The Oscars are now an alternate universe

This is, of course, the Oscar season, the one time of year when moviegoers are suddenly deluged with adult-oriented Academy Awards contenders. I guess that's what makes it even more depressing to peruse the holiday weekend box-office results--and hardly see an Oscar contender in the bunch. If there were ever a time when it was more clear than ever that Oscar films and commercial pictures are operating in separate universes--sort of like men from Mars and women from Venus--this would be it.

If you study the weekend's numbers, you'll discover that of the top 10 box-office winners, only two--"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," which ranked No. 3 with a three-day total of $27.2 million, and "Doubt," which brought up the rear, landing at No. 10 with a three-day figure of $5.7 million--were legitimate best picture contenders.

The remainder of the box-office Top 10 consists of mainstream, crowd-pleasing pictures, some of them quite skillfully made, but none that has any chance at a best picture nod. In fact, one picture, "Valkyrie," though it earned respectable reviews, was deliberately kept out of award-season contention, with MGM/UA refusing to screen the picture for critics groups or run an Oscar campaign, fearing (quite legitimately) that if the film was snubbed by critics and awards groups, it would tarnish its commercial potential.

Isn't this a strange, not to mention altogether unhealthy, state of affairs, where at year's end, Hollywood essentially divides up its fourth-quarter releases into two totally different quadrants--the world of popcorn movies the public wants to see and the world of dark, brooding Oscar movies handled so gingerly that they can't actually be shown in wide release until moviegoers has been properly hypnotized by thousands of 'For your consideration' ads and softened up by a flurry of early January Oscar nominations and Golden Globe awards? 

I'm not blaming the motion picture academy, which simply wants to reward quality. And I'm certainly not blaming moviegoers, who, in their own way, are eager for good pictures to see. But by insisting on releasing all the potential Oscar candidates in the last 10 weeks of the year--and then largely only in limited release--studios have walled off all the potential best picture candidates in an awards-season VIP lounge, a self-defeating exercise, since once the academy announces its five best picture finalists in January, all the other films are, by definition, damaged goods, roundly ignored by the media for the rest of the season. If a movie has genuine audience appeal, why not allow it a chance to shine in a less competitive time of year?

To be blunt about it, the Oscars ignore too many good movies. It's painfully obvious that somewhere in the evolution of the Oscars (and this is a topic we'll return to in another post) academy members started rewarding movies not for their skill and craftsmanship but for their aesthetic and social importance. This has transformed the Oscars from a mainstream movie institution to an elite art society, leading to its increased marginalization, both as a barometer of public taste and as a big-time media event. If we want studios to make movies that embrace both popular taste and deft artistry, we need to find a way to give out awards that reflect both kinds of aspirations. If we put the Oscar movies in an Oscar ghetto of limited release in small pockets of urban America, we'll end up insuring that they never reach a broader audience, an audience just as hungry as Oscar voters for good pictures to see. 

Photo of an Oscar statuette by Bob Fila / Chicago Tribune

Comments

[Voiceguy]

This is why the People's Choice Awards were invented.

VG

[harry]

THE DARK KNIGHT MAN THE DARK KNIGHT SHOULD GET NOMINATED FOR BEST PICTURE

[JeremyinOZ]

But Benjamin Button is a very ordinary film boosted by its star appeal and big studio openiong power. Due to its lack of opening power, Slumdog has had to build an audience. I suspect it will turn a very helathy profit, eventually outgrossing Doubt. This article made some good points, but is essentially flawed. For my money, The Dark Knight is perhaps the only crowd pleaser with best picture credentials, most are too cynical to warrant recognition.

[Art Snob]

Unless you believe in the false logic of "argumentum ad crumenam" -- that the most popular/hightest grossing movie is necessarily the BEST movie -- Oscar voters should simply vote for whatever movie they think will hold up best over the long haul.

[Art Snob]

Artistic awards are bogus to begin with -- great movies happen when they HAPPEN, not on a regular annual schedule. Unless you believe in the fallacy of "argumentum ad crumenam" -- that the most financially successful movie is necessarily the BEST movie -- I say that if there HAS to be an award, voters should simply vote for whatever they think will hold up best over the long haul.

[Tom Andrews]

First off....How do you divide something into Two Quadrants?

Second, clearly you just want to write this article. You get an idea a few years ago that Popcorn movies and Best Picture type movies are divergent and you want to write an article. Then you do some research and find that that isn't actually true. So you have to wait around a few years til we find one of these years where there just isn't a very good crop of best picture candidates, and then you can finally write the article. Yay, did it come out as good as you'd hoped?

