Editorial: About the Academy Awards

 

Well, this month has been rather quiet in the face of animated releases, other than a few trailers and announcements, so let's do another editorial. This time, I wanted to talk about something that I felt very strongly about, had a deep passion for and could talk about for hours, but instead I figured it would be more pertinent to talk about the Oscars.

What are the Oscars? Not in the literal sense, in the sense of "What do they mean"? Like the question "What is Love?" or "What is the meaning of life?" we aren't asking those questions in the literal sense of the question, I mean we know that love is a feeling and life has a dictionary definition, but in the more meta sense of it all, what really IS love, and does life have a true purpose? In the literal sense, the Oscars, or the Academy Awards are film industry awards given for artistic and technical merit given out every year by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and are widely perceived as a very prestigious award. These awards are given by category including "Best Picture", "Best Costume Design", "Best Film Editing", "Best Actor", "Best Documentary Feature" and so on and so forth. These awards have been given out since the late 20s and are still a highly discussed and anticipated event to this day. That is what the Oscars are in the literal sense of the question, but what are they beyond the literal meaning?

Are the Oscars really a prestigious award? Is it all just a marketing gimmick? Is it just a bunch of film people patting themselves on the back? In my opinion, the Oscars are nothing, not even a joke. Jokes mean something, I don't think that the Oscars mean anything.

Like, let's be real here, do any of us actually watch a movie because the Oscars nominated it? Is our enjoyment of a movie lessened because it didn't win an award? Let's be real here, most of us only care about the awards because we want to advertise our favourite movies, it's award season where everybody says "Hey X Movie is an academy award nominee, go check it out" or it's after award season where everybody goes "hey, X Movie won the Academy Award for Y, go check it out!" and I'm fine with that, I really am, I mean a large part of why I am doing this blog is essentially to tell people to watch the movies that I like, or at the very least it is a nice bonus. However, I do think we need to stop pretending like the awards actually do mean anything.

Let's take the "Best Picture" award for example. Tell me, have you ever heard of "Cavalcade" from 1933? How about "The Great Ziegfeld" from 1936? "Marty" from 1955? "Tom Jones" from 1963? "Ordinary People" from 1980? I mean, you might have if you're a serious film buff, or you're a serious watcher of every Oscar winning movie, because all of those movies not only got nominated, but won the award. You know what movie was not nominated for the "Best Picture" award? "Back to the Future", one of the most iconic and beloved movies of the 1980s, but apparently "Hannah and Her Sisters", "Prizzi's Honor" and "Tender Mercies" are the movies that are going to be remembered forever. Yes, I know that it is tough to predict what will be remembered and what will not, but it really does surprise me that "Out of Africa" was the best movie of 1985, when that year gave us "Brazil", "Weird Science", "The Goonies", "Clue" and "Back to the Future".

Sometimes absolutely awful movies also get nominated, screw "Dead Poets Society", I hate that movie, and I refuse to watch "Rain Man" on principle. Also, "The Godfather Part III"? To be fair, the "Best Picture" winner of 1990 was "Dances with Wolves", which is hilarious to me as a fan of "The Red Green Show". Does anybody even care about "Shakespeare in Love" anymore? Granted my favourite movie of all time is an Academy Award Best Picture Winner, 2010's "The King's Speech", but it isn't my favourite movie because of its award status, honestly I'm surprised it won at all considering 2010 also saw "Black Swan", "Inception" and "True Grit" nominated. Really, that point is moot when you take into consideration that only two of my favourite movies were even nominated for "Best Picture", and only one of them won. "The Shawshank Redemption" lost to "Forrest Gump".

Oh, but you really, REALLY want to talk about pointless, let's talk about the Oscars and animated movies. So far, only three animated movies have been nominated for "Best Picture", "Beauty and the Beast", "Up" and "Toy Story 3", all deserving movies definitely, but that's it? Not "The Lion King"? or "Spirted Away"? or "Waltz with Bashir"? No, these movies, if they get nominated at all, get to be nominated for "Best Animated Feature". Since 2001, the Academy Awards have included a "Best Animated" Feature category, and granted this one generally has less to gripe about, however, the amount of animated features released that could be nominated for the award is not that much compared to live-action movies. This can and has lead to films like "Puss in Boots", "Shark Tale" and "Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius" being nominated for the award, because... why? No really, why? Like, why "Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius"? Was 2001 really lacking in animated releases? Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (A god awful movie but it could have easily fit in with the typical Oscar selections), Waking Life, but nope, Jimmy Neutron was the one that needed to be nominated.

Granted the Academy does nominate some lesser known animated movies, like in 2003 they nominated "The Triplets of Belleville", 2007 they nominated "Persepolis" and 2016 they nominated both "My Life as a Zucchini" and "The Red Turtle", so that does give these movies some good exposure to people who would otherwise pass them over, but a lot of people often feel like this category is just lip-service to the medium.

Really, I don't see why anyone should care about the Academy Awards. A lot of the movies that won the biggest award, "Best Picture", are not movies we remember, and the movies that weren't even nominated are movies that everyone remembers and usually loves. It's like that joke about Pitchfork, you can tell an album is good when Pitchfork gives it a 6/10, but you can tell an album is great when Pitchfork gives it a 2/10. It's like that, because so many of the movies that have become pop culture staples, they usually did not get nominated for "Best Picture", seriously, go through the list and see which award winners you've even heard of. Really, that is the big thing about the Academy Awards, they don't mean anything because they're not meant to mean anything. The Academy does not make a movie a timeless classic, time does, and what movies are considered "timeless classics" can change with time, people were saying "Avatar" was going to be one of the most beloved movies of all time, and yeah, it's still somewhat iconic, but the rate it's hype just died down, and "Avatar" didn't even win the 2009 "Best Picture" award, "The Hurt Locker" did. It just goes to show, fad truly is one letter away from fade.

Oh, and to all of you who are like "Oh, I don't care about the Oscars anyway", yeah, keep telling yourself that as you check to see if "Encanto" beat "Raya and the Last Dragon", or as you rant on Twitter if it looses, or celebrate if it wins. Yeah, you do care on some level, and on some level even I do, because I wrote this damn blog, but if you want an editorial about "Academy Award Nominees" or "Why X movie should have won the award instead of Y", sorry, you're not gonna get it out of me, because from this point on, I make zero plans to care about the Academy Awards.