The State of the Race: The Oscars are Over, Now What?

I scanned the interwebs this morning looking for one thing: the Oscars 2023 timeline. I didn’t find it. I did see a host of “predictions” at various outlets. It seems like fun and games but what it is really is, if you want the truth, is public relations negotiations. The predictions bounce off the idea that there are movies earmarked for this bizarre industry of awards-watching, which is increasingly becoming — if it hasn’t arrived already — awards-making. If we can take any lesson from last year’s Best Picture winner it’s that voters will often rebel from the status quo we build for them. This is a lesson we should all take to heart about how we set up our frontrunners, and lock them in with too much confidence, way too soon.

It is a game of money, access, swag. It is a game of measuring status in terms of who gets to see what and when. Which publicist likes which blogger or reporter more. Who goes to what film festival. Who goes to what party, is flown in for what screening, and what, if anything, is left after the fire burns.

Many people in this game don’t see a problem. Or if they do, they are running just ahead of it, like a fast-moving wave no one on the beach sees coming. They just run as fast as they can to stay dry. Then, when the wave recedes, they do what humans always do. They bring all of their shit back to the sand and set it all up again.

What is the problem, then? The awards-making industry serves publicity teams, and filmmakers who would like their foot in the door to make other movies, to make names for themselves, to get a chance to direct a blockbuster. Think: fashion week where the end goal is to get a deal at Nordstrom, Target, or Bloomingdale’s. Is big money the goal at the end? Is the freedom to make more art the goal? Does it just come down to serving the needy egos of all involved?  A publicist once told me, as long as there are egos in Hollywood the Oscars will survive.

But I think, and I wonder, what is the use of it if it has become a flattering mirror that doesn’t really have any major impact anywhere except among the sophisticates who call themselves film fans, show up at screenings, unearth the art, truth and beauty of films that then get shaped into awards contenders that are then awarded at the end. Is there any glory in that at all? Impressing such a small cabal of cineastes? Don’t people get in the business of making movies so that people will watch those movies and not just those who have time and interest to do so?

All I know is that more people thought about the Oscars in the wake of the incident when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock than they probably have in the last 20 years. It’s partly due to a massive content machine that is hungry for a juicy piece of scandal and gossip that had such a dramatic set-up of a do-gooder industry that put non-white people in the impossible position of being always good and always perfect managing a situation where one Black man slapped another then cursed at him loudly on stage for all to hear, even little Jude Hill sitting nearby.

You can’t get more dramatic than that. No writer could ever come up with anything that ghastly. So much of the content that the industry puts out is aspirational – even when it’s dark and edgy like Fences or the Wolf of Wall Street there is an aspirational side to it. Even Succession has an aspirational side that says we will not be this way. We are morally superior. What we don’t see, what no one would ever write, is something like what happened on March 27th, which is partly why it captivated every single inch of media and culture for about a week. It was a story that had no bottom. So much of what Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith had exposed about themselves, laid bare for the world to see, was not being dissected. Chris Rock’s upbringing as someone brutally bullied also unearthed. A protagonist, a villain. It was dramatic because it was truthful, raw and real.

Don’t get me wrong; this is a real situation involving real people and it impacted everyone involved. It also upstaged and ruined everything that came after it. One of the most surreal moments in the theater came shortly after “the slap” when Kevin Costner came out to present an award. First of all, it was odd to see him there, as it was at the SAG Awards. The industry is currently interested in him because of the hit show Yellowstone. They are trying to acknowledge that other people in the country actually exist outside the utopia of Hollywood who like Yellowstone and Costner and might watch the Oscars if he was there.

He was handing out Best Director to Jane Campion. He gave a moving speech about film directors and how much they matter. He also set it up with an experience of being in an actual movie theater, as if to say – let’s not let go of that quite yet. Costner wasn’t just a reminder of the old days of the Academy, when movies like Dances with Wolves were popular with both audiences and the industry, but he was a reminder of the days when the director drove the Best Picture race. The Academy hasn’t released footage of that night yet, but someone did record it.

But here he was, giving out the lone Oscar win to a movie with 12 nominations. Shouldn’t the director matter more than that?

That is our first big lesson from the 94th Oscars. The system in place now, the expanded ballot, has mostly made the director a non issue, a symbolic vote. For the few years of the expanded ballot, Picture and Director still matched:

2009-Kathryn Bigelow
2010-Tom Hooper
2011-Michel Hazanavicius

Then, in 2012, the DGA nominations for the first time in their history were announced after Oscar balloting had closed. That meant the two frontrunners were left off the list: Kathryn Bigelow for Zero Dark Thirty and Ben Affleck for Argo.

