For an institution that recently celebrated its 90th anniversary, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – home to the Oscars – isn’t looking too self-assured these days.
It’s nine years since they announced the biggest-ever shake-up to the Hollywood dog-and-pony show – expanding the best picture category from five to 10 nominees – only to half-retreat two years later, shifting to a mathematically arcane formula that keeps the final number in flux. That experiment was a naked grab for more popular inclusivity among the nominees after a run of indie-dominated ceremonies, but they balked when a flat 10 allowed artistically barren dross such as Sandra Bullock’s white-saviour smash The Blind Side through the gates.
Last month, Academy brass broached the blockbuster problem again, in more discriminating fashion, announcing that commercial Hollywood cinema would be honoured with a new, vaguely defined award for “achievement in popular film”. The backtrack was far hastier this time. Yesterday, Academy president John Bailey and CEO Dawn Hudson issued a cautiously worded statement indicating that the idea has not been scrapped exactly, but that it “merits further study”, which sounds a lot like the sort of thing you’d say before quietly scrapping it under less scrutiny next year.
It’s an embarrassing U-turn from a more embarrassing proposal, though give the Academy this: at least they heard the protests that the announcement provoked in the media,within their own ranks – and who knows, maybe a few keen civilians? – and acted accordingly.
Bailey and Hudson were surely blindsided by the sceptical-to-hostile response to a move they expected to be, well … popular:“Awesome, a prize for Marvel movies! Way to go, Oscar! God bless America!”
But in their eagerness to engage a public they fear they’re losing with coronations for strong, small dramas such as Moonlight and Spotlight, and pressured by TV network ABC’s anxiety over slipping telecast ratings, they charged forth with an elementary-school everyone’s-a-winner fix before remotely considering its practicalities.
For they couldn’t answer the question everyone from major-league studio bosses to basement-dwelling awards nerds asked in response: how does one define “popular film” for the purposes of an award? Black Panther, a well-reviewed, paradigm-shifting franchise entertainment that remains at the top of 2018’s US box office with takings of $700m, may have seemed an obvious winner of such a prize, but looking beyond such extraordinary anomalies, what would the criteria be for nominees? Bailey himself doesn’t seem sure. In a garbled interview to Indiewire on Thursday, he said: “To focus on this new award as if it is somehow oriented primarily toward big-action films … might be a part of it, but it’s about films that have not been recognised, not been seen by people.” So the best popular film Oscar is actually for unpopular films that you wish were popular? Well, that clears everything up.
Simple grosses might seem the safest standard for a commercial prize, but what about late-breaking popular phenomena – December 2017’s word-of-mouth hit The Greatest Showman, for example – that haven’t fulfilled their commercial destiny by the time the ballots are in? What about the sliding scale of expectation v performance? Addled Star Wars spin-off Solo is widely regarded as an industry shortfaller and artistic muddle – but brand fumes alone have made it one of the year’s top 10 grossers. Should that really be celebrated by the Academy as a shining achievement in popular cinema?
Working from a fraction of its budget, Crazy Rich Asians likely won’t top Solo’s total, but is inarguably a more noteworthy phenomenon. Perhaps Academy number-crunchers could do some complicated calculus factoring in profitability, Cinemascore and Rotten Tomatoes ratings, plus some indefinable industry x-factor – but the Academy routinely nominates respectable popular hits, from Get Out to Dunkirk, at the intersection of such curves, so splitting their best picture chances with an additional shot at a less prestigious award seems less than necessary.
For there’s the rub: as much as the Academy’s ratings hawks would love a return to the days when well-made, four-quadrant blockbusters such Titanic, Gladiator and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King ruled the ceremony, the creation of a separate award for such phenomena would only diminish the chances of Tinseltown ever getting back much Oscars’ Oz: having duly acknowledged Hollywood product with one box checked on their ballots, many voters would contentedly stick with their independent semi-arthouse inclinations in the loftier categories.
Which is nothing to be ashamed of. The way some populist-minded Academy critics talk about their elitist bent, you’d think this year’s best picture winner had been one of Filipino experimentalist Lav Diaz’s eight-hour monochrome folk musicals, as opposed to The Shape of Water, a glossy, grandly entertaining fusion of genres that grossed $64m – peanuts compared to Infinity War, sure, but hardly a fragile arthouse figure.
Hollywood studios once made ambitious, inventive, grownup entertainment like The Shape of Water on the regular. That they’re now largely too timid to venture beyond pallid sequels and synthetic franchise instalments is no reason for the Academy to realign its preferences, unless it’s for the rare entry that busts its plastic armour with fresh aesthetic and political ideas and is duly singled out by the industry for exceptional treatment. Perhaps the Academy board finally figured out that Black Panther has a better chance of competing for the top Oscar – in a field where it seems likely to compete with such other stirring, grownup but eminently commercial entertainments as Bradley Cooper’s A Star Is Born and Damien Chazelle’s First Man – without a patronising popular award in the way. Sometimes, Oscar, you have to let change come to you.
