New Oscar category will actually HURT popular films?

[Kitten Champion]

The Shape of Water is a genre film and it won the most prestigious categories the Oscars have just last year.

Besides, big productions win Oscars all the time just for being expensive movies that can do things like elaborate visual effects, very detailed costuming, make-up, musical scores, and so on.

Suicide Squad won an Oscar - a movie I'm pretty sure was made by coke-addled monkeys - because of their make-up designs, for instance.

Besides, top-grossing popular movies already "win" by being top-grossing movies. Having limited artistic merit is fine if you're rolling in cash, I don't think the production staff behind the last Transformers movie is weeping over their latest Oscar snub.

[Darth Ultron]

Award shows have always been a problem. Some people hide in a room, and just pick movies for awards...maybe based on something? Then everyone else just..falls down in awe, because of what they picked. And it works great...if nobody thinks about it. Just who are the ''movie experts'' that make the pics? And what do they use to make the call? How does someone decide that one specific thing is somehow better or the best of similar things?

And maybe most of all, when a movie or whatever wins what does it really mean? Is it somehow ''better'' then all the rest? In what way?

And you already note the backlash of only ''one'' thing can win, so they bend over backwards to say the others are ''special, somehow", just because they were nominated. They did not win, but they, er, ''almost won".

And all of this really, really, really does not fit in with the idea that ''everything is special''. How can they say ''oh well x is special...but, er, no more special, then everything else..but, er, this one is special, but non-special at the same time."


So it woun't ''hurt'' anything, just make the mess more of the mess.

[Devonix]

The Shape of Water is a genre film and it won the most prestigious categories the Oscars have just last year.

Besides, big productions win Oscars all the time just for being expensive movies that can do things like elaborate visual effects, very detailed costuming, make-up, musical scores, and so on.

Suicide Squad won an Oscar - a movie I'm pretty sure was made by coke-addled monkeys - because of their make-up designs, for instance.

Besides, top-grossing popular movies already "win" by being top-grossing movies. Having limited artistic merit is fine if you're rolling in cash, I don't think the production staff behind the last Transformers movie is weeping over their latest Oscar snub.

Things like this are usually reactions to a certain type of film getting nominated or winning an award. The entire reason that there exists an animation category is because animated films were getting too close to winning best picture. The animation award puts them nicely away in their own category.

[Mechalich]

Things like this are usually reactions to a certain type of film getting nominated or winning an award. The entire reason that there exists an animation category is because animated films were getting too close to winning best picture. The animation award puts them nicely away in their own category.

I have mixed feelings about the animation category. While it does lock the occasional supremely awesome animated film out of Best Picture contention - though some like Toy Story 3 have been nominated anyway - animation is different enough from live action film-making and a substantial enough part of the market to deserve recognition. Also, in years where they manage to have 5 nominees (which they ought to have every year) good but smaller animated films can sneak into the Oscars and achieve worthy recognition.

Live-action and animation are clearly different beasts. Popular and niche films are not, it's just a matter of budget, and often not even that. Get Out was clearly a popular film - it was a massive hit - but it had a substantially lower budget than the much more niche Shape of Water. In terms of trying to get mass-market films more awards exposure it would seem to make more sense to go Golden Globes style and divide comedy and drama, though that has its own problems.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Back in the early 2000's, after they snubbed Beauty And The Beast an Lion King for best picture, they created Best Animated Movie.

They did create the new category starting in the 2001 movie season, but just as a side note Beauty and the Beast came out in 1991 and Lion King in 1994. That sentence confused me for just a moment.

Since then we've seen hugh numbers of animated movies get snubbed cause they now all have to compete in this one category, and were put there by the admission of the academy voters cause they don't watch cartoons. (That's a quite from one of them the year The Boss Baby got a nomination.)


This is them repeating that. At last, they can ignore the movies people actually got to see by ghettoing them into this one category.

On the other side, before they created that category they only ever nominated a single animated movie for best picture. They honored a few with a special Oscar for an outstanding achievement, but those were few ad far between. That wouldn't have changed much if not for the new category. In fact, the fact that they have to pick a few animated features as well probably makes those movies more likely to win in the technical categories like sound design or even categories like best original song. Because they are brought to the attention of the academy.

It's an industry award. The International Car of the Year 2015 was the Kia K900. I didn't know a thing by that name existed. Film makers will always have a film maker's taste in movies. (Even though it's still a good idea to diversify the group.) We normal people don't have to pay attention to these guys at all. But we do, for some reason. So it's nice that they create categories we can enjoy as well, in contrast to stuff like sound mixing and sound editing, which most members of the academy can't even tell apart, that's how specialized those are.

Honestly, I don't see Rambo VS Predator ever winning best picture, but this way some light may get shined on it anyway.

EDIT: In fact, maybe the best documentary (long and short) and best short film categories are a good comparison as well. A documentary is probably never going to win best film. (Except if it already has, I'm too lazy to check.) It just doesn't have the right kind of story to ever be considered. But there are still some very good documentaries which I like to watch, like say March of the Penguins, which won best documentary.

