it had such a strong reach among the general public seemed to bode well for its awards chances.
All of which could anger the millions of halfway-out-the-door Oscar viewers who hoped that a Maverick or Avatar triumph for Best Picture would win them back.You’ll never convince me that millions of people tune in for the Oscars.I understand, intellectually, that the numbers may actually bear that out — but still.
Any one episode of the Maverick TV series (1957-1962) that James Garner starred in is easily better that all the films that Tom Cruise has ever been in
curious what you think the point of the oscars is? I get that everything must be profit driven in this country, but the idea that they should hand out best picture hardware to the biggest dumbest blockbusters based on some half-brained scheme to boost ratings among a vaguely-defined “middle America” is extremely cynical. not to mention there are other awards shows that already fulfill that exact role. in no universe should box office gross be taken into consideration when deciding on the most prestigious film awards in the country – unless your goal is to turn the academy awards into a contest over which studios can cough up the biggest advertising budgets.
Don’t we also get this same dumb take on the Oscars at least once a year now on a Kinja site? I swear I’ve read a different version of this same dumb argument in a previous year.Money is how the biggest blockbusters are rewarded. For those that are especially beloved, there is also the People’s Choice Awards.I would simply note additionally that there does seem to be this tension with the Oscars where they’re upset that people aren’t as interested in them and that viewership is generally declining, but where they are also determined to stick to their guns and award based on what they consider best artistically, even if it’s some movie that only like 5 people have seen. I say they should just lean into it and stop pretending like they have populist appeal. Better yet, use the ceremony’s platform to try to show viewers why it is they think these movies are so great. They’re never going to be all things to all people. So just be who they are.
Oscars ceremony that…[been] alienating its last remaining viewers by giving its top prize to films like Nomadland and Parasite, which were head-scratchers for middle America.Middle America gave us President Donald Trump—do you really want to cater to that demographic? Also, on those occasions when the Academy has chosen to honor a blockbuster with a Best Picture, movie hacks writers like you criticize The Academy’s voters for pandering to box office over quality!At least the Oscars are finally recognizing smart, challenging films over comfortable middlebrow dramas like Driving Miss Daisy or Crash (and not even the David Cronenberg one!). They may not always win (Green Book beating out BlackKKKlansman and The Favorite really seemed like The Academy fleeing to the “safe” choice of Yet Another White Savior narrative), but at least films like Parasite, Nomadland and The Shape of Water are starting to get their due as Oscar voters skew younger and more adventurous.
I’m so confused by this. Are there actually people pitching fits because Top Gun or Avatar didn’t win Best Picture?
Hey, Tom Cruise and James Cameron are people.Also, the people that didn’t see a single other movie the entire year.
I mean, let’s be real, I don’t think Tom Cruise has cared about getting awards since the early 00s. All evidence would suggest he’s mostly interested in proving he keeps it tight and getting to write off all of those skydiving lessons as a business expense on his taxes.
Of the nominees I saw, I think Top Gun and Avatar felt like the most complete packages. They accomplished what they set out to do.
This is a bizarre characterization of how movies are voted on. I’m not going to say that the Oscars are some objective measure of quality, but I don’t think the voters give a shit about ABC’s ratings.
Man I hate these takes. 1) The Academy reflects the movie industry. The industry used to spend a lot on middle-class filmmaking. These were smart movies meant for the general public, rather than indie arthouse fare or IP-based blockbusters. The Oscars then nominated the best of those films, which were usually pretty commercially successful! Silence of the Lambs, Forrest Gump, The English Patient, Saving Private Ryan, Gladiator, The Sixth Sense, Erin Brokovitch. Look at any year in the 90s and it’s filled with popular, mid-budget and critically acclaimed films not based on IP. Now, movies are either IP-based blockbusters (which usually are not BP worthy) and indie flicks (which usually don’t have mainstream appeal). That’s the problem, not the Oscars.2) Of all years to make this argument against the Academy, this is the worst one in a while! EEAAO is one of the highest-grossing pics in recent memory to win, and made its money before the noms, which is unusual. It was very popular!3) The Academy isn’t like a fucking secret board of directors at a company (you know like the Golden Globes). It’s thousands of people who work in the industry, some with lots of influence, some without. The noms aren’t decided based on the “survival” of the Oscars – it’s just what those people like, or what they can be cajoled into liking. Framing the Academy as a single entity trying to stay relevant is absurd. It’s just directors, actors, producers, grips, sound mixers, composers, editors, etc. filling out ballots with movies they liked. Yes, the Academy LEADERSHIP might try to stay relevant, say by expanding the Best Picture category, or combining the Sound categories into one, or by floating the idea of a Fan Oscar (which got shut down). But the actual picks? Just people!
