Earlier this month, I went to the theater to rewatch Titanic as part of the movie’s 25th anniversary rerelease. Despite not falling in the top half of my personal James Cameron rankings (of his narrative films, I prefer the first Terminator, The Abyss, and both Avatars), it’s a very good movie – a crowd-pleaser in every sense of the word, with great storytelling fundamentals, affecting performances, lush production design and Cameron’s typical eye-popping setpieces. It’s also frequently very corny and broad, with a score that doesn’t quite know when to let up and dialogue that’s often a bit too on the nose. That’s perfectly OK with me when the rest of the film is that good, but it did make me wonder: How can people watch a movie like Titanic and then accuse the Academy Awards of being snobby?
After all, Titanic is still the fourth-highest grossing movie of all time, with approximately $2.26 billion to its name. However, it is also tied for the most Oscar nominations (14) and most wins (11). If that movie could be so financially successful and so well-rewarded critically, do the accusations of Academy pretentiousness hold any water? Has the institution changed over the last 25 years? Have audiences?
I think the answer to this question can be found by examining the fundamental misunderstanding of the Oscars’ purpose – and, for that matter, the purpose of a large amount of discourse about film or art as a whole. So let’s get into it: What are the Oscars actually for?
1. The Oscars are for rewarding art
Criticism of the Oscars as an insular, elitist institution has been going strong since well before I became an adult or started caring about movies, but it feels like it’s picked up over the last decade or so. I’m no historian, but I’d wager 2008 was an inflection point, for Oscars discourse and for the entertainment industry as a whole: That year saw the release of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, which caused a fan uproar when it wasn’t nominated for Best Picture the following spring, as well as Iron Man, the first movie in the film-world-transforming Marvel Cinematic Universe. The latter film might not seem as important in the conversation about the state of Oscars discourse, but we’ll be coming back to it.
In response to public outcry that a movie about Batman didn’t get a chance for the top prize on Hollywood’s biggest night, the Academy expanded its Best Picture slate from five to as many as 10. The following year, it nominated several crowd-pleasers, including the first Avatar, Inglourious Basterds, District 9, Up, and The Blind Side. Despite a more general-audience friendly lineup, however, Kathryn Bigelow’s dreary war film, The Hurt Locker, took home the top prize.
Are the Oscars snobby? Let’s put that question aside for a moment and ask ourselves this: Does The Dark Knight – a movie I like an awful lot – really need an Oscar? Does Avatar? Isn’t the massive amount of money and critical plaudits good enough?
It’s fun when a movie you already love gets nominated for an Oscar, or better yet, wins one. It makes you happy for the people who made a thing you love, certainly, but if we’re being honest, it also bestows a little bit of pride. You get to feel “in the know” or cultured for a brief moment, all because you took a couple of hours to ingest a good story that a group of Hollywood professionals also liked.
But there’s a reason why arthouse movies and so-called “Oscar bait” exists: If a movie is nominated for an Academy Award, or even has buzz that it might be, that’s going to get more people to see that movie, particularly if it is otherwise small or difficult or not featuring many name actors. I’ve made it a point to watch every Best Picture nominee for the last five years. Sometimes I’ll see something I love, like Drive My Car or The Favourite, and other times I’ll see something I don’t really like, like Women Talking or Mank. Either way, the Academy is responsible for getting me to expand my horizons, to see a bunch of stuff I probably otherwise wouldn’t have, and that’s a great thing. And speaking of seeing things off the beaten path…
2. The Oscars are for watching (and talking about) movies
Was The Dark Knight really not as good as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, Milk, The Reader, or (eventual winner) Slumdog Millionaire? I couldn’t presume to say, as I have not seen most of the rest of those movies – and crucially, neither had most of the people who complained about The Dark Knight getting snubbed.
To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with liking what you like. Not everyone is going to want to watch a movie about an illiterate concentration camp guard (even Oscar host Hugh Jackman joked that year that he hadn’t checked out The Reader). But if you choose not to see what the Academy deems the best films of the year, how can you say that whatever you saw is better? After all, it’s a good guess most of them saw Batman! You’ve removed yourself from the conversation, or at least, that’s the way things should work.
That’s not to say the Oscars are always right. They are frequently, frequently wrong, or profit-seeking, or chasing the public mood or some other signifier of legitimacy. At last year’s ceremony, CODA, a perfectly fine movie that was something like my 18th favorite film of 2021 out of the 50 I saw, took home the top prize over more deserving nominees like West Side Story or Judas and the Black Messiah.
But in the end, who cares? The Oscars are fun because they’re sports for nerds. We get to argue over the nominations and winners like balls and strikes, but like in sports, the right to boo the ump is reserved for the people who actually watch the game. Anything else is just whining that the critical consensus doesn’t align with your narrow tastes, which leads me to the final reason the Academy holds this ceremony every year.