[Legato Endless]

In fact, maybe the best documentary (long and short) and best short film categories are a good comparison as well. A documentary is probably never going to win best film. (Except if it already has, I'm too lazy to check.) It just doesn't have the right kind of story to ever be considered. But there are still some very good documentaries which I like to watch, like say March of the Penguins, which won best documentary.

No documentary has ever even been nominated for Best Picture. Remember, the 'Academy' is self titled, and it's actually made up of people who aren't all even experts in film. There are a lot of rumors of nominations being made for extremely dubious reasons. Such as Suicide Squad because...Harley was hot. Or Mad Max being nominated for editing...because it used practical effects. <_< (That's not what editing is guys)

I could not care less about the awards, but if this is gonna be a media event, it could at least try to be more egalitarian.

[Rogar Demonblud]

To heck with egalitarian, I'll settle for competency and less politicization. Although that last is likely to occur without the Weinstein deal-making behind the scenes.

[Psyren]

The Martian, in 2015 ($228 million domestic). American Sniper, in 2014 ($350 million domestic). Gravity, in 2013 ($274 million domestic).

In 2010, Toy Story 3 ($415 million - the highest-grossing film of that year) and Inception ($293 million domestic).

And in 2009, one of the biggest blockbusters of all time, Avatar ($750 million domestic).

It's relatively common.

Great, now tell us how many of those actually won

I'm perhaps a bit more bullish on this idea than most of the thread. An artsy/pretentious/whatever film is always going to win it, so another category to make a blockbuster film also be an Oscar winner seems like a good thing.

[Mechalich]

Great, now tell us how many of those actually won

Just being nominated matters though. The best picture nominees are regularly used as sort of a consensus on the best/most important films of a given year. It's well understood that the winner is highly subjective - freaking Citizen Kane didn't win, but it did get nominated. So if you are going back in time and recommending the best films of a given year, the Oscars nominees are a place to start. For example, in 1975 The Godfather Part II won Best Picture, but the nominees were Chinatown, The Conversation, Lenny, and The Towering Inferno. I'm not much of a film buff, but I recognize three out of those four names.

So, insofar as the introduction of this new award prevents popular movies from being nominated for Best Picture that's potentially a problem. Right now, this decision is very clearly about Black Panther. The Academy wants to hand it a statuette, but fifty years from now I think it would matter more to have Black Panther nominated for Best Picture and losing rather than winning this brand new category (especially if further industry changes render this whole award irrelevant and it gets discontinued in a decade or so).

Now, maybe that won't be a problem, but I can certainly see why it would worry people.

I'm perhaps a bit more bullish on this idea than most of the thread. An artsy/pretentious/whatever film is always going to win it, so another category to make a blockbuster film also be an Oscar winner seems like a good thing.

If we're going to expand the Oscar slate - which I'm totally onboard for - I'd rather see it done in a somewhat more coherent way. 'Popular' is a hideously subjective category that seems designed as a specific crisis response.

Personally I'd much rather see any or all of the categories suggested in this vox piece on the subject added instead of the 'Popular' category. It would be easy to use awards like Best Stunt Coordination or Best Casting to reward popular films while also highlighting real achievements in moviemaking. A voice acting or motion-capture based award (especially one that combined the two) would also play towards blockbusters, since those movies feature such roles far more commonly than niche movies.

[Knaight]

Huzzah now I can rest in peace knowing that fantasy, scifi, and innovate genre fiction will be pigeonholed in this dungeon for the foreseeable future.

The Shape of Water is a genre film and it won the most prestigious categories the Oscars have just last year.

These two comments together nicely show a trend familiar from literature. To wit - this is a "literary fiction" versus "genre fiction" split, albeit thinly veiled. Those splits generally aren't clean though, because various biases creep in. The most major of these is that literary fiction is just generally more prestigious, and the literary fiction fans like it that way. So when you get sufficiently good genre fiction that's good in the right way it mysteriously loses that genre classification. This is how Vonnegut somehow consistently isn't classified as science fiction, despite that entire corpus of work fitting neatly in that category. The Shape of Water is another example of this, and while Del Toro is a bit of an interesting director in that he's also made stuff that comes across as big dumb action movies (Pacific Rim, Hellboy) and that gets classified accordingly his more serious in tone work generally sees this sort of thing. Pan's Labyrinth is a fantasy story, and getting that acknowledged by lit-fic snobs is like pulling teeth.

Then there's the biases that creep in in much, much stupider ways. I'm not conversant enough in film to really get into them here (the only reason I was able to pick up on the pattern I'm detailing it is knowing it from literature, which is the only media I have that level of specialization in), but my favorite example in other contexts is romance novels. Romance is generally understood as genre-fiction, but the lit-fic snobs doing the classification tend to dismiss it in a very particular way, as crappy genre-fiction by women, for women. So when you get a man writing a romance novel, well, clearly it can't be a romance novel, it doesn't fit the mold. So it gets tossed in the literary fiction bin instead.

