On the Role of Awards Season in the Zeitgeist
Why people ought not take the Oscars (et al.) so seriously, and offering a different and more healthy outlook on that whole industry.
Every Oscars season, I have a whole host of friends that get pumped up to hear their favorite movies get announced as the best of a given category, and inevitably 90% of them end up furious at the television because something they enjoyed got snubbed. Awards shows were never intended to be objective measurements of the year’s accomplishment, even if they are presented to us as such. The selection process of any major ceremony involves a panel of highly-opinionated people. Some are journeymen of their respective field, some are distinguished tastemakers, others are cretins who have schmoozed their way up the ladder by shaking hands with the right people. At the end of the day, though, their collective opinions are never going to match yours perfectly. What’s better than trusting the decrees of an opaque obelisk? Finding common ground with a group whose tastes match yours. The award money and the imaginary prestige of a terrestrial gold-painted statuette might not be as alluring for the people involved, but at the end of the day, the true creatives behind the best works never care about such rewards anyway.
For me, the platonic ideal of the awards ceremony is the Booker Prize. My experience with their organization began with seeing The Sellout by Paul Beatty in the Brown University bookstore on an expedition through Providence, picking it up, enjoying it, and googling what other novels had won the prize that had adorned the front cover of the paperback. There, I saw Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, which I had thoroughly enjoyed in my freshman reading class in college. I decided to check out a few other winners, like John Banville’s The Sea, to further verify the award’s credibility. Since then, every book I’ve read that happens to coincide with their shortlist (or longlist) has been an enjoyable experience. Have there been snubs? Longtime readers will remember my appreciation of Percival Everett, whose novels have made the shortlist twice but has not yet been honored with the award. The same year that the aforementioned The Sellout won was a year that Ottessa Moshfegh, another author whose works have been praised on this blog, had a contender up for nomination. Whether I personally enjoyed any of the nominees more or less than the winners has no bearing on my estimation of the prize because they have a track record of picking good novels. Even if my favorite books of the year consistently placed second in all their lists going forward, I would continue to hold them in high esteem because they recognize the qualities of good literature. This may not line the pockets of my favorite authors quite as well, but they’ve already gotten their money from me.
The exception to this rule is, ironically enough, the source of inspiration for this article. The Academy Awards is an industry award and not something open to all films at all times. This most recently arose as an issue with Netflix’s attempts to break into the scene; because all their movies are on streaming platforms, they generally do not meet all the criteria to be nominated without shady backroom dealing or finding a loophole in the system. If, for example, you and your friends went out and shot what was objectively the best movie of all time to everyone who saw it on a $15,000 budget,1 you would not be up for contention. People criticize the Oscars for being insular, but that’s because they don’t understand that it is by nature an insular award. People also criticize films for including so-called “Oscar bait” because directors understand what the nominators tend to look for. The entire industry has refocused from putting out a quality product in order to make sure their names are listed alongside One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Silence of the Lambs because they think it will immortalize them. Unfortunately, the less entertaining the average nominee gets, the cheaper the prestige becomes. I only watch a few movies a year as-is,2 but at no point would I consider using the Oscars to look back at gems I might have missed.
If people by and large held awards shows in this same light, the ceiling for high-quality big budget releases would go back up. Hollywood tends to allocate about half a movie’s budget towards advertising as a rule of thumb, and a substantial amount of that percentage goes into “for your consideration” advertising around the city of Los Angeles during Oscar season. If we can take money away from the bureaucrats and the psychopaths in the advertising department, then more of that budget can go towards the real creative decisions. Talk about your favorite movies again. Make word-of-mouth a legitimate model that indie filmmakers, musicians, and authors can rely on to make back their investments.
The culture is beginning to trend back towards this attitude as shown by the successes of movies like Skinamarink and Hundreds of Beavers, but it will take a conscious effort to really move the needle. I’m doing my part: every other week on this blog is dedicated primarily to talking about someone else’s creative output, and the other weeks usually have one or two names peppered in throughout. Even the small stuff helps; I’m not on Letterboxd, but I often see people share sarcastic or ironic commentary about the films they’ve watched in the review section rather than insightful opinions. In that respect the Goodreads user base is miles ahead; if only they’d stop skewing the pinnacle of human achievement towards smutty romance novels. Even if you just tell your coworkers at the watercooler (or equivalent breakroom) something you’ve enjoyed recently, you’re helping to work towards a better experience for all of us. If, on the other hand, the media that has been recommended to you hasn’t been up to snuff as of late, consider seeking out what awards the things you have loved in the past all have won in common.
Shoutouts to Skinamarink. Kyle Edward Ball follows me on twitter, so there's a nonzero chance he's seeing this and I can't wait to see what he's cooking up for the future.
I went to the theater thrice in 2024: twice for films I wrote about in my article on movies with classical themes and once to see Dune Part 2, which was also blog-related. Other than that, practically everything else I watched was on Kanopy, and even then I found myself with extra tickets at the end of most months. Ladies who love frugality, hit me up.