What’s up Wisecrack?
Michael here.
Now I’m sure a lot of you are sick of hearing about the Oscars.
You either don’t care and are starting to wonder why you clicked this video, or you
do care, and are deeply offended by the following statement: Nobody should care about the Academy
Awards.
We say this as film lovers who have been burned one-too-many times by the Academy’s bizarre
choices, and we say it as philosophy students trying to understand how Crash could possibly
be considered the most significant film of 2004.
“You want something from me?
Cause I’m right here.
I’m trying to help you.I didn’t ask for your help did?”
But most of all, we say it as human beings who hate the media discourse surrounding the
Oscars so much we considered entering a sensory deprivation tank for the duration of this
year’s award season.
Jokes aside - what’s the big deal?
What’s wrong with people celebrating how much they love Green Book?
The way we see it, the problem lies in the profound influence the Academy Awards have
on the creation of new movies.
But we’ll get there.
So without further ado,
Welcome to this Wisecrack Edition: The Oscars Were a Mistake
Every year, tens of millions of people tune into to see who will receive the film industry’s
highest honors.
But the Academy that doles out Oscars wasn’t just created to celebrate performances by
actors like Nicolas Cage in “Leaving Las Vegas.”
Ah!
Ahh!
It was instead created to uh, pay people in the film industry less.
The year is 1926, and you’re Louis B. Mayer, a MGM studio mogul preparing to do the most
studio mogul-ly-thing of all: build a fancy Santa Monica beach house.
As recounted by critic and author David Thompson in Vanity Fair, Mayer wanted to hire some
MGM set designers to help construct his oceanside paradise.
But there was a problem: the set designers were just about to become part of Hollywood’s
first union, complete with new contracts that made them very expensive.
In case you were worried about the well-being of Mayer’s new home, he managed by hiring
a few pricey set designers and relying on cheaper laborers for the rest.
But the dude was more or less haunted by the idea that actors, directors and screenwriters
would follow suit and unionize for better wages.
So, he concocted a genius plan: he made his own union.
He beat them to the punch, creating an institution that could swoop up his opposition and stop
unions before they even started.
It was the historical equivalent of your boss giving you a giftcard to your local TGI Fridays
instead of that raise you asked for.
Mayer’s new institution was the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences - The
Academy, for short.
If you think the long name sounds snooty, that’s the whole point, according to Thomson,
“It made you think the Academy had always been there, arranged by God and Harvard and and
Albert Einstein” and not a few cigar-smoking jerks looking for cheap non-union labor.
At its inception, the Academy was comprised of 36 actors, directors, writers, technicians
and producers.
They were conferred elite status and the vague promise that working conditions in the industry
would “improve.”
But while the Academy promised to create industry standards and handle labor disputes, it was
privately viewed as a way to render unions unnecessary.
On a broader level, the organization was dedicated to promoting a positive, wholesome image of
Hollywood during a decade plagued by industry scandals in the form of Charlie Chaplin’s
scandalous divorce or Fatty Arbuckle being tried for drunken manslaughter.
Anyway, these powerful, image-conscious folks had a fancy banquet in January of 1927.
The only thing the festivities were missing?
Something to make people feel even MORE special, a “legitimizing” factor, if you will.
Enter: awards.
As Mayer recounted to his biographer, “I found that the best way to handle [movie makers]
was to hang medals all over them.
If I got them cups and awards, they’d kill themselves to produce what I wanted.
That’s why the Academy Award was created.”
Come 1929, the first awards were handed out in a 15 minute private ceremony.
These awards were also a way for the movie industry to affirm its own artistic importance.
On one level, this can be seen as obvious self-indulgence.
On another level, scholar Peter Decherney argues, it was a way to brand Hollywood talent
as “skilled artistry” rather than “labor,” in the process, rendering labor unions unnecessary.
Decherney argues that the award categories themselves created two separate classes of
Hollywood workers - lowly laborers and “artistes.”
However, Mayer’s ingenious solution to the pesky union problem was ultimately doomed.
The economic turmoil of the early 1930s led everyone from actors to writers to directors
to organize.
