Last year, amid the height of excitement over the popularity of The Dark Knight (arguably one of the very best films of the decade) the Oscars did something that would haunt them throughout the season – they failed to nominate it for Best Picture. The snub was a catastrophic PR disaster. Not only was The Dark Knight the highest grossing film of the year, but it was also at the top of a number of critic and organization ‘Best Of’ lists, and a young, hungry fanbase found itself embittered against awards they saw as elitist and dismissive of genre film. And it really wasn’t Oscar’s fault. Arcane and rarely commonly understood voting rules had simply bumped it out of contention. It didn’t get the votes. Oscar needed a solution; they needed a way to breathe new life into an award show that was losing viewership.
So they reinvented the Best Picture category.
The idea was simple: allow 10 films instead of 5 to battle it out, making for an even tighter, more diverse and interesting category in which anything could happen. The idea is both interesting and insane; a gamble that could prove to bring a lot of excitement to the aging show while bridging the divide between critical and public opinion. But it could also blow up in Oscar’s face, especially in a year like this, in which the landscape is filled with perfect mainstream fare while devoid of the type of films critics usually go gaga over. And that’s a real problem.
Oscar’s biggest problem right now is critics. The WGA nominations were released recently to a sea of teeth gnashing writers angry that films like Avatar, The Hangover and (500) Days of Summer were nominated, possibly hinting that these would be strong contenders for the Oscars. Ignore the fact that many of these same critics loved these films when they considered them intelligent popcorn fare; when they were elevated to “the year’s best” the game changed. And so did the rhetoric.
Most interesting are the choices we will no doubt see when all 10 films are chosen. Films like Up, Star Trek, Avatar and District 9 all have a real chance of standing toe to toe with films like The Hurt Locker, An Education, A Single Man and A Serious Man – films the critics have praised loudly but audiences have rejected whole hog. If the critics groups picked the winner, this year’s Best Picture would be Katherine Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, a film that no one saw because nobody likes watching a war film at war time. Instead, audiences are busy heaping praise on Bigelow’s ex-husband James Cameron’s film Avatar, a film everyone has seen and the critics actually loved…for a popcorn film.
But which is worse? Further alienating an audience that funds the lavish event with its viewership (bringing in huge advertising dollars) or alienating a bitter press angry that their favorites will now vanish into the mists of time, only to reemerge as an ignored Criterion release ten or twenty years from now? The best bet, it would seem, would be for Oscar voters to nominate mainstream films and vote for the smaller ones, satisfying both – kind of like a gimme-prize to John Q. Popcorn, allowing him to complain about how Star Trek was robbed, but happy that it was at least in the race to begin with. I know this is what the Oscar folks were hoping for. But really, what would happen if something like Star Trek or District 9 actually won?
