I'm nothing if not an Academy Award apologist. I like the idea that there's a group that can come up with the best movie in a given year. "Best" of course is some nebulous mix of quality, popularity, significance, and representation of a given time. I think it's cool that you can look back to a given year and figure a lot out about tastes in movies then or what a consensus pick looked like in a certain era by looking at the nominees or winners. There's some value to that. Not a lot, but some.
Before I get into a solid couple weeks of Oscar prognosticating and examination, I wanted to say a couple things about this year's Oscar field as a whole. This Oscar season has been dominated by a discussion about diversity. OscarSoWhite has been a popular hashtag and it's the first thing mentioned in just about any Oscar discussion I've come across this season. As it should be. It's pretty sad that, given the demographics of this country (not to mention the world), that the Oscars are so incredibly weighted toward straight white men. In Hollywood these days, there's an embarrassing lack of different perspectives.
However, this whole diversity debate is mostly over what isn't there. There's a lack of diversity, not a lack of talented people doing great work. That's where I've had trouble this season. The list of movies, performances, directors, writers, etc. all looks pretty good to me, given all the movies I saw in 2015. There's a lot of great movies in 2015 and the Oscars did a pretty great job of recognizing them. When someone like Brie Larson or Leonardo DiCaprio come away with Oscars, it'll be hard to quibble with that. I love that something like Mad Max: Fury Road actually got nominated. Even though I didn't care for the movie, it's refreshing to see The Big Short, an actual comedy movie, with a legit chance to win best picture.
Each individual snub of a diversity movie or performance from this year makes some sense. Straight Outta Compton was much better than I assumed it would be, but it still had a story that played like a checklist of events. Will Smith was one of a half dozen actors with an equal case to be made for the last one or two acting nominations. Magnolia simply doesn't have the resources to mount the kind of campaign to get Tangerine enough traction for any nominations. Creed is one of my very favorite movies of the year. I'd nominate Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan without hesitation. The lone nomination for Stallone, the white guy in the movie, looks pretty bad. What's a little lost though, is that Creed is a movie that no one assumed would get any nominations. What's surprising isn't that Coogler and Jordan were snubbed, but that Stallone was nominated. Then there's Idris Elba in Beasts of No Nation. I haven't seen that movie. I can only guess that he wasn't nominated out of some sort of bias against the Netflix release model. That's the snub I really can't explain. Entirely articles could be written about each of these lack of nominations, but the arguments all are pretty explainable.
It's the plurality of these snubs that's hard to swallow. The more times that a coin-flip keeps coming up tails, the more you question the person flipping it. I think the percentage of voters who actively voted against any of these out of active prejudice is pretty small. It's harder to say what's happening unconsciously. One look at the voting body makes it pretty clear that the Academy is in need of a little updating.
I'm glad that the Academy voted to make the changes that they announced starting next year. Yes, it was a PR decision, but no, no one forced them to do it. I believe it was a unanimous decision by leadership to make the changes, which shows that they are actually concerned with looking like they are out of touch. I actually wasn't sure that they cared at all before this. In case you aren't familiar, there's basically two big changes to membership to the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. The first is that there's a "use it or lose it" rule for maintaining voting rights. Essentially, you have to be active in movies in the last decade to keep your voting rights, and if you are active for three consecutive decades you have lifetime voting rights. That's fair. It also helps to modernize the voter base, so the movies can better represent the film industry of today, as opposed to the film industry of 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. The second big change is that they'll be doubling minority and female membership by 2020. That's fine as well. The current nomination process is pretty insular, so it's tough to internally update the demographics. And, five years is an aggressive pace for the Academy that indicates more of a continued effort than a "one time fix".
I'm not going to say that after these changes the Academy is done and Hollywood is fixed forever. To start, a semantic check: It's not a "broken" system. It's an imbalanced one. Remember, even if they achieve some theoretical "perfect representation", we'd still disagree with and question the picks. There's no "fixing" something subjective. The hope is that with these changes, the Academy will reflect the tastes of more than just a certain group of people within the industry, let alone the populous. That's the goal.
The Oscars don't matter, except that they kind of do. There's nothing about winning an Oscar that will make me start liking The Big Short any more and nothing about a snub that makes me think that Creed wasn't fantastic. But, I'll be honest, I'm more likely to see The Best Years of Our Lives than The Yearling. For some reason, the Oscars carry a weight that other awards don't, so I'd like to not be embarrassed by the results a decade later.
Whatever. That's my two cents on that. I really like this year's nominees but I fully admit that there's a problem with the system as a whole, from development to production to awards. I'd rather move onto the aspects of the Oscars that interest me more and that I know much more about: predictions. Stay tuned for a solid two weeks of Oscar predictions. I can't wait!
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