[Legato Endless]

It does not really matter what the awards are or who gets them, that won't solve the real dilemma the Academy trotted this out to fix.

From 1980 to 2003, the best picture winner was usually in the top 20 at the box office. Go back further, and the trend line of films aligns more closely with gross and wins. Since then, blockbusters get nominated less often.

The monetary fall of Oscars didn't start in the mid 2000s, it began in the last four years from 43! million viewers to 26m last year. That's not because winning films were seen as 'pretentious', it's because viewers are taking advantage of an ever more decentralized personalized media experience.

Giving Best Picture to Black Panther won't do anything to bring those people back. A few of them would just watch the acceptance speech on YouTube the next day. You want to resurrect the Oscar's? Kill Netflix and its brethren. YouTube. Torrenting. Kindle. Etc.

Barring the Yellowstone supervolcano erupting, the only thing more than 30 million Americans are going to gather to simultaneously watch anymore is sports and politics.

[Xyril]

Award shows have always been a problem. Some people hide in a room, and just pick movies for awards...maybe based on something?

I'm surprised to see you making this particular criticism. From some of your prior posts, I didn't think you would object to people making conclusionary assertions while declining to be transparent with respect to the evidence and reasoning used to reach those conclusions.

I do agree that individual judging tends to be very opaque with respect to judging. In theory, it would be nice if individual judges would say "I voted for Movie A because it had a great screenplay with good dialogue, pacing, and complex characterization. Movie B had slightly better special effects, scoring, makeup, and costumes, but the difference was minor, and didn't make up for the much worse script." In practice, the academy is--IIRC--in the thousands, and very few people would bother to read all of that.

Then everyone else just..falls down in awe, because of what they picked.

No. Then people debate whether or not they got it right. Whether it was a close--but wrong--call between several good pictures, or a clearly idiot call that snubbed obviously superior candidates. Whether worthy contenders were left out of consideration or terrible choices were wrongly nominated. They speculate about what secret reasons might have motivated apparent mistakes, and argue over precisely what traits make a top movie.

Just who are the ''movie experts'' that make the pics?

Generally, they're directors, producers, actors, etc. who have some sort of experience in the field of making movies. (Thus, the "expert" part of the description.) However--as others have pointed out--there's also a great deal of politics involved. Not everyone working in the industry is invited to join the academy, and while I have no hard data to support this, my guess is that the question of who gets into the club isn't settled by years working, number of projects made, amount of money made, or any other objective criteria.

Are they better qualified than the average random person to articulate standards for artistic merit and then to judge how a movie measures up to those standards? Probably, the way a ballet dancer or choreographer is better at gauging what a good performance is or an engineer or architect is better at gauging how structural sound a building is.

Do they accurately reflect the tastes of the population as a whole? Almost certainly not.

And you already note the backlash of only ''one'' thing can win, so they bend over backwards to say the others are ''special, somehow", just because they were nominated. They did not win, but they, er, ''almost won".

When you say "bend over backwards to say that others are 'special, somehow'," I believe you are referring to what the neurotypical call "being a gracious winner." See also: acknowledging the fact that if you're not Michael Phelps or Usain Bolt, the other guys on the podium with you could very well have been the one in your top spot if they had just had a slightly better day.

And all of this really, really, really does not fit in with the idea that ''everything is special''. How can they say ''oh well x is special...but, er, no more special, then everything else..but, er, this one is special, but non-special at the same time."

I suspect your rant might be conflating your disdain of the liberal leftist media elite with your disdain of the liberal leftist elite in general. I don't think anybody in any award show, anywhere, espouses the idea that "everything is special." Acknowledging that the five or so movies you nominated out of hundreds are all--by some metric or another--special movies does not imply that all those hundreds of movies are also special.

You can nominate Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Lebron James for best basketball player of all time, and no matter who wins, any reasonable person would agree that they're all special--by which I mean, they are all in the top tier of players. That doesn't mean that every forgotten player who made it into the NBA for a couple of years is also special.

[Psyren]

Just being nominated matters though.

No one is denying that. But winning matters even more.

So, insofar as the introduction of this new award prevents popular movies from being nominated for Best Picture that's potentially a problem. Right now, this decision is very clearly about Black Panther.

Assuming this is true - and? So what? Again, good thing from where I'm sitting.

If we're going to expand the Oscar slate - which I'm totally onboard for - I'd rather see it done in a somewhat more coherent way. 'Popular' is a hideously subjective category that seems designed as a specific crisis response.

It's all subjective. Suicide Squad's costumes (for example) are most certainly a matter of taste. So while I hear you, again, not seeing the problem.

[Metahuman1]

They did create the new category starting in the 2001 movie season, but just as a side note Beauty and the Beast came out in 1991 and Lion King in 1994. That sentence confused me for just a moment.