This seems to be the point when Picture and Director parted ways. Only a few times after that would they be united:

2014-Alejandro G. Inarritu, Birdman
2017-Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water
2019-Bong Joon-Ho, Parasite
2020-Chloe Zhao, Nomadland

Every other time there was a split. It is probably less to do with the director not being valued anymore, than it is to do with the expanded ballot. With more than five or especially with ten, votes are split among the major categories, which is why the average number of wins for any movie now is about three, as CODA won.

The Hurt Locker-6*
The King’s Speech-4*
The Artist-5*
Argo-3
12 Years a Slave-3
Birdman-4*
Spotlight-2
Moonlight-3
The Shape of Water-4*
Green Book-3
Parasite-4*
Nomadand-3
CODA-3

*If you notice, only films where the director also wins can win more than 3 Oscars. Otherwise, you max out at 3 for Best Picture of the Year.

I’m not sure what that tells us. But I do wonder what is the point anymore for the Academy to have ten Best Picture nominees. I have seen suggestions to “fix” the Oscars, and some people have suggested a new category to honor one film that the public likes. They also did their “fan favorite” this past year. But this does nothing for the Academy. The public would see it as performative and silly. The sophisticates would sneer, of course, at any attention paid to the rabble. Rather, there should be an incentive for the big studios to make big movies that Oscar voters and the public likes.

How to do that when we saw empty theaters this past year for “adult films.” Audiences are slowly becoming used to the idea that going to movies is about escapist entertainment and “Oscar movies” are for people sitting at home. I just don’t think we should give this up without a fight.

What the Academy should do is simply this: vote for the best no matter who made it. Continue to do good work to elevate marginalized groups but not at the expense of awarding great work. They should divide Best Picture into two categories.

Category one
Films made for more than $30 million.
Theatrical run that isn’t just a week or two in New York and LA.

Category two
Films made under $30 million from any medium – YouTube, Tik Tok, any studio.
No theatrical run is necessary.

I realize they still have their new inclusion guidelines due to come into effect in 2024. So there is that. Slowly, over time, people will get used to it. This would do both – give studios an incentive to make better blockbusters — right? Who wouldn’t want that anyway? AND it opens up the Academy to the exploding industry of content.

I don’t believe that the Academy will choose to do this. I don’t think they are quite ready to stare down the mob. It looks like we’re likely going to be ruled by the mob for a few more years at least.

We’re in the midst of a pendulum shift, as we talked about before. If we accept the theory from the book Pendulum: How Past Generations Shape our Present and Predict Our Future, they divide an average 80-year generational cycle into two phases. Forty years of a “me” phase (individualism) and 40 years of a “we” phase (collectivism). According to this theory, when the “we” phase begins to break down we see witch hunts and purges, as we’re seeing today. This was written way back in 2012 so it’s even more impressive they could predict where we’d land by 2022/2023:

Senator Joseph McCarthy was an American promoter of this witch-hunt attitude at America’s most recent “We” Zenith of 1943 (see the “House Un-American Activities Committee,” 1937–1953); Adolf Hitler was the German promoter (see the Holocaust, 1933–1945); and Joseph Stalin was the Soviet promoter (see the Great Purge, 1936–1938). Our hope is that we might collectively choose to skip this development as we approach the “We” Zenith of 2023. If enough of us are aware of this trend toward judgmental self-righteousness, perhaps we can resist demonizing those who disagree with us and avoid the societal polarization that results from it. A truly great society is one in which being unpopular can be safe.

Funnily enough, right around 1943, the Academy shifted from ten nominees for Best Picture down to five. It was exactly that year, which then rode the wave of individualism for the next 40 years until that started to break down and brought us to where we are now.

I don’t think the Academy is ready to bring things back down to five. I think they will hold onto what they have now because we’re still very much in this moment of “we” and won’t start to cascade back towards individualism or another decade.  After all, the McCarthy witch hunts and the utopian rigidity that shaped so many films throughout the 1950s were the “we” phase losing steam.

When all of that finally ended we got the 1960s and the 1970s – the best era for American film. You can’t stop what’s coming.

Like everyone else on this beat, I too will have to play the game of Oscar predicting. Tomorrow, our first Predictions Friday for the 2023 season. This year, though, we should all try harder not to lock everything in so early.