Academy CEO Bill Kramer is under pressure from all directions. He must not upset the activists—DEI and LGBTQIA—who are breathing down his neck and ensuring maximum compliance at all times. He has to please the donors whose generous checks keep things well-oiled at the Academy and the Museum.
He has to please ABC and Disney with non-humiliating ratings. And he has to please the hardcore fans who will throw massive fits if things don’t go their way, like a joke they didn’t like by the host and that’s all before you get to the exhausting, lengthy op-eds sure to sprout up if things aren’t neat and tidy.
Clayton Davis interviewed Kramer a few days ago and got the scoop on the plans for the future.
Having met Bill Kramer myself I can say you’ll never find a nicer guy in Hollywood. He genuinely has his heart in the right place and is trying to make things work in extremely turbulent times. I like what he says here about theatrical:
The box office situation is heartbreaking. Anyone interested in the Oscar race will meet our theatrical eligibility requirements. One of the goals of that shift was to say, ‘We want audiences beyond New York and L.A. to know these movies and see these films.’ We believe in theatrical releases and encourage our members to see movies in theaters while balancing digital access through our Academy Screening Room.
About the future:
Since I became CEO, we’ve had extensive internal planning conversations about changing the success metrics for the show. Domestic versus international, linear versus streaming and how we monetize the show. Any new deal will look at these components differently than our previous agreement from 2016. We must change how we transmit, distribute and engage with the Oscars. My hunch is that will change when we approach this contract.
The clickbait headline that came out of that was that he was ruminating on what to do about “gender neutral” acting categories:
We are exploring this topic with our awards, membership, equity, and inclusion committees and soon with our Board of Governors. It’s in the early exploration stage and one of many conversations about the future of awards and the Oscars. We are still investigating how it could look.
For that, he will be pulled in many different directions at once. I can this with a certainty. Regardless of what happens to the Academy, whether they stay on ABC or make some kind of combo deal with a streaming platform (all but guaranteed), making the acting categories gender neutral is career suicide. It eliminates the excitement of the show, flattens it and ultimately makes it nothing more than an empty virtue signal.
However, there is the problem of a growing number of trans and non-binary actors sure to be put in the race. How to handle that? What the Gothams and the Spirits have done makes my eyes water with embarassment. They know it too. They know how horrible it is and yet they have to save face and keep those balls spinning.
One way they could solve the problem is to expand the acting categories from five to six or seven. Then, as they do that, they can tell contenders vying for the prize which category they’d like to be considered for. The only people who won’t fit are “non-binary” but so what? If they want to compete for acting prizes they have to choose. Trans people have the option of saying they’d like to compete for Actor or Actress and it’s their call.
That’s how I’d do it. There isn’t any other way to do it without it really and truly killing the Oscars once and for all. You can’t call Best Actor – Best Sex-Based Male Actor. You have to keep it as Actor and Actress. The whole thing shouldn’t be upended to satisfy a tiny percentage of people. Those you alienate by going gender-neutral will vastly outnumber those you alienate by keeping the gender binary.
Gen-Z isn’t as insane as Hollywood believes them to be. There is a part of them that yearns for traditional male and female roles, which partly explains the success of Barbenheimer. It was very much the gender binary that drove the excitement of those two movies. Oppenheimer very male, Barbie very female. Yin and Yang. You can’t fuck around with that and hope to maintain your dignity.
Then again, I sometimes think – why fight it? Why not just let the Oscars drift off into obscurity, never to be heard from again. You know what would happen if they did? The Golden Globes would instantly become the number one awards show.
No decision they make comes without consequences. If they hired Ricky Gervais they could solve their ratings problem overnight. Millions would tune in to watch him insult the glitterati, of whom, a large portion of the public can no longer stand. After Trump won, the entire industry became overtly political in a way that turned people off, even if they weren’t Trump supporters. Their ongoing hyperbole and melodrama about how bad things were left a bad taste in the mouths of people who will never live the way they do.
But if they did that, and they rescued their ratings, the Academy would never hear the end of it from the donors, for starters, from other Academy members who hold themselves in high esteem and assume the American public feels the same way (they don’t). For the Academy, that causes even more problems.
Jimmy Kimmel is the wrong host, even if he was among the only people who would take the job. But word has it John Mulaney might host and if he does, my daughter assures me, her generation would watch. No doubt, he would ruffle a few feathers and there would be screeching but at least it wouldn’t upset the donors.