We get years like this every so often. Where its a little thin as far as movies that are accessible to the regular person. But what you are talking about just isn't true. Its just one of those weird arguments that for some reason sound logical to people but isn't true if you did any research. Or isn't true if you actually took 15 seconds to think about it. Besides, if The Dark Knight and Benjamin Button both get nominated, then what will you be talking about?

-T

[Michael A. Shea]

Let Hollywood take a cue from publishing. Announce throughout the year that certain films are "Academy Award Nomination Finalists" in particular categories. This would parallel the National Book Award Finalists which expand the list of honored works.

[Lizzie]

Agreed! If some of these Oscar-bait films were released in the summer, they'd get more attention. The audience for serious film is there all year round. (Not everyone wants to see exploding-car movies just because it's July.)

What's stupid is that every "serious" film is released during the holidays, when many of us -- me, anyway -- are too busy to go to the theater. Between holiday parties, visiting families and kids out of school, the chances of catching a Kate Winslet film before it goes DVD is pretty slight.

[Dennis]

The answer to the above dilemma should be obvious, and it's strange that Mr. Goldstein couldn't come up with it: merely create a few new Oscar categories. Best Popcorn Movie, for example, or Best Picture Based on a Video Game. Another contender: Most Effective Use of Explosions.

[Rick Mitchell]

Perhaps Mr. Goldstein's interpretation of the Academy's history is different from mine, which is also from an older generation. The final awards voting have almost always been based on aesthetic and/or social importance, though the first year only they did separate such films from commercial successes. This stems from the Academy's formation by people from a post-Victorian society which was brought up to have a reverence for "high art", whether they actually liked it or not. The key founders of the Academy, most notably Douglas Fairbanks, had developed an inferiority complex about working in a medium that in the Twenties still had not received the respect granted literature and theater, and an unacknowledged goal in the formation of the Academy was to change this attitude. Thus, for most of the first 50 years of its existence, the Best Film winners were not necessarily the "best film" of that year (for which the Academy has never set any aesthetic standards), but the film equivalent of the best play or novel, of which most of the winners were adaptations. An increase of film respecting inductees since the Seventies saw a greater melding of commercial and higher tastes, but that has been altered by the arthouse mentality that has infected the industry over the last 20 years. I agree that the Academy should be more open to popular films that also meet obvious standards of artistic excellence, but it should not be turned into another People's Choice Awards, especially considering the current "aesthetic" standards of the people (and this from someone who grew up on American International pictures).

A personal note: I was never that excited by the Oscars because I grew up in a town that was at the bottom of the first run cycle, so we wouldn't get end of year winners until the following summer or later and I found it hard to get excited over the win of a film you hadn't seen. I generally have not watched the show in over 35 years because it turned into too much of a tv variety show instead of a celebration of the theatrical motion picture art.

Rick Mitchell
Film Editor/Film Historian

[Errand Boy for Adlai Stevenson]

Goldstein writes:

"To be blunt about it, the Oscars ignore too many good movies. It's painfully obvious that somewhere in the evolution of the Oscars ... academy members started rewarding movies not for their skill and craftsmanship but for their aesthetic and social importance. This has transformed the Oscars from a mainstream movie institution to an elite art society, leading to its increased marginalization, both as a barometer of public taste and as a big-time media event. ... If we put the Oscar movies in an Oscar ghetto of limited release in small pockets of urban America, we'll end up insuring that they never reach a broader audience, an audience just as hungry as Oscar voters for good pictures to see."

What schizoid gibberish. How are you defining "good movies"? As studio bombs that were penned by a computer, yet rake in millions anyway? And what is all this reverse snobbism re "elite art society" and "ghetto of limited release"? The Academy never honors true independents; studio-owned boutique indiewood stuff hardly qualifies either as art or as elite. The real issue isn't what the Academy does or doesn't, should or shouldn't nominate, it's distribution. These so-called small films should open wide, and stay on thousands of screens, until they catch on, which they inevitably would. Conversely, all the Will Smith, Jerry Bruckheimer, Adam Sandler, and Eddie Murphy duds ought to be open only on one or two screens, then claw their way out, if they can, based on word of mouth, not on multimillion dollar ad campaigns. Also, how does aesthetic importance differ from "skill and craftsmanship"?

[Julie]

I don't like it but I understand why films are released in select cities. A few years ago, a theatre was opened in my area that promised to devote one screen to arthouse/foreign films. I found that there were only two or three people at each showing I attended. The theatre lost money and reverted back to showing popcorn movies. The people around me frankly have no interest in quality films or Oscar contenders. I drive to two cities that are both an hour away in order to see what I want, and I understand it's a necessary evil. It wouldn't matter when those films are released because they'd still have to win major awards before the average viewer will bother wtih them.