Yes, they created it in 2001 and the first Shriek movie won it. The reason for that was that they'd had too many close calls. Which, they would define as animated movies getting nominated for best picture. Which is a serious award that is definably not for cartoons, which are assuredly low brow entertainment for children, nothing more, and thus assuredly not worthy of being best picture. Ever.

Beauty and the Beast, Lion King and Spirited Away in the same decade would be the close calls they had in mind. They were just slow on the ball. As per normal.

On the other side, before they created that category they only ever nominated a single animated movie for best picture. They honored a few with a special Oscar for an outstanding achievement, but those were few ad far between. That wouldn't have changed much if not for the new category. In fact, the fact that they have to pick a few animated features as well probably makes those movies more likely to win in the technical categories like sound design or even categories like best original song. Because they are brought to the attention of the academy.

It's an industry award. The International Car of the Year 2015 was the Kia K900. I didn't know a thing by that name existed. Film makers will always have a film maker's taste in movies. (Even though it's still a good idea to diversify the group.) We normal people don't have to pay attention to these guys at all. But we do, for some reason. So it's nice that they create categories we can enjoy as well, in contrast to stuff like sound mixing and sound editing, which most members of the academy can't even tell apart, that's how specialized those are.

Honestly, I don't see Rambo VS Predator ever winning best picture, but this way some light may get shined on it anyway.

EDIT: In fact, maybe the best documentary (long and short) and best short film categories are a good comparison as well. A documentary is probably never going to win best film. (Except if it already has, I'm too lazy to check.) It just doesn't have the right kind of story to ever be considered. But there are still some very good documentaries which I like to watch, like say March of the Penguins, which won best documentary.

Except that the people making the nominations, by there own at large admissions, are not watching any of the movies before nominating them at all. And also by there own at large admissions, once the nominations are made, there not bothering to watch the nominee's before voting on the winner. There doing it blind.

Cause there cartoons, and these people consider cartoons too low an entertainment form for them to be bothered with by and large.




This hasn't helped. All it's done is helped Disney and DreamWorks kick valid competition in the shins once a year. (Seriously, look at some of the animated things not made by DreamWorks or Disney/Pixar that came our the year The Boss Baby was in the running for the award. Tell me there aren't like half a dozen movies that should have been nominated in it's place for that category.)




Not helped is that they lumped all foreign movies into a single category as well. So live action art house Italian and French movies are competing with Ghibli, instead of letting Ghibli and other studios that do animated movies compete in the animation category, or better still, just compete in general.


Bottom line, this is not a good thing. Not even a little bit.


I only care to point it out in the hopes that the Oscars can do the world a favor, and just fade into obscurity and die.

[Mechalich]

No one is denying that. But winning matters even more.

Not really. In the long term view being nominated matters almost as much as winning - wins are notorious for their subjectivity, while nominations carry an imprimatur of quality simply because they are a pool. Additionally, the different categories have different levels of prestige. For instance, the visual effects Oscar has been essentially conquered by blockbuster films in the last two decades - the LotR films freaking three-peated - and no one cares because it is broadly understood that a genuinely terrible movie can win such a technical category easily - and Pirate's of the Caribbean Dead Man's Chest did just that in 2006.

So being nominated for Best Picture - the most important category - may turn out to have more value for a film than even winning this new 'Popular' category. This is quite likely if the criteria used to define the category allow it to become a dumping ground of mediocre films that simply made a lot of money in order to please the big studios.

It's all subjective. Suicide Squad's costumes (for example) are most certainly a matter of taste. So while I hear you, again, not seeing the problem.

Your mistaking the subjectivity of the categorization itself with the subjectivity of achievement in that category. Suicide Squad won for Best Costume Design. That's actually a very clearly defined category because it has such a narrow scope: which movie in the year had the best costumes. Several Oscar categories are far less effectively determined - there has traditionally been considerable controversy about the 'Supporting' vs. 'Lead' acting categories for example.

This new popular category has no good definition behind it. Even strict monetary definitions are unlikely to work, as even seemingly niche prestige films may actually make a lot of money. For instance, Hidden Figures was the 14th highest grossing movie of 2016, beating out Star Trek Beyond and X-Men Apocalypse. In 2015 The Martian reached #8 and The Revenant (a movie that was practically defined by it's Oscar push) #13. Heck, American Sniper - which got nominated for Best Picture - was the highest grossing film of 2014 - a fact my mind struggles to process as having actually occurred.

So there's a huge problem in defining how to classify popular movies and there's a strong case to be made that plenty of popular blockbusters of high quality are already getting nominated for Best Picture. And plenty of genre films have been nominated - Get Out represented horror just last year and Arrival science fiction the year before that. What hasn't yet happened is a superhero movie receiving a nomination for Best Picture despite their now decade-long run of box office dominance. And we finally have a movie (and a cultural moment) where it is broadly understood that Black Panther sure as s*** should be nominated, and the people in charge of the Academy are terrified that won't happen and are seeking to find a way to through recognition at it another way - and Black Panther is the lock-est of locks to win this new Popular category should this change go through.