In a delicious twist, fledgling unions like the Screen Actors’ Guild, the Writers’
Guild and the Directors’ Guild boycotted subsequent Oscar ceremonies in successful
attempts to strongarm the Academy into negotiations.
Those unions remain powerful to this day.
Still, that annual love letter to Hollywood’s most glamorous residents would become one
of the most effective promotional tools of all time establishing American film as the
world’s primary form of entertainment.
Increasingly fawning media coverage intensified America’s emotional investment in the movie
industry and especially, in the celebrities who win and lose shiny prizes.
As the cult of celebrity grew, obsessive interest in the fashions worn, the attractive dates
escorted, and the scandalous afterparties ballooned.
So now we know the shady origins of the Oscars.
But the real question is --Are they even good at what they do?
After all, if your goal is to award artistic excellence, you’d hope said excellence would
withstand the test of time.
Or at least do so better than, say the 1956 Best Picture Around the World in 80 Days or
the 1989 gem Driving Miss Daisy.
While an Oscar award is pretty ubiquitously seen as a confirmation of artistic merit,
some decisions the Academy has made have cast doubt on the industry’s ability to appraise
its own work.
And that’s putting it politely.
“This seemed like a better idea in rehearsal”
Last year alone, controversy brewed over choices like Best Editing for Bohemian Rhapsody, a
film which IndieWire called “a masterclass in bad editing” and which even the editor
HIMSELF admits of one scene: “Whenever I see it, I want to put a bag over my head.”
Then there was the Best Picture for Peter Farrelly’s Green Book, which LA Times critic
Justin Chang succinctly called “an embarrassment.”
The matter of taste has haunted the Oscars from the very beginning, with the industry
perpetually agonizing over its desire to advance the art of filmmaking and to spotlight commercial
successes.
We’re going to focus on the history of the Best Picture, by the way, because it can help
succinctly shine light on larger issues in the academy.
So apologies to you best costume design historians.
In its first year, the Academy straddled this line by awarding two best pictures.
One went to the most “Outstanding Picture,” the commercially successful World War I film
Wings and one to the most “Unique and Artistic Picture” the expressionist film Sunrise:
A Song of Two Humans.
It created a division between mainstream and “artistic” excellence.
But then, the Academy tweaked things - creating one “ultimate” best picture category.
Since then, that award has represented a tough balancing act between entertainment value,
artisanship, commercial success, and the film industry’s public image.
All of which must be reconciled when Hollywood endorses one film as the definitive “best.”
This has resulted in many questionable choices.
In 1953, the still-widely-respected film Singin in the Rain wasn’t even considered for Best
Picture.
The award instead went to The Greatest Show on Earth which has an abysmal 43% critic score
on Rotten Tomatoes.
The wildly inventive film Brazil - a Wisecrack favorite, so maybe we’re a little biased
- also didn’t manage to get nominated for best picture in 1986.
Instead, the top prize went to Out of Africa.
Brazil has a 98% critic approval on Rotten Tomatoes, and a 90% audience approval - speaking
to its long-lasting appeal and artistic brilliance.
Meanwhile, Out of Africa has a 58% critic score and a not-so-bad 83% audience score.
What’s more, Gladiator won best picture in 2000 when the god-damn freaking MATRIX
wasn’t even nominated.
I’m going to stop this list before I burst a blood vessel, but I think the question has
been raised: Why has the Academy proven to be both predictable and frankly annoying in
its choice of best picture nominees and winners?
There’s a certain pattern when it comes to the Oscar’s highest prize.
Most notably, genre makes a big difference for Best Picture - Dramas tend to rack up
the top prize, winning 89% of the time between 1928 and 2010, according to Collider.
Specific types of drama also have an easy way in: A UCLA study of Best Picture nominees
between 1985 and 2009 found that war movies, historical epics and biographies fare incredibly
well.
Meanwhile, IMDB keywords like “family tragedy,” “whistleblower,” “domestic servant,”
and “Watergate” correlated most highly with nominations.
Collider also noted that the Oscar tends to go to the longest film nominated and that
80% of Best Picture winners since 1980 clocked in at over two hours.American Film History
Damiel Bona sums up the vibe of Best Picture winners as: “Movies that are aesthetically
conservative, but which contain humanistic or uplifting attitudes.”
