Why Do We Care So Much About the Oscars?

Each year, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, better known as The Academy, hosts their awards ceremony to celebrate merit in film. These awards are popularly known around the world as The Oscars. Each year millions of people tune in to watch as the best films from the year gone by get their accolades and wins. Not just a place for awarding films, the Oscars also give rise to many socially and culturally relevant moments. The Will Smith slap incident, Leonardo DiCaprio's Oscar win, and the mistaken La La Land Best Picture win are among some of the moments that live in the popular subconscious. Speculation about who will win which Oscar begins just as soon as films are released in the new year, which is to say it never stops. However, the Oscars remain controversial. What is the history behind this award ceremony? Are these really the best films of the year? What is wrong with the Oscars, and how do we fix them?

In 1927, a gathering of people working in the infant art form of cinema came together to form The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. It was headed by the American actor and filmmaker Douglas Fairbanks. Even today it consists of notable people who work and have worked in the film industry. He was also the host of the first-ever Oscars ceremony. The ceremony was held in 1929 at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. These days, it is held at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. The way they decide which movies qualify for the awards is quite complex, yet functional.

While other film festivals, such as Cannes or Sundance, often find their best films of the year through the films screened in their competitive category, the Oscars find their nominees in all of the films released within that year. Any film released between January 1st and December 31st of the preceding year in the United States for public release (be it in a theatre, or on a streaming service), can be eligible for the Oscars. After that, the films are submitted to the Academy, usually by the production houses, for their consideration. This is where many 'For your consideration' ads play, where studios advertise their films on the basis of their Academy appeal. The winner is decided by a secret ballot, in which the members of the Academy vote on the films and their respective categories. This has been the process for decades now.

In this nearly hundred-year-old history of the Oscars, there have been quite a few controversies in the popular awards show. While the voting process may seem fair and democratic, it has been the subject of many controversies. There have been many cases of downright lobbying for votes within the Academy. Nicolas Chartier, the producer of the 2009 Best Picture winner, The Hurt Locker, was banned from that year's Oscar ceremony for circulating an email among Academy Members to vote for his film over a very high-budget film (probably Avatar). Such practices can get in the way of fair voting systems in place to ensure the democratic nature of the Awards ceremony. The fact that films are allowed to advertise themselves on the basis of their Awards nominations, enables studios to engage in practices that, at best, might be unfair, and at worst, downright predatory. The term 'Oscar bait' has been used to describe the films that are subject to such studio practices.

Oscar bait films generally follow the same formula: usually about a social issue or some true story (plus points if it does both), released around Oscar season so that they are fresh in the minds of Academy Voters, and often with marketing that caters to the popular notion of 'film fans'. Film producer and sexual predator Harvey Weinstein deliberately engaged in similar practices to gain acclaim for many of his films, including 1998's Shakespeare in Love and 2010's The King's Speech. This practice is not illegal, nor morally dubious. Many of these films are even quite good, or at the very least interesting. It, however, reduces the art of film to a formula; where producers look for these attributes in films to produce. This leads to many subpar or even juvenile films getting awards and prestige. Producers pay attention to films that fit the formula, rather than films that may be good. Some examples of this include the 2019 Best Picture winner Green Book. The film's overall message was a simple "racism is bad," but it was problematic in that it furthered the white saviour stereotype, and spoonfed racism to white people. It felt like a film that was designed to make white people feel better about themselves.

Then again, that criticism has been leveled against the Oscars for decades. The Academy has been predominantly white and male for almost its entire history. This has led to a bias in the kinds of films to win the Award, mostly with white protagonists and white stories. As shown in the example above, even when stories of race, gender, or sexuality are nominated, they are through the eyes of the straight white male person. This drive for inclusion is a new phenomenon too. The 2015 hashtag #OscarsSoWhite was a popular criticism of the lack of diversity within the Academy and their blind eye to films made by people of colour. Since then, the Academy has inducted nearly four hundred new voters into its ranks, many of them being people of colour and people with differing gender identities. Still, they make up a small number of the larger population.

One of the side effects of having a largely white voter base is that sometimes a film that is harmful to the discourse it intends to help gets recognition. A perfect example is this year's Oscar nominee Emilia Pérez. The film has been nominated for thirteen Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. The film's lead actress, Karla Sofia Gascón, is the first transwoman to be nominated for the award. It tells the story of a Mexican cartel leader who aims to transition into a woman and leave the cartel. While this may seem like a positive thing at first The film has garnered criticism for its depiction of both, the reality of Mexican life and trans representation. Not to mention, the film frames its protagonist as a criminal, whose violence and crimes get blamed on her masculinity, giving it a problematic view of masculinity.

This year's Oscars have also seen some other nominations that seem to have been included only for their popularity. Wicked is a similar story. It is a prequel to The Wizard of Oz and is an adaptation of a musical of the same name, with big names attached like Cynthia Erivo, Arianna Grande, Jeff Goldblum, and Michelle Yeoh. The film itself is inoffensive but spoon-feeds its subject matter to its audience while also being dull for most of its runtime. On a technical level, the cinematography of the film has received criticism because of its dull colour palette. Why the film was included at all is a mystery. One can make similar claims about Dune: Part Two, a perfectly well-made action science fiction blockbuster, but its Oscar credentials leave much to be desired. Moreover, popular and critical films have been left out of the Oscar race. George Miller's Furiosa, Justin Kurzel's The Order, and Payal Kapadia's All We Imagine As Light are all brilliant films that were left out. To me, what seems to be most criminal is that neither of Luca Guadagnino's films, Queer nor Challengers, was nominated for anything. Daniel Craig's performance in the former and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross' score in the latter will be talked of in legend, and the awards season seems to have glossed over it entirely.

Moreover, the claim that the Oscars are a celebration of the best films of the year seems to be false at the very least. They only look at films released in the United States, and those that fit a certain stereotype, with a flawed and biased voter base, and out of those too, they sometimes nominate films that might not be very good, much less even close to being the best of the year. They overlook a lot of foreign cinema, relegating all of foreign cinema to a teensy "Best International Feature" category. As if to say that these five foreign films are the only ones that can compete with these English language films. However, this category seems to be blending with the Best Picture category as many films are nominated for both. Some, as in the rare case of 2019's winner Parasite, win both. This raises the question of why even have a separate category at all.

All of this is to ask the question: why do we still like the Oscars then? Film festivals such as Cannes, Sundance, and Venice are much more diverse and much more celebrative of the art of cinema. What makes the Oscars stand apart? The answer is popular appeal. Film festivals are often seen as elitist affairs. Places where critics and snobs about film interact with each other to discuss what are seen as "artsy" films. The Oscars are a good compromise between what is popular and what is artsy. Not only does the legacy of the award show grant it some legitimacy in terms of the award itself holding weight, but also it makes people feel smart for caring about them. By awarding popular films, the Oscars hold popular attention and give those working behind-the-scenes recognition. Often, those giving this recognition and those receiving this recognition are the same, but that seems to matter little to the audience watching it.

The Oscars aren't a film festival, where critics ask filmmakers about the themes and subtext of the films at hand. They are a celebration, with a late-night show host everyone likes cracking jokes, with musical numbers, tributes, and trailers for upcoming films. They are an event where the audience gets to see their favourite stars rewarded for the work they put in. And that is by no means a bad thing. So why do we love the Oscars so much? Because they're fun.