That just feels patronizing to me. I'd much rather see Black Panther get nominated for best picture and make a real push to win. I'm sure there are plenty of academy members who would vote for it. Heck, if the prestige film crop turns out to be a weak won I'd even give it a decent chance of winning. But with this new category in place freeing up everyone to ignore its massive success and place in the zeitgeist of 2018 everyone will feel free to ignore it for best picture.

Except that the people making the nominations, by there own at large admissions, are not watching any of the movies before nominating them at all. And also by there own at large admissions, once the nominations are made, there not bothering to watch the nominee's before voting on the winner. There doing it blind.

Most such statements come from members of the acting branch. There is some evidence that members of other branches - particularly the more technical categories - take this rather a bit more seriously and watch a much larger percentage of the films involved. Since you can only vote to nominate for your own branch, the quality of nominations in those areas is likely to be higher and there seems to be less of a trend to proxy an Oscar as a sort of lifetime achievement award as commonly happens in the acting categories - most recently evidenced by Gary Oldman in Darkest Hour.

However it is certainly true that getting a movie considered for an Oscar requires a campaign to get the attention of the Academy members - though this is true of any award given out for something like film and some of the broader voting bodies like the SAG (which is open to just about anyone with any acting credits at all) are going to be even more vulnerable to media pressure than the Academy. There are absolutely films that miss out because the studios don't want to back a bid. For example, Funimation chose not to mount an Oscar campaign for your name. despite bothering to conduct a US release for the film. It absolutely should have booted The Boss Baby, but Funimation calculated - probably correctly - that an animation nomination was worthless without a win and that your name didn't have a chance of toppling Coco.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Yes, they created it in 2001 and the first Shriek movie won it. The reason for that was that they'd had too many close calls. Which, they would define as animated movies getting nominated for best picture. Which is a serious award that is definably not for cartoons, which are assuredly low brow entertainment for children, nothing more, and thus assuredly not worthy of being best picture. Ever.

This hasn't helped. All it's done is helped Disney and DreamWorks kick valid competition in the shins once a year. (Seriously, look at some of the animated things not made by DreamWorks or Disney/Pixar that came our the year The Boss Baby was in the running for the award. Tell me there aren't like half a dozen movies that should have been nominated in it's place for that category.)

I don't know. They also nominated Loving Vincent in the same category, a hand painted feature about painter Vincent van Gogh. That's a fancy high brow serious arthouse movie surely? Shouldn't that stay out of best animated feature then?

Not helped is that they lumped all foreign movies into a single category as well. So live action art house Italian and French movies are competing with Ghibli, instead of letting Ghibli and other studios that do animated movies compete in the animation category, or better still, just compete in general.

Foreign language movies released in the US are eligible to compete for any oscar, although since the creation of the foreign language award only five of them have been nominated for best picture.

Don't forget these are American awards. Many countries have their own movie awards, like the Dutch Golden Calf. That one focuses on Dutch movies.

The problem with the Oscars is not that they exist, it's how we treat them. What they are are an American industry award, where members of the industry congratulate each other with their fine work and select who they feel did best that year. It gets covered as if it's a definitive ranking of the worlds movies that everyone should agree with and is really important you guys. It's not important, it's a "pat yourself on the back committee", like those people in high school who would organize something minor and spent like half the time they had on thanking each other for organizing it. I think it's interesting to hear their ideas on what last years best movies were, there might be films among them I'd like to watch. But it's still an in-group celebrating themselves, that's what the thing was designed to be.

[Peelee]

I'm surprised to see you making this particular criticism. From some of your prior posts, I didn't think you would object to people making conclusionary assertions while declining to be transparent with respect to the evidence and reasoning used to reach those conclusions.

Indeed. And even more surprising that i actually agreed with him for once. Well, for the first sentence or two at least, before the standard DU ramblings came out full force.

[Bohandas]

Well, if the ratings trend continues they can just cancel the big ceremony in a few years and hand out the awards in a conference room in the local Hilton, with a press release most people will ignore as clickbait.

Wow! That sounds way better than what they do now.

[BeerMug Paladin]

So there's a huge problem in defining how to classify popular movies and there's a strong case to be made that plenty of popular blockbusters of high quality are already getting nominated for Best Picture. And plenty of genre films have been nominated - Get Out represented horror just last year and Arrival science fiction the year before that. What hasn't yet happened is a superhero movie receiving a nomination for Best Picture despite their now decade-long run of box office dominance. And we finally have a movie (and a cultural moment) where it is broadly understood that Black Panther sure as s*** should be nominated, and the people in charge of the Academy are terrified that won't happen and are seeking to find a way to through recognition at it another way - and Black Panther is the lock-est of locks to win this new Popular category should this change go through.

Something along these lines strikes me as a possible explanation for the new category suddenly springing into existence. Although I would suspect the reasoning would be closer to something like: "We know that Black Panther was very popular, and it's well-made for a film of its genre, but it has a low chance for being nominated as best. Maybe we can just make a new category it will be capable of winning? That way, we can also recognize those movies which aim to have satisfying action sequences and consider plot/characters as secondary considerations."