That is movies that make Hollywood feel important WITHOUT challenging the status quo - which
is why heartwarming romantic war dramas like The English Patient beat arguably-better,
but decidedly-nihilistic films like Fargo.
So what, in contrast, DOESN’T win Best Picture?
Negatively associated are IMDB terms like “zombie” and “black independent film.”
Which is why the objectively groundbreaking, hasn’t-aged-a-day Night of the Living Dead
lost to the decidedly-dated musical Oliver, and also why Spike Lee didn’t win an Oscar
until 30 years after the release of Do The Right Thing which lost to, and I can’t stress
this enough, Driving Miss Daisy.
“Mornin Ms. Daisy I thought I’d see after your
Zinnias”.
“You leave my flower bed alone”.
Oh, and if you’re making a kickass fantasy film, or horror film, don’t hold your breath
waiting for a nomination.
After all, even Psycho, almost universally regarded as the best horror film of all time,
wasn’t nominated for Best Picture.
That was the same year flicks like Elmer Gantry, Sons and Lovers, and The Sundowners, none
of which you’ve heard of, were nominated.
Not even one of the finest works of sci-fi is likely to earn a nomination, including
the famously-snubbed, breathtaking 2001: A Space Odyssey.
In fact, a sci-fi film has never won Best Picture.
It might sound like we’re harping about all our favorite films that didn’t snag
best picture nominations - but it’s not just that - the list of films not given Oscar
nods wouldn’t be so objectionable if only so many TERRIBLE or forgettable films weren’t
lauded.
Somewhat humorously, the status-quo obsessed nature of the Oscars can perhaps best be illustrated
by a decision made in 1929.
The very first feature-length talking picture was disqualified for consideration because
it had an ``unfair” advantage over silent films.
The tendency for the Academy to reward “safe” choices is only augmented by their preferential
voting system, in which voters rank nominees in order of preference.
As a result, films that are “less disliked” tend to triumph over films that are more polarizing,
innovative or “risky.”
The industry's desire to simultaneously seem important and recognize commercially successful
films means that it tends to nominate inspiring films based around popular historical events
and people (cough Lincoln) - even when those stories skew the facts about historical figures
or events.
What’s more, films featuring actors who “transform” physically into familiar characters
from history or literature are also frequently rewarded, whether they’re playing Freddie
Mercury or Winston Churchill or Queen Elizabeth.
Above all though, naturally, your film must not ruffle the feathers of the Academy, which
is why beloved, provocative films like American Psycho or Tangerine tend not to not attract
the same attention as safe, non-paradigm shifting films like The King’s Speech or Frost/Nixon.
It also must not be seen as quote unquote “cheap” commercial fare like Back to the
Future.
And, we’d be remiss NOT to point out that a “foreign-language film” has NEVER won
best picture, though we are rooting HARD for Parasite to change that.
In recent decades, Hollywood has attempted to make itself more relevant by tweaking the
awards to recognize more popular films [Joker].
They introduced a Best Animated Film category in 2002 and expanded the Best Pictures category
from five to ten nominees after The Dark Knight was infamously snubbed.
Most notably, the Academy proposed reverting back to its original, 1929 paradigm for the
2019 Oscars by introducing an award for “outstanding achievement in popular film.”
This announcement, ironically, was quickly met with outrage at the Academy’s apparent
insinuation that a highly-commercially successful film couldn’t ALSO be the best film of the
year.
They quickly rescinded the decision before promptly, and predictably, giving its highest
honors to a 130-minute historically-inaccurate drama featuring an uplifting interracial friendship
during American segregation.
Speaking of Green Book,“important” and “popular” films that tend to win also
seem to skew preachy,.
“So that little temper tantrum, was it worth it?
Hm?
You never win with violence Tony, you only win when you maintain your dignity, dignity
always prevails”.
Without asking too many hard questions or being too provocative.
So we get a lot of feel-good interracial friendships, and a lot less horse-people-fueled revolutions.
Which gets us to Oscar bait - a catch-all term for the way studios try to game their
way into a