Can The Oscars Ever Be Great Again?

Part 1: The Failures of the Academy and What You May Have Forgotten

By all standards by which we measure success, this year’s Academy Awards should be the most anticipated in over a decade. Black Panther, one of the highest grossing movies in history is up for Best Picture, as are Bohemian Rhapsody and A Star is Born, two of the biggest box office hits of the year. What is more, unlike so many years in the past, the Best Picture race is wide open. Roma, the critical darling that has won the lion’s share of the Best Director prizes, should have the edge, but it’s a foreign language movie, and that’s a type of film that has a hard enough time getting Best Picture nominations in the first place. Bohemian Rhapsody won the Best Drama prize from the Golden Globes, but its been a very critically divisive film. Green Book won Best Comedy and triumphed at the Producer Guild. In a huge upset, Black Panther won the Best Ensemble from the SAG awards. The Favorite was the big winner at BAFTA, and A Star is Born is one of the movies that the Oscars love honoring.

So, there’s a very good chance that this Sunday’s Oscars could be the most watched in a decade. But there’s also a very good chance that the ceremony could be a complete disaster. For the first time in thirty years, the Oscars does not have a host. This is a self-inflicted wound by the Academy for not having a ready replacement when scandal rocked Kevin Hart.

In all candor, though, the Academy has been self-inflicting a lot of wounds right from the start. There was the uproar when they announced in July that they were planning to give an award for Most Popular Film. When so many people got pissed — mainly because the Academy never defined what ‘popular meant’ and the idea of having to admit that the Oscars didn’t recognize the most popular films — they shelved it less than a week late. Then, just a week ago, they announced that several of their minor awards, including Best Cinematography and Editing, would be given off screen. The technical guilds threw a fit, and the Academy reversed itself again two days later.

All of these problems have come at a time when more and more people are wondering if the Academy Awards is relevant at all. This is nothing new; people have been making arguments about for decades. But at a time when Oscar ratings have been dropping steadily for years, reviews of the telecast have been increasingly hostile, and so much of Hollywood is under fire for charges of sexism within the industry, there are increasing worries within the Academy that the Awards may be becoming a weight around the industry rather than the crown jewel its supposed to be.

I would like to propose a counter-argument. Most of the problems the Oscars has been having are not new. There have complaints that the awards are too long, too dull, and too irrelevant since at least the 1960s, if not longer. And most of the problems that everyone says are hurting the Oscars aren’t even close to being as bad as everyone says they are. As someone who has been a historian of the Oscars privately almost since I was old enough to appreciate films, let’s deal with some of the more prominent arguments against them:

The hosts of the Academy Awards are not entertaining.

There is some truth to that of late. Jon Stewart, Ellen DeGeneres, Chris Rock and Jimmy Kimmel are some of the funniest comedians alive, and if they can’t make viewers at home laugh, clearly there’s something wrong. But this is a complaint that has always been register at the Academy, and often with much more relevance.

Bob Hope, who hosted the awards more often then anyone history, was regarded as terminally unhip when the Awards were still given in a banquet hall. Johnny Carson, whose telecasts are now remembered with great fondness by the baby boomers, was horribly maligned the years he did so. And those were the natural entertainers: this is a ceremony that has had Charlton Heston. Frank Sinatra and Warren Beatty host, none of whom were natural comedians.

Were any of them as bad as Seth McFarlane or James France? I can’t say with certainty. But I do know that there may be some kind of vacuum around the awards they sucks all the entertainment out of them.

The Oscars are too political.

This is an argument that gets made over and over again by even friends of the Academy. But Hollywood, like every other institution, has a short memory.

In the 1970s, George C. Scott and Marlon Brando refused to accept their Oscars, with Brando famously sending a Native American impersonator to do so. When a documentary filmmaker accepting an Award for the anti-Vietnam films Hearts and Minds and gave a speech that inspired boos, Frank Sinatra came on stage to admonish the filmmaker. He and Shirley MacLaine nearly came to blows backstage over it. And Vanessa Redgrave famously pissed off everybody when she accepted her award for Julia by giving a pro-Palestinian speech. It says a lot for the decade that when Jane Fonda won both her Oscars, she gave the least political speeches of the group.

So yes, Michael Moore got booed off the stage, and there was a lot of ‘Time’s Up’ last year. But nothing has really changed about political diatribes. What has changes is our society’s reaction to it. Back then, critics actually thought the speeches livened up dull and predictable affairs. Hard to picture it now.

The quality of films gets worse each year.

This is a hard argument to make or win, so I’m going to use history as my guide. In 1975, many critics leading up to their Oscar prediction said: “It wasn’t a bad year for movie, it was a terrible year.” The nominated films were One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Barry Lyndon, Dog Day Afternoon, Nashville, and Jaws. With the exception of Barry Lyndon, all of these movies are now considered classics, and even that film has been undergoing reevaluation in recent years.

Now, will we in thirty years time view Get Out, Darkest Hour, Three Billboards, and The Shape of Water the same way? I don’t know. They all played well enough to me.

I could write a much longer essay on why people have argued about the films that compete at the Oscars, but the biggest blow Hollywood has done to itself is self-inflicted. If you’re going to flood the multiplexes with bad action movies, unfunny comedies and adaptation of teen dystopia films, and simultaneously released all of the major contenders in two theaters in New York and LA in December, don’t be shocked when people say they haven’t seen a nominated movie this year. You can’t promote box office eleven months of the year and then choose to honor greatness in December. If nothing else, you’ve made damn sure members of the Academy have memories of goldfish. You especially can’t argue that The Dark Knight isn’t an Oscar movie and Benjamin Button is. I’d say you’re cutting off your nose to spite your face, but since this is Hollywood you might view this as a compliment.

So, most of the arguments are not new. Is there a way to fix the problem with the Academy? I’ll deal with that later in the week.