Although I would've enjoyed it had Zombieland or something like Shoot 'Em Up had gotten a nomination for best, the kind of fun, silly sort of movies those are probably would only fit in this newer category. I'm sure there are plenty of other examples out there, but I don't watch many newer movies.

[Darth Ultron]

It does not really matter what the awards are or who gets them, that won't solve the real dilemma the Academy trotted this out to fix.

From 1980 to 2003, the best picture winner was usually in the top 20 at the box office. Go back further, and the trend line of films aligns more closely with gross and wins. Since then, blockbusters get nominated less often.

This is the typical, out of touch elitist type, that you find in Hollywood. They are lost in the 'haze' of making 'art' and 'culture' and 'changing the world with fiction'. They think what they think is perfect and right...and everyone should agree with them. And they overly love typical out of touch stories like ''aww the little boy got his mom a spoon!" and such. They utterly hate anything the ''popular mass culture'' likes, as that stuff is just all junk and filler.

So, needless to say, they hate all Superhero, Sci-fi, Animation, Fantasy and Horror. All the junk filler stuff made for the common masses. Such stuff is not a 'real' movie to them: it's just a waste of time.

And in the past, such movies were just like a little distraction in the corner and they did not care much. The movies did not make too much money and no one talked about them too much. And, Once upon a Time, it was the big huge box office cash making movie that everyone loved, both the common folk and the elites, that won best picture.

But not anymore. It really got started in about 2000 with all the Superhero, Sci-fi, Animation, Fantasy and Horror type ''geek" movies taking over at the box office. Just look at 2016. Moonlight was best picture, but did anyone go see it? Wikipedea says it made 65 million. And how much did Suicide Squad make? 746 million!

And it's not just the money. People talk about Superhero, Sci-fi, Animation, Fantasy and Horror type ''geek" movies to death. They make tons of buzz. For Moonlight, you only hear crickets.

And this really hits the eleit people: how can they change the world with thei movies if people don't talk about them and follow the ideas of the movie.

I'm surprised to see you making this particular criticism. From some of your prior posts, I didn't think you would object to people making conclusionary assertions while declining to be transparent with respect to the evidence and reasoning used to reach those conclusions.

My problem is that it is impossible to say many things are objectively good. A person can like something, but that does not make it the best movie 4ever! And if you do want to judge, you have to judge everything the same. If movie A and movie B have the same element, you can't just say ''movie A" is the best as you like it more.

I suspect your rant might be conflating your disdain of the liberal leftist media elite with your disdain of the liberal leftist elite in general. I don't think anybody in any award show, anywhere, espouses the idea that "everything is special." Acknowledging that the five or so movies you nominated out of hundreds are all--by some metric or another--special movies does not imply that all those hundreds of movies are also special.

Well, they think everything in their elite bubble is special, not ''everything". They still hate Superhero, Sci-fi, Animation, Fantasy and Horror type ''geek" movies.

You can nominate Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Lebron James for best basketball player of all time, and no matter who wins, any reasonable person would agree that they're all special--by which I mean, they are all in the top tier of players. That doesn't mean that every forgotten player who made it into the NBA for a couple of years is also special.

The problem is: you have to have a cut off or everything is special. At some point you have to say ''nope, that and everything after that is not special". And you don't want to hurt too many people. A basketball team has a lot of people on it, but you don't want to say ''well only this guy here is special...the rest of you are nothing normal nobodies". The same way they don't want to snub a good movie that ''just missed" getting nominated.

It's the endless circle mess: Billy was the best and he won...but, um, er, everyone else won too just as they played, but, um,er, Billy won more, but, um, er, his winning more does not mean anything...um, but it does, but we will say it does not, but it does, but, um, it does not, but it SO does matter.......

[Legato Endless]

Something along these lines strikes me as a possible explanation for the new category suddenly springing into existence. Although I would suspect the reasoning would be closer to something like: "We know that Black Panther was very popular, and it's well-made for a film of its genre, but it has a low chance for being nominated as best. Maybe we can just make a new category it will be capable of winning? That way, we can also recognize those movies which aim to have satisfying action sequences and consider plot/characters as secondary considerations."

Although I would've enjoyed it had Zombieland or something like Shoot 'Em Up had gotten a nomination for best, the kind of fun, silly sort of movies those are probably would only fit in this newer category. I'm sure there are plenty of other examples out there, but I don't watch many newer movies.

The Academy should just go whole hog and create new categories to better connect with the every person. Best Dumb movie. Best Guilty Pleasure. Best Movie to watch while Inebriated. Most-likely-to-age-poorly.

