Last week, the Motion Picture Academy made some changes to its biggest award ceremony--the Oscars. The Academy announced that next year's Oscar ceremony will have a new category to honour "popular" films. This will give big tentpole blockbusters like Black Panther and... well, any superhero film a shot at something other than a technical award. Because, let's be honest, no matter how good the film is (and I think Black Panther is certainly that), it doesn't stand a chance at getting a Best Picture nomination because the Academy will never look at it as anything other than a 50-year-old comic book character.
The sad truth is, the Academy has always, at least in my lifetime, been a bit snobbish about who gets nominations. Most of their nominees and certainly their winners are films that are supposed to make one think about the human condition and morality and our place in society and all sorts of other weighty issues like that. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure Moonlight is a great film, but it's not something that I'm necessarily going to jump at the chance to watch... certainly not multiple times. And I'm not saying that weighty issues shouldn't be examined in film. I am saying that the Academy just likes it when those issues are really in your face.
The best example of this was 2008's The Dark Knight. This film touched on all sorts of important social issues. It made us ask important questions like, is it okay for someone to invade our privacy if its in the interest of protecting the general populace? (Again, this was 2008--we still cared about things like warrantless wiretapping in the name of national security.) And yet, with the obvious exception of Heath Ledger's performance (more on that in a bit), the film failed to garner any non-technical nominations. In my opinion, it should have been nominated for Best Picture and Christopher Nolan should have been nominated for Best Director. It was seriously one of the best directed films I'd seen in a long time. In fact, I'll go out on a limb and say that Nolan did as good a job directing that as he did last year's critical darling Dunkirk.
I'm an Oscar junkie. As I write this, for the life of me, I can't remember what won Best Picture that year, or, for that matter, any of the Best Picture nominees from that year except Frost/Nixon and that's only because I'm also a Watergate junkie. However, I do plan on looking it up after I post this.
Which brings me to the late, great Heath Ledger, who was posthumously awarded the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his work in The Dark Knight. To me, it was almost insulting. Not because he didn't deserve to win, mind you. He absolutely deserved that award. His performance was jaw-droppingly amazing. What was insulting about it was the fact that had he not died before the film's release, I don't think he would have won. In fact, I don't think he would have even gotten a nomination because I think the Academy would have only seen the fact that he was playing a nearly 70-year-old comic book character. That is why the film was left out of the Best Picture and Best Director categories--because at its heart, it's still Batman. You can make all the serious social commentary you want when you make a movie, but if you couch it in an action film based on a beloved comic, all the Academy will see is that comic.
Speaking of comics--there was one other injustice in the Best Supporting Actor Oscar category in 2008. (Who knew there could be multiple issues with just one category in just one year?) The person who really got shafted that year was Robert Downey, Jr., for his hysterical performance in the movie Tropic Thunder. Frankly, I was amazed he even got a nomination (again, not that he didn't deserve it). But why tease him like that? Even if he wasn't up against Ledger, there wasn't a chance in hell he was going to win it for the simple reason that it was an over-the-top comedy.
I've often wondered what the Academy has against comedies. Even the really good ones will usually only get nominated in Supporting Acting and writing categories, and even then, it only has a chance at winning for the screenplay. The few times in recent memory that Oscars have been awarded to comedies, there was always some kind of underlying drama as a counterpoint to the humour. Jack Nicholson's performance in As Good As It Gets could be looked at as comedic. And it was very funny. But underneath the funny, if offensive, one liners, Melvin Udall was an obsessive-compulsive, misanthropic, germophobic writer who just wanted "to be a better man." This brought out enough drama that the Academy felt it was okay to give Jack his third Oscar.
But what's wrong with giving awards to films and performances that just make us laugh? Most actors will be the first to say that comedy is harder than drama. So why do Oscars only seem to go to the more "realistic" dramatic performances? Why couldn't Melissa McCarthy actually have won for her performance in 2011's Bridesmaids? Or Downey for Tropic Thunder? The last Oscar I remember being awarded to a completely over-the-top, laugh-out-loud comedic performance was to Kevin Kline for A Fish Called Wanda--thirty years ago. (I suppose one could cite Jack Palance in City Slickers or Cuba Gooding, Jr., in Jerry Maguire, but, like Nicholson in As Good As it Gets, there were enough serious, more dramatic moments that kept them from being too funny.)
One performance that I felt was unfairly passed over was Michael Keaton in 2014's Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance). The Academy was kind enough to give him a nomination, but because Eddie Redmayne was playing Stephen Hawking--a real-life person who overcame almost unimaginable obstacles to become one of maybe two astrophysicists recognized by people who know nothing about astrophysics--he was the more "logical" choice. To be fair, I still haven't seen the film and I'm sure he did a magnificent job, but giving him the Oscar--or, rather, not giving it to Keaton--just seemed too easy to me. I often wonder if Keaton killed his chances of winning when he accepted his Golden Globe. He thanked the Hollywood Foreign Press for recognizing comedies, which is not exactly something the Academy is well-known for, as I hope I've illustrated above.
Over the last few years, there have been a number of criticisms of the Academy Awards, from a lack of diversity among the nominees to how long the ceremony is. And people have complained in the past that a lot of popular films don't get recognized except in the technical categories. I remember the Academy trying to address this issue some years back when they doubled the number of nominees for Best Picture. I don't think it worked too well.
Most of the time, I have to say, these "popular films" are not as good as the films that do tend to get nominated and/or win. I don't see The Meg being huge Oscar bait. I'm sure it's probably highly entertaining. There's nothing wrong with that, but is it really great cinema?
I really feel that the best way to improve the Oscars (other than obviously recognizing diversity) is to recognize other genres than drama. I think they ought to take a page out of the Golden Globes' playbook and separate drama and comedy into two categories. This will give a lot of really great performances a chance that they wouldn't otherwise have. I'm not sure I would go as far as to add an action category as the spectacle of blowing things up is usually the primary focus of action films. But if there is an action film worthy of critical praise (let's say... oh, I don't know... The Dark Knight), they could be nominated as a drama or comedy, depending on the storyline.
And I realize that this will make the ceremony longer. Personally, I think this is a non-issue. The Oscars are once a year. It's the highest holiest day of the awards season. Get over it, already! Don't start eliminating the technical awards from the broadcast just to please the local news anchors. The sound mixers can often work as hard as the actors, writers, and directors.
Just because a movie makes a lot of money and attracts a lot of people to the theaters, doesn't mean it's the best written, best acted, or even just the best film... except at making a lot of money and attracting a lot of people to the theaters. When most people go to the movies, they're just looking for escapist entertainment. They want to be taken out of the dramas of their own world for a couple hours. Not that I think there's anything wrong with serious films. Sometimes we need those too. But, ultimately
we must remember why we have these awards--to honour what's best (which
I realize is a subjective term), not what's popular. I think the Grammys should look into this a little more often.
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