Oscar Blogging – Good or Bad?
When
I was really into the Oscars, I would say that they were definitely a good
thing. Yet, it certainly does feel like in the past 10 years, things have
gotten wildly out of control, and more and more, that awards season is little
more than an echo chamber. The nominees are seemingly drawn from a small group
of films that the Oscar bloggers anoint at the beginning of the season – sight
unseen – and while it can be easy to fall out of the picture if your film
doesn’t deliver (think of Suffragette or Truth or Freeheld this year), it can
be very hard to climb your way into the race if you weren’t tapped from the
start.
Difficult,
but certainly not impossible. I don’t think many thought The Martian was going
to be among the nominees at the beginning of the season – but the studio was
smart, and got out ahead of the season, debuting the film at TIFF - an odd move
for a film that big, but one designed to get people to see it as more than
audience movie. It worked. The Big Short entered the season fairly late, and
now it may even win the whole thing. It’s not impossible to enter the race if
people don’t see you as threat in October – but there’s only so much room for
you to do so. So The Big Short gets in, but Creed cannot find its footing –
that is in part because the studio didn’t know they had an Oscar contender in
Creed, and did in The Big Short, but also in part because the race is half over
before it begins.
Just
look at the best actor race for example. Leonardo DiCaprio has been the
frontunner all year – and he’s going to win (more on that later) – in part, I
think, because the narrative that he was long overdue took hold and didn’t let
go all year. Never mind the fact that he has been way better in other movies,
and his work in The Revenant is not the sort of thing that wins Oscars, he’s
winning anyway. The other nominees include Eddie Redmayne for The Danish Girl –
a film that few people actually seem to like – yet he was tapped as early as
DiCaprio was as an Oscar contender, and so he is. You can say something similar
about Michael Fassbender in Steve Jobs (I think he’s the best of the nominees –
but it’s not much of a horserace) – a film that tanked at the Box Office, but
that had been tapped as an Oscar contender all year. Even Bryan Cranston in
Trumbo had made quite a few people’s predictions before the season started.
It’s hard to really argue that Oscar blogging doesn’t have an effect on the
season – that they’re just reporting what happened – when they can predict four
out of five nominees, and the winner, of a major category without seeing any of
them.
Still,
I’m fairly agnostic about Oscar bloggers in general. Maybe they effect the
outcome, maybe they don’t – it’s not something anyone can prove. It’s one of
those things, and hey, if you enjoy writing or reading about the Oscars six
months a year, have at it.
#OscarsSoWhite
The
fact that, for the second straight year, all 20 acting nominees were white is a
major embarrassment for the Academy – and one that they have moved quickly to
try and address – by committing to add more minority members to the Academy
(doubling the number by 2020) and by, for the first time since 1970, weeding
out some of the current membership – not kicking them out of the Academy, but
taking away their right to vote for the Oscars if a) they are not a previous
Oscar nominee, b) have not been active in the last 10 years or c) been active
in three different 10 year periods since becoming a member. Naturally, there
are many people who are upset about these rules – try and take anything away
from anyone, and they’ll be upset, but to me it’s a move the Academy had to
make – adapt or die, really. It is a shame that most of the people losing their voting rights are older, and are being painted with the brush of being racist, which I don’t necessarily think they are. As the various essays that have popped up in the Hollywood Reporter from people who may be potentially effected by this have stated, they believe they vote colorblind – not voting for anyone based on their race, but instead voting on the basis of the quality of the performance alone. I believe that these members firmly believe this – and I also believe that most of these members are not really racist (are some? Sure – get any 6,000 people in a room together, and you will find some racists).
I
also believe, however, that racial bias certainly comes into play. Can you
really be surprised that a group like the Academy – whose average voter is a 64
year old, straight white man – who watch a film like Creed, and not be more moved
by Sylvestor Stallone’s performance in it, than by Michael B. Jordan’s? Who do
you think that voter is going to have an easier time relating to? How is the
same voter going to react to a film like Straight Outta Compton – which in many
ways is the type of straight ahead, musical biopic they love – except for the
fact that’s about young, (justifiably angry) black men, who swear a lot, and
perform the type of music that that Academy member probably doesn’t much care
for.
Because,
make no mistake, the Academy could have easily have found a few worthy acting
nominees who were not white – even in films they nominated for other awards.
Samuel L. Jackson for The Hateful Eight or Michael B. Jordan for Creed would
get my vote over any of the Best Actor nominees. Oscar Isaac or Benicio Del
Toro could have easily have gotten in for Supporting Actor (that’s right, this
is bigger than just African Americans being snubbed – it’s anyone who isn’t
white) – not to mention Jason Mitchell from Straight Outta Compton. Tessa
Thompson is at least as good as a few of the Supporting Actress nominees in
Creed. I just saw Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq, and Teyonah Parris is as deserving a Best Actress candidate as there was
last year.
Now, expunging some people from the voting rolls
may not make that much of a difference to who the Academy nominates – we have
no idea who voted for what. But I do believe that if you cannot meet one of the
three criteria set out to keep your voting rights here, than perhaps you
shouldn’t be voting for the Oscars anyway. Remember, this is supposed to be the
elite group of Hollywood – an award given from your peers, and so if you don’t
meet those criteria, can you honestly say that you should vote? Sure, there are
probably going to be some surprising people who get kicked out. But waiting for
a perfect system before they do anything is the same thing as doing nothing –
because there will be no perfect system.
In the end though, the Academy will only ever be
able to do so much. The much bigger problem is in the films getting made (or
more specifically, not getting made) by black or female filmmakers – not to
mention the almost non-existent numbers of films being made by Asian American,
Hispanic/Latino American, Native American or Middle Eastern American people in
Hollywood. This is still an industry completely and totally dominated by
straight white men and that needs to change. And it needs to change at all
levels – from executives, to directors/producers/writers to actor to all the
behind the scenes people – and even to people who write about the industry –
from critics to Oscar bloggers and everything in between. The Academy are
taking some good steps – but they can only go so far by themselves.
Rule Changes I Would Make
There
have been a lot of suggestions about future rule changes to help with the
diversity issues – but to be honest, I don’t like most of them. The one I am
fully in favor of –and have been since they changed it – is moving back to 10
nominees for Best Picture – and barring that, back to 5. I liked the two years
they went with a full slat of 10 nominees – it really did allow for a wider
array of films to be nominated. But people complained about the prestige being
hurt, so they went with this “floating” number of nominees, and requirements of
having to garner a certain percentage of #1 votes to get nominated, and it
ruined the whole thing. Now, Pixar cannot even be nominated when they make a
masterpiece like Inside Out. And that’s insane. Go to 10 nominees, and let
everyone vote for 10 films – do a sliding scale for example, when every Academy
member ranks their 10 favorite films of the year, with #1 getting 10 points, #2
9 points, etc. I know some Academy members complained about having to vote for
10 films in the past – but that’s another way to thin the herd a little bit,
because you cannot name 10 films you really liked during the course of the
year, then perhaps you didn’t see enough films, and shouldn’t be voting for the
Oscars.
What
I would NOT do is expand the number of acting nominees to 6, or any other
category. I think 10 is fine for Best Picture, but for the rest of the
categories, 5 is the right number. If you go more than that, than you may as
well throw away 80 some odd years of stats for individual nominees, and the
Academy’s history is what makes them special. That is all.
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