[McStabbington]

These two comments together nicely show a trend familiar from literature. To wit - this is a "literary fiction" versus "genre fiction" split, albeit thinly veiled. Those splits generally aren't clean though, because various biases creep in. The most major of these is that literary fiction is just generally more prestigious, and the literary fiction fans like it that way. So when you get sufficiently good genre fiction that's good in the right way it mysteriously loses that genre classification. This is how Vonnegut somehow consistently isn't classified as science fiction, despite that entire corpus of work fitting neatly in that category. The Shape of Water is another example of this, and while Del Toro is a bit of an interesting director in that he's also made stuff that comes across as big dumb action movies (Pacific Rim, Hellboy) and that gets classified accordingly his more serious in tone work generally sees this sort of thing. Pan's Labyrinth is a fantasy story, and getting that acknowledged by lit-fic snobs is like pulling teeth.

Then there's the biases that creep in in much, much stupider ways. I'm not conversant enough in film to really get into them here (the only reason I was able to pick up on the pattern I'm detailing it is knowing it from literature, which is the only media I have that level of specialization in), but my favorite example in other contexts is romance novels. Romance is generally understood as genre-fiction, but the lit-fic snobs doing the classification tend to dismiss it in a very particular way, as crappy genre-fiction by women, for women. So when you get a man writing a romance novel, well, clearly it can't be a romance novel, it doesn't fit the mold. So it gets tossed in the literary fiction bin instead.

That's definitely half of it. But I would also note that the other half is simply that the Academy Awards are the annual awards of a trade association, that happen to be televised. And it's the tension between those two things that keeps tying the film industry in knots.

The reason why you would give a film like The Greatest Show on Earth an Oscar over films like High Noon or Singin' in the Rain (or, if you prefer a more modern example, The Reader winning over The Dark Knight and Wall-E) is the exact same reason why the Best Plumber of the Greater Philadelphia Area in 2016 probably didn't go to someone who actually was the best plumber in Philadelphia that year. Because it's an industry award. It's an award that people hang on their walls, and use to market themselves going forward. And for that reason, they typically go out to longstanding, dues paying members who have earned the friendship of fellow members who are tasked with handing out awards. In this case, The Greatest Showman on Earth, and The Reader, won because Cecille B. DeMille and Harvey Weinstein were seen as solid, dues-paying members of the Academy who had successfully scratched enough backs, and paid their dues sufficiently, that they were entitled to the award that year.

The difference is that the hypothetical Plumbers' Association of Philadephia doesn't put their annual awards show on television. And because they don't put their awards' show on television, they don't have viewers calling in, saying that they've compared the work of the plumber that won to Cecil down the street, and wondering WTH, Cecil is clearly the better plumber. By contrast, a lot of people had seen The Dark Knight and Wall-E, and some people had also seen The Reader, and in that case, it was pretty clear that both films that didn't get nominated were superior films to the one that did, so what gives? And precisely because the Academy Awards are on television, and are "art" that the masses consume, the Academy can't just come out and state the obvious: "Dudes, this is a trade show award that we give to reward faithful work and for martketing purposes, and we just gave it to The Reader because Harvey slapped enough backs, and because Kate Winslet had been doing a lot of great acting for a long time that we felt ought to be rewarded. We weren't actually measuring talent or skill here."

Saying that out loud would be more honest. But it would also destroy the illusion that the Oscars are anything but a "You've participated long enough!" sticker that gets handed out to actors that have put in good work for long enough. Nobody would want to watch that. So they have to gussy the Academy Awards up, and pretend they are something they're not.

[sktarq]

Honestly the whole article and many of the post here all reek of "The movies I like best didn't win so therefore academy is .."

Animation wasn't getting too close to winning, it wasn't winning enough and since most of Academy are in the acting branch by numbers films with live actors had a pretty unassailable advantage...so they created Best Animated Feature

these awards are not for the general public, they are for the movie making community by the movie making community. That's a big reason that the Shorts are still around...it is where lots of movie makers get their start and opens up lots of low budget opportunities or interesting ideas that can't support a whole 90 min film. And people who choose to go into movies professionally are pretty likely to have different taste in movies since they see movies in a fundamentally different way (often "art" which since the Academy of Motion Picture ARTS and Sciences is not a surprise).

Also because of the numerical dominance(at least until this last two year massive growth spurt - I have not checked since) of the acting branch those movies that are actor driven have a huge advantage. Which really accounts for a lot of the type of movie that is "Oscar Bait"

That it has become a way of advertising a certain type of movie to the type of people who otherwise don't respond well to advertising dollars and a way for certain industry members to fluff themselves up is a whole kettle of fish.

[Psyren]

Not really.

Agree to disagree.

(But even if you feel that way, more categories = more nominations, so not seeing the need for bellyache.)

Your mistaking the subjectivity of the categorization itself with the subjectivity of achievement in that category.
...
This new popular category has no good definition behind it.

I'm still not convinced it needs one. As you yourself stated, other categories have inherent subjectivity, and while there has been debate, the sky ultimately hasn't fallen. To repeat, from where I sit, more is better.

[Metahuman1]

Honestly the whole article and many of the post here all reek of "The movies I like best didn't win so therefore academy is .."

