The Oscars’ Incredible Knack for Being Wrong
As a film critic, I have complicated feelings about Oscar season, a baggy calendrical concept that now includes every month of the year, from the indie-film discoveries of the Sundance Film Festival in January to the awards voting by critics’ groups in December. The complaints about the Academy Awards are as well rehearsed as the acceptance speech of a surefire victor: The most deserving nominees seldom win, and the most inventive movies of the year typically get no nominations at all. The voting process is so opaque and so subject to external influence—barraged by ever more expensively managed PR campaigns and buffeted by political and social forces far outside the Academy’s garden walls—that to say the prize has little to do with the recognition of artistic merit is to join a weary chorus. And yet the whole cinematic world dances to the rhythm of the Oscars’ baton, and I refer not merely to the film industry itself but to a sprawling satellite economy of run-up awards, Oscar-branded media coverage, fashion marketing, and social-media conversation.
To scoff at or criticize or even ignore the annual ritual that is the Academy Awards is not to escape its hold on our culture. Indeed, the doubters and haters make up a crucial part of the system. Resistance to the Oscars’ outsize influence is what sparked the creation of alternative prizes such as the Independent Spirit Awards and the Gotham Awards, now glamorous institutions in their own right. Some award-giving bodies, such as the dubious Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and —have destroyed whatever legitimacy the Globes ever had. (I should disclose that I’m a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, whose annual ceremony—started just six years after the first Oscars were handed out—has long been a station of the cross on the awards circuit. So even in critiquing the Oscars, I’m one more cog in an awards machine that offers no real place for an observer to stand outside it: Critics’ awards, reviews, lists, and rankings are routinely deployed in Oscar campaigns.)
