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The Academy Awards have become quite controversial lately. If they aren’t burying animated movies getting a Best Picture nod because of the media pecking order and whiny celebs, they’re nominating a French produced movie about a Mexican drug cartel chief who want to transition to a woman that manages to piss off pretty much everybody they claim they’re trying to champion. Learning the star and director may have a few controversial statements in their past isn’t helping them, either. Then again most of us think the collective Hollywood mindset, even if they aren’t based in Hollywood, is a big joke anyway. It’s a bunch of elitist media snobs ordinarily, but add in modern ideals of “playing to the cool kids” and false inclusion by way of laziness and proving how out of touch they are with the average human being and they’ve become something of a joke to the average human being, who used to watch just to see celebs and get mad that their favorite film didn’t get an award in a particular category.
I’d put it to you that all awards shows are something of a joke. Even awards shows that claim the audience chooses the winner, they didn’t choose the nominees, the industry did. So if your favorite movie wasn’t nominated but a rather boring or garbage movie did, of course you see the awards as something of a failure, the industry finding another way to pat itself on the back whether they actually deserve it or not. I don’t think there can be an actually fair and accurate process for choosing what was the best picture of that year. What they choose may not be what the audience chose, or what failed in the theater (which doesn’t seem to matter anyway) may be more successful on TV, streaming, or home video. Or it might get a cult following years later who got past the bad marketing of the original theatrical release and found a nearly lost gem of a movie.
Since my next intended article needs time to be written properly by post time and there’s nothing current I want to discuss, I’m grabbing a video by YouTube channel All Talking Pictures. In a video titles “What Each Best Picture Winner Tells Us About Hollywood”, the host goes over why the award and the Academy Awards/Oscars exists, and tries to figure out why each choice was made from the start of the Oscars to today. This came out two years ago post time so I don’t expect them to explain why Emilia Perez got nominated when everybody hates it and it became so controversial that they’re trying to figure out how to bury it without annoying the people they actually like (as in not the actual groups the movie is supposed to champion as they all hate it). I do think this will be an interesting look at past winners and what they were thinking, as well as the controversies of some of their choices. See if you can see the host’s own biases in his discussion. Also, he does drop a bit of swearing as he goes on.
So the silent movie got screwed over. They wanted to push it aside to force Hollywood to evolve, rather than let the silent movies get organically replaced by talkies. I wonder what things would be like today if that hadn’t happened? I don’t think the talkies would go away, but maybe more silent films would have been made. I’ve seen productions without dialog altogether, including the text on the screen, and they can tell some decent stories and you don’t have to worry about the language barrier, just maybe a cultural one or the occasional street sign or label. Charlie Chaplin was done dirty, folks.
As far as the Hayes Code, I’ll defend the Comics Code (and have) but that depends on how you use it. The Hayes Code was completely restrictive and cinema is better off without it. The modern day rating system is just fine…if modern Hollywood didn’t leave most family pictures to low budget studios who can’t afford to get their movies into theaters and look as cheap as they were made. I’d say bring back the Comics Code for kid-friendly comics, at least the final version that ditched some of the worst and dumbest restrictions, but we’re all better off without the Hayes Code.
The second phase of musical is probably better cinema-wise because it takes advantage of being a movie rather than just being a Broadway production on film. The stage and the screen each have their own strengths and weaknesses. Occasionally a movie will remember that, either in tribute or something like what I’ve heard about Wicked, but even some modern stage shows have taken advantage of digital screens to offer unique experiences. Musicals seem like a dying art, though. It doesn’t feel like anyone really wants to make them and that’s kind of sad. I wasn’t a huge musical fan but I’ve seen some good ones and we are missing out.
The 1980s is where the host’s biased are most on display. None of the movies I enjoyed from the 1980s won best picture. I find it funny that Tron lost because the Academy considered using computers cheating, considering computers have now all but replaced the practical effect and nobody over there cares. I find nothing wrong with feel-good movies, lighthearted fun stories, or epics. I don’t want them to replace the more serious stuff but why can’t they exist together? He and I will have to agree to disagree, but trashing the 80s for not being his taste in movies to the point he “doesn’t want to talk about it anymore” shows how biased he is.
Length does not make a movie better any more than being rated R does. If the movie needs to be longer, fine. However, there’s a reason long movies used to have intermissions, so the audience could stretch their legs, go to the restroom, or refresh their refreshments. Longer movies today are better watched at home, where you can pause the video or at least walk around the room or turn it up to go to the kitchen.
Remember when James Cameron made movies we wanted to see? Now we get Avatar and him spitting on his own legacy like The Terminator.
Return Of The King is also rare in that a fantasy movie won Best Picture. Fantasy and science fiction are usually ignored except for special effects or cinematography. Best Picture? I guess it has better odds than animation. Notice he didn’t mention how Beauty & The Beast getting nominated led to hurt feelings, a change in rules that shoved animation to the backyard, and the company that was started to push animation bending the knee and trying to do a live-action remake to please their fellow elitist snobs.
I think that’s ultimately the problem with all the award shows. Nominations are chosen by elitists, in most cases they’re voted on by elitist, and since they’ve declared themselves the tastemakers it sucks to be you for not being them. The thing is, as a general rule I don’t hate “their” movies and might even enjoy one or two. However, they will totally look down on “my” movie preferences and will tell me I’m wrong. My all-time favorite movie? Not a single nomination from the Academy Of Motion Pictures, but was nominated the Saturn Awards, with the lead winning best young actor, plus another win for the movie from Germany’s film awards for best set design. I could go through all my favorites and probably find few if any nominations for anything and none of them winners. I don’t care about the Awards because I don’t care what Hollywood thinks is their best work. I’m not part of that mindset. I have my own reasons for seeing a movie just like any other form of storytelling I enjoy, and we just don’t match up.
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