Animation wasn't getting too close to winning, it wasn't winning enough and since most of Academy are in the acting branch by numbers films with live actors had a pretty unassailable advantage...so they created Best Animated Feature

these awards are not for the general public, they are for the movie making community by the movie making community. That's a big reason that the Shorts are still around...it is where lots of movie makers get their start and opens up lots of low budget opportunities or interesting ideas that can't support a whole 90 min film. And people who choose to go into movies professionally are pretty likely to have different taste in movies since they see movies in a fundamentally different way (often "art" which since the Academy of Motion Picture ARTS and Sciences is not a surprise).

Also because of the numerical dominance(at least until this last two year massive growth spurt - I have not checked since) of the acting branch those movies that are actor driven have a huge advantage. Which really accounts for a lot of the type of movie that is "Oscar Bait"

That it has become a way of advertising a certain type of movie to the type of people who otherwise don't respond well to advertising dollars and a way for certain industry members to fluff themselves up is a whole kettle of fish.

That first one would be a solid argument given the things I explained about the by and large admissions of academy voters in my previous posts. At least, a soilid argument for my position that there getting to close. After all, not only being nominated but requiring an outright snub by people who dismissed it based on it's medium and maybe some professional biases involved that shouldn't matter based on how they presented everything?

That sounds like they were getting way to close to me. Better Ghetto them.



And that second one? Gee, it's almost like it's a snobbish elitist parade that frankly the industry would be better off with out. Almost like what I was asserting.


I do so love when people try to refute my position, open there mouths to do so, and solidification for it comes out instead.





Bohandas: Absolutely it does.

[BeerMug Paladin]

I'm still not convinced it needs one. As you yourself stated, other categories have inherent subjectivity, and while there has been debate, the sky ultimately hasn't fallen. To repeat, from where I sit, more is better.

Now, now, they could've obviously just dumped those special effects blockbuster movies into the "best animated movie" category and leave it at that. Clearly, it's better that way, since those movies rely on animation more heavily than their live-action sequences, it's an obvious place to dump them.

Seriously though, at some point there should probably be a changing of categories to reflect weirdo mixed media movies like Star Wars (one of the ones with CG), Avatar and Lord of the Rings.

[Bohandas]

Well, if the ratings trend continues they can just cancel the big ceremony in a few years and hand out the awards in a conference room in the local Hilton, with a press release most people will ignore as clickbait.

I honestly can't figure out how the televised ceremony has lasted as long as it did. It's basically like watching a high school graduation, except that you don't know anywhere there. As long as the thing's been running there have always been at least two more interesting viewing options available on other channels; I know this because I know that even from the very beginning there have always been at least three tv channels.

[Bohandas]

Regarding elitism, does anyone recall offhand how they usually treat films like Avatar and 2001: A Space Odyssey, where on the one hand they're effects driven science-fiction movies, but on the other hand they're also super pretentious? Do they usually hate them for being science fiction or love them foe being pretentious

[Metahuman1]

Regarding elitism, does anyone recall offhand how they usually treat films like Avatar and 2001: A Space Odyssey, where on the one hand they're effects driven science-fiction movies, but on the other hand they're also super pretentious? Do they usually hate them for being science fiction or love them foe being pretentious

They have a sort of weird love hate relationship with them. It also matters though, who made them. For example, James Cameron get's praised for his Pretentious Sci Fi, but Steven Speilburg is detested and snubbed for his. Because it's Steven Speilburg. (The academy hates him for some reason.).

[zimmerwald1915]

though this is true of any award given out for something like film and some of the broader voting bodies like the SAG (which is open to just about anyone with any acting credits at all)

For what it's worth, these are the requirements to apply for membership in SAG-AFTRA:

A performer becomes eligible for SAG-AFTRA membership under one of the following two conditions: proof of SAG-AFTRA, SAG or AFTRA employment, or employment under an affiliated performers’ union.

Proof of Employment
SAG-AFTRA membership is available to those who work in a position covered by a SAG-AFTRA (or AFTRA or SAG) collective bargaining agreement, provided that any person qualifying through work as a background actor must have completed three (3) days of work as a background actor under a SAG-AFTRA (or AFTRA or SAG) collective bargaining agreement. Membership is also available to those who work one (1) day of employment in a principal or speaking role (actor/performer), or as a Recording Artist in a SAG-AFTRA (or AFTRA or SAG) covered production.

Employment Under an Affiliated Performers' Union
Performers may join SAG-AFTRA if the applicant is a paid-up member of an affiliated performers' union such as ACTRA, AEA, AGMA or AGVA for a period of one year, and has worked and been paid for at least once as a principal performer in that union’s jurisdiction.

This is a little more lenient than I remember. It used to be five days work as a background actor under a SAG agreement to join that union instead of three. Apparently the merger was good for something.

They have a sort of weird love hate relationship with them. It also matters though, who made them. For example, James Cameron get's praised for his Pretentious Sci Fi, but Steven Speilburg is detested and snubbed for his. Because it's Steven Speilburg. (The academy hates him for some reason.).

Possibly because he doesn't exist. Steven Spielberg, however, does.