I’ll add on to this by pointing out that by virtue of the fact that they are a reflection of the movie industry, the Oscars really have no responsibility to reflect the tastes of, or resonate with “audiences.”
The Oscars is people!
Honestly, I wonder if they know this commentary is weak and are just trolling for clicks and angry comments. If so, damn it, they got me.
Who is this article for? The people who use ratings to set prices for ad sales for the broadcast?
The public see our Best Picture winners as high brow, intellectual films. They hate movies like that. *toilet flushes*
Is there anything actually stopping a studio from making a big budget blockbuster type movie that is a serious Oscar contender? Other than it would be a massive risk.It reminds of when I hear complaints about how it is not fair that broadcast networks have to compete with cable and streaming at the Emmys. Even though there would be nothing stopping a broadcast network from making a show like Breaking Bad or Homeland or Succession. Other than it would be a massive risk of not being as popular as another cop or lawyer show.
Well, there IS a reason for that. Broadcast networks are more strictly regulated with respect to content. “The FCC does impose certain restraints and obligations on broadcasters. Speech regulations are confined to specific topics, which usually have been identified by Congress through legislation or adopted by the FCC through full notice-and-comment rulemaking or adjudicatory proceedings.” (https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/fcc-and-speech)Basically, you can’t have Breaking Bad on NBC because anyone with an antenna could find and watch it (and complain to the FCC about those immoral murderous drug dealers on their TV), but you have to have a cable subscription to watch it on AMC. Effectively, it’s like you’ve opted in. They can get away with more that way. Broadcasters have to play it comparatively safe (and therefore boring). I think that’s a big part of why they tend to be more creative with comedies than they are with dramas. There’s only so far you can go with a drama show before it gets into areas that might get complaints, but you can do a lot more with comedy under those constraints.
I looked at that link and it seems to mostly restrict things like language, obscene sex and nudity. It’s not like Breaking Bad was winning Emmys for having those things. It was winning them for strong writing and acting. Even Mad Men almost never used swearing or had scenes of sex/nudity that were worse than what you might see on something like Greys Anatomy.
I am guessing broadcast networks are also looking for things that have the broadest appeal. A cable show may be a hit – on a cable ratings scale. Broadcasters seem to want much higher ratings numbers than cable will settle for. This could also be an advertiser thing. I don’t know the economics of it, but I’m guessing broadcasters can charge more for ad time because they have potential to reach a larger audience. Thus they need higher ratings to justify those higher costs. Thus making them less risk averse with content. But again – just a guess. (This article does imply that the advertiser aspect is a thing: https://variety.com/2017/tv/news/fcc-rules-orange-is-the-new-black-american-crime-carmichael-show-1202527318/)
Ratings are down across almost all TV in general. The people who care about movies, specifically seeing gold trophies get handed out to movies, have mostly abandoned traditional cable and would rather just watch in a bar or see funny tweets about the ceremony. The ones who still watch TV, and possibly have fond memories of when “real movie stars” were in pictures, probably think Hollywood is full of baby blood drinkers at this point. It’s over.