If they move in the direction they’re already moving, they should do well with their ratings, improving year after year. They probably won’t ever get to the kinds of ratings they really want, however, because we don’t really live in a ratings kind of world anymore. We live in a world of views and clicks. Ratings are hard to come by unless you have Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce at your show (speaking of which, invite them, have them give out an award).
The Academy realizes that their survival will depend on which streaming platform they make a deal with and how they can broaden their reach around the world to become more of an “International Academy Awards,” which was what they were in their first year of existance.
The way the Oscars used to work was that they existed mainly to drive profits to the movie studios. Last year, Oppenheimer’s win was the first time since Gladiator won that the Best Picture was measured by its financial success along with artistic achievement. Winning an Oscar meant something. It didn’t mean righting the wrongs of society. It meant high achievement in film in every way.
The Oscars, therefore, honored successful films Hollywood made first, then they honored the “foreign language” or “international features.” Their aim was to promote American product, which in turn, made studio films better. The American film was a brand in and of itself, a high water mark of excellence unmatched by any other country. What is missing now from American film is great storytelling. Stories take a backseat to making the world a better place, or activist driven writing.
Ideally, the whole point of the Oscars is a competition of the best. The best no matter their gender or skin color. Until the Oscars are seen that way again, and they’re getting there, they will never regain their former glory because they will exist, as most of American culture by now, in an insular “woketopian” bubble. I still hope that won’t be the future of the Oscars.
The biggest thing that happened lately is Pixar’s Inside Out 2’s astonishing box office. That puts it in line for a Best Picture nomination, as we saw in 2009 and 2010, with Up and Toy Story 3. Considering the Animated branch is so big, it seems theoretically possible that they would choose Inside Out 2 as their number one film. The problem is that the branch is full of international filmmakers who are less likely to do that.
The reason those other movies made it in was that there was a thing called the “Disney Mafia” with large voting blocs pulling the lever for Disney. Without that, you have adults, many of them with more sophisticated tastes who aren’t likely to choose an animated film as their number one film of the year. You need at least 100 or so number one votes to get in. But who knows, maybe Disney/Pixar can work their magic to help rescue their brand from the brink.
Considering the weak sampling of films for Best Picture, it seems to me Inside Out 2 two has a decent enough shot to be considered a contender.
Here are my predictions for this week, for what they’re worth, which isn’t much.
Best Picture
- Joker: Folie a Deux
- Sing Sing
- Dune II
- Anora
- Gladiator II
- Juror #2
- Emilia Perez
- Wicked
- Inside Out 2
- Blitz
- Horizon II
- Hard Truths
- Queer
- Here
- The Nickel Boys
- A Real Pain
Best Director
- Todd Phillips, Joker: Folie A Deux
- Greg Kwedar, Sing Sing
- Sean Baker, Anora
- Denis Villenueve, Dune II
- Ridley Scott, Gladiator II
- Jacques Audiard, Emilia Perez
- Mike Leigh, Hard Truths
- Steve McQueen, Blitz
- Luca Guadagnino, Queer
- Clint Eastwood, Juror #2
- Kevin Costner, Horizon II
- Marielle Heller, Nightbitch
- Robert Zemeckis, Here
Best Actress
- Karla Sofia Gascón, Emilia Pérez (or Supporting)
- Lady Gaga, Joker: Folie a Deux
- Jessica Lange, Long Day’s Journey into Night
- Angelina Jolie, Maria
- Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Hard Truths
- Mikey Madison, Anora
- Amy Adams, Nightbitch
- Saoirse Ronan, The Outrun or Blitz
- Tessa Thompson, Hedda
- Cynthia Erivo, Wicked
Best Actor
- Colman Domingo, Sing Sing
- Joaquin Phoenix, Joker: Folie a Deux
- Ralph Fiennes, Conclave
- Daniel Craig, Queer
- Pedro Pascal, Gladiator II (or Denzel Washington)
- Nicholas Hoult, Juror #2
- Jesse Eisenberg, A Real Pain
- Tom Hanks, Here
- John David Washington, The Piano Lesson
- Adam Driver, Megalopolis
And that is pretty much all I got for today. It’s really the blind leading the blind here. Have a great weekend.