February 2016
The Sound STC • Vol.2 Issue 02
Keeping Up With The Oscars
By Paul Sawchuk
In previous years I’ve tried my hand at predicting the
Oscar winners. From about 2005 to 2012 the race had
been very predictable. It’s only been the last couple of
years where the Academy voters really broke from the
patterns they had gotten comfortable with, though it
still remains that the whole race is political. I won’t try
to predict this year. There are clear front-runners, like
The Revenant, Mad Max, The Big Short, Room, in multiple
categories. In my first article for The Sound I talked about
what I thought might be the biggest movies of the summer. I was right on one of those, the only big movie of
the summer, Jurassic World. I’m not testing myself this
year. I don’t want to try and get into the head of Academy voters and gamble on the winners, even if it’s with
myself, because the Academy is in crisis mode.
Oscar voters have gone on record, especially in the
2014 Awards season with 12 Years A Slave, that they
simply cannot see all the films up for the big awards.
According the L.A. Times in 2014, “two Oscar voters
privately admitted that they didn’t see “12 Years a Slave,”
thinking it would be upsetting. But they said they voted
for it anyway because, given the film’s social relevance,
they felt obligated to do so.”
I wrote last month about the shifting views of quality
films, and this is important to remember along with the
above quote. If a film is so impactful and so “relevant”
a film as to sway voters to call it “Best Picture” without
having seen it, how are we to judge “Best” anymore? In
the case of 12 Years, its emotional resonance equated it
with an abstract cultural relevance, yet this vague and
subjective “relevance” is what apparently earned unseen
votes for BP. Whether or not “relevance” is subjective or
objective, 12 Years a Slave was certainly voted for because
of its political resonance.
Was last year’s Birdman relevant in the same way? The
cast was predominantly white with a Latin-American
writer-director conceptually shitting all over pretension
in art and mass-media at the same time. In a way it was
timely, and that may have made it “relevant”, but that the
Academy astoundingly voted both Birdman and Alejandro González Iñárritu top in their categories said something about the Academy’s transparency and openness
to self-criticism, or at least tongue-in-cheek looks in the
mirror. In fact, the only politically motivated contender
for Best Picture last year was Selma, about Martin Luther King Jr.’s march in 1965. Perhaps Clint Eastwood’s
American Sniper could be called timely, but its strong
right-wing conservatism would easily alienate a Liberal
Hollywood mindset that usually chastises such Oscar
baiting. In the span of a year, the Best Picture award
went from being awarded to a blatant and transparent
examination of racial relevance to a film attacking the
very institutions it was a part of. What gives?
What seems to give, at least in North America, is that
films and filmmakers want to be treated as they once
were. An art form. Where independents are successful
at creating amazing character pieces, Hollywood has
always been about spectacle, bringing in independent
(often foreign) filmmakers to pepper their release schedule with “Quality” films from December to February
while dumping off poor blockbuster failures in January,
hopefully without notice. Up against new forms of narthesoundstc.com
rative-television, big studios were in a creative rut come
Oscar time. Despite their nominations, films like The
Danish Girl or Room aren’t pulling big box office numbers to justify their presence in a primarily capitalistic
revenue based industry.
The Oscars, as you likely have figured out, is an elitist
programming attempting to appeal to the masses out of
necessity. Network programming is more expensive,
and as streaming services have cut television viewership
down significantly, in order to reap in the acclaim and
notoriety the Academy wants they simply must pander
away from predictable internal political leanings. This,
as well as the apparent snub of The Dark Knight in 2009s
Oscar race, is the reason that blockbuster behemoths
such as Mad Max: Fury Road and The Martian are up for
the big prize.
In today’s world, the Oscars simply don’t hold sway
over a films success. Walk into the new releases section
(if you still buy Bluray discs or physical media) and you’ll
sooner see a sticker with “Certified Fresh” from Rotten Tomatoes review aggregations than you will “Best
Picture Oscar Winner”. And as the prevalence of online-only reviewers and critics associations grow-mostly
formed of twenty-to-thirtysomething males with nostalgia glasses on, films that normally wouldn’t be receiving these Tomato badges of honour now are, and are
reaping commercial and critical accolades in the process
at any time of the year, not just in awards season.
Are the Academy voters wising up to this? Hard to say.
This year, the grassroots social media campaign, #oscarssowhite, is again fighting against perceived racism
in the acting category nominat [ۜˈ