3. The Oscars are for good movies
Despite all the naysayers out there, the reality is that the Oscars LOVE nominating and awarding popular movies. This year’s nominees include three movies in the top 20 worldwide box office, including two movies that are in the top 20 highest-grossing movies of all time. Out of the top 10 highest-grossing films in history, adjusted for inflation, eight of them were nominated for Best Picture, and three of them won. From 1988 through 2003, the winner – not a nominee or two, but the Best Picture winner – was in the top 20 worldwide box office, and several were in the top 10, culminating in Return of the King’s coronation atop the ceremony and the industry’s annual gross.
So, what happened? Clearly, despite a very brief foray into slightly more obscure films in the mid-2000s (despite not being The Dark Knight, Slumdog Millionaire was very financially successful in 2008), the Oscars still like rewarding, or at least nominating, successful crowd-pleasers on a fairly regular basis. They just need to have some patina of quality to recommend them, and increasingly, that is not the kind of movie people are going to see. In short, the Oscars didn’t change; we did, and the movies changed along with us.
Consider this: 21 years ago, the Best Picture winner was A Beautiful Mind. I know it’s a polarizing film, but put aside your personal feelings for a moment and ask yourself this: What would you do today if someone told you that a biopic about a mathematician struggling with mental illness was going to gross more than $300 million worldwide and be the number 12 movie at the box office? You’d rightfully think that person was crazy. In today’s Hollywood, this is the kind of movie where the lead actor works for scale and the film only premieres in major markets. It gets the Oscar nod, but nobody’s seen it, and Marvel fans complain when it gets a nomination over Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.
But in 2001, A Beautiful Mind did just that. Last year, by comparison, the number 12 movie was Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, the second sequel to a Harry Potter spin-off that nobody really likes. It was considered a financial failure and yet still made more than $400 million. Every movie in the domestic top 10 in 2022 was a sequel or a reboot, I saw every one of them, and most of them sucked shit – and the three that didn’t (Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Avatar: The Way of Water, and Top Gun: Maverick) earned a slew of Oscar noms. The most successful movie of last year that could be compared to A Beautiful Mind in terms of scope, tone, or subject matter would be… what? Father Stu, maybe (No. 52 domestic, $20.9 million)? The Fabelmans (No. 67, $11.8 million)?
Look, I get that there’s no such thing as an objective standard of taste, and as I said before, it’s OK to like what you like – including things you know to be actively bad. I have watched almost every single Liam Neeson action movie since he made Taken in 2008, and I’ve enjoyed doing so, despite the fact that most of them are not very good. Crucially, however, I’m not demanding they get awards attention!
You see, while The Dark Knight was the 2008 superhero movie that kicked off the changes at the Academy, it’s Iron Man that’s had the longer and more significant resonance. Since the Marvel Cinematic Universe kicked off, it seems the entire entertainment industry has attempted to remake itself in that franchise’s image, and we’ve largely lapped it up despite the movies never really rising above “pretty solid” – and make no mistake, despite my affection for many earlier MCU outings, only a goldfish could argue that the films haven’t gone off the rails since the pandemic. The plots are overbearing and obsessed with minutiae, the jokes are universally hacky, and the CG and action choreography – never these movies’ strong suits – have gotten progressively muddier and lazier. And yet, a significant contingent of fans (as well as this year’s Oscar host, Jimmy Kimmel) had the temerity to complain a year ago at the lack of Best Picture recognition for Spider-Man: No Way Home – a ripoff of a much better Spider-Man animated feature that relied on the audience’s intimate knowledge of seven previous Spider-Man movies (many of them bad) to have any kind of emotional impact. It’s the same as back in 2008: Most of these people hadn’t seen any of the other movies!
It’s a tale as old as time. People don’t want to expand their horizons; they just want to be secure in what they already think. This is a problem that has more serious implications than the paltry matter of who wins the Oscars, and it’s existed for time immemorial, although it’s hard not to think it’s gotten significantly worse in the 21st Century. The internet can be a great tool for exposing oneself to new information and alternate viewpoints, but most of us (often including myself) use it to bathe in confirmation bias. I have conservative relatives who live in what is functionally a different reality from my own, cosseted in a country that is undeniably scary, but also one in which they have the security of always being right. Marvel, or Star Wars, or Disney, or Zack Snyder’s DC Universe, or take your pick, can function much in the same way: If the algorithm can send you a never-ending stream of things that make your brain feel good, you don’t want to be told there’s another way to live.
Ultimately, when it comes to the movies, this attitude is relatively harmless (besides contributing to the slow death of cinema, but ultimately I’m not arguing people should pay $12 to see a thing they don’t think they’d enjoy). It’s just annoying. Movies for grown-ups are already irrelevant financially; at least let us talk about them in peace.
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What else is good on the internet?
I enjoyed this charming piece about a still-functioning relic of the early internet.
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From the field
If you haven’t quite tired of me writing about the Oscars yet, here’s my take for my old newspaper on which of the nominees this year should have won. It’s not too different from my previous post on this blog — that’s a consequence of the Academy nominating my four favorite films of last year for Best Picture — but I’m still happy with how it turned out.
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Follow me on Twitter @RTHowitzer, read my Letterboxd reviews @mrchumbles, listen to my Star Trek podcast at outofcontreks.podbean.com, or email me at outofcontreks@gmail.com.