I used to be a huge fan of the Oscars. In my teens (ah, back when I was young and naive), I thought they were so important and clearly the winners were really the best of their category that year.And then came the 1997 Oscars. By some miracle, I had managed to see every Best Picture nominee before the ceremony. I had opinions, and I thought they mattered. And then I watched as some of the major category awards were “misawarded” (in my opinion, at least). I was mad. Was this rational? No, but it did help me realize that sometimes, the winner isn’t actually the best. It can be political. It can be a popularity contest. It can be some dumb shit like, “Well this person has never won, and even though they’re not the best, we’ll give it to them as a sort of lifetime achievement to make sure they get the honor.” For too many years, I’ve seen what can best be described as the “boring middle” movie win Best Picture – the easy Oscarbait movie that no one really likes but no one really hates either, which can be damn uninteresting, too (think Out of Africa, Driving Miss Daisy, The King’s Speech and Green Book). And while most years, the winner is a little better than the above, it’s rarely the one I would pick from the list of nominees.
The benefit of making all the money is “then you’ve got all the money”. You don’t also need recognition on top of that. With how frequently the Oscars straight up get it wrong (e.g. Crash, Green Book) it feels like this shouldn’t be that big of a concern. After all there’s very little that Top Gun: Maverick did that does not specifically involve airplanes or Tom Cruise that RRR didn’t do better.
I mean, I guess at only 100M or so, EEAAO isn’t a “blockbuster” any more, but it’s hardly a sleeper film either, coming from A24 on a $25M budget. And it’s certainly a hell of a lot more crowdpleasing than most oscar winners.
Do you even read this site’s legacy columns? You can see this progression in The Popcorn Champs (https://www.avclub.com/film/features/the-popcorn-champs – I miss Breihan writing for this site). It’s been since LotR: Return of the King won Best Picture that the winner has also been a big budget high grossing studio pic, and I would argue that was maybe more of an outlier. The last time a major studio film that topped the annual box office and won Best Picture where it was a character drama (rather than some variety of spectacle) was Rain Man in 1988.More and more so since the 1980s, studios are investing in what (they think) people want to see, not the complex narratives that the Oscars most want to reward. Given how the film industry is today, it honestly kind of blows my mind that a movie like Kramer vs. Kramer was #1 at the box office the year it came out.
Blockbusters haven’t been regularly winning since the 1960s and yet the ceremony somehow survived another 50 years….
The problem isn’t popular films not winning, the problem is dull, self-important, unfunny ceremonies that go on way too long. I was honestly amazed when they were wrapping things up before midnight Sunday night.
You also don’t have a host with the cultural cache of a Bob Hope or Johnny Carson or even Billy Crystal, someone people will tune in to watch regardless of what they’re hosting.
I would argue that we were still seeing extremely popular movies regularly winning into the first half of the 90s. 6 movies in a decade that were top 10 domestic box office grossers and also won Best Picture:1994 – Forrest Gump1991 – Silence of the Lambs1989 – Driving Miss Daisy1988 – Rain Man1986 – Platoon1985 – Out of AfricaHowever, I still agree with your point that if the problems were the movies nominated, we would have noticed this in the past 30 years. The problem is the bloated ceremony. I noted this in a different comment here: I would be far more interested in watching again if the ceremony was more about the movies nominated than just an awkward assemblage of bleh song and dance numbers (that aren’t related to a song/score nomination) and cringey comedic bits. I want to see clips from the nominees. I want a respectful In Memoriam segment. I want to hear the nominated songs and music.
I think it’s less a matter of what films are nominated and more a matter that we value our lives more than those of the rich and famous. It’s not that we have many more choices of what to watch, it’s that we choose our own interests over the corporate media agenda that spent generations infiltrating and bouying our distracted lives and now we just don’t give a shit. Our personal lives are our own and we’re just not going to give it away to something that doesn’t speak to us, that we can’t fully participate in and that doesn’t relieve of us of our own dispossession and torpor, but could only add to it. In any other industry awards ceremony, you have a dinner, give out some trophies and say goodnight. You don’t build up a full evening (and.a good part of the afternoon) broadcast of vapid insights, fashion commentary and false suspense building only for it to go limp in the last 5 minutes. The first Oscar broadcast was 15 minutes (on radio!) They could reasonably make the present ceremony 60-90 minutes and not lose anything that makes it important to those who care about it. The rest of it is just masturbation and ad sales gone wild.
Is $100 million really an amount of money we’re calling not a blockbuster now? I feel like that’s generally the threshold people use when making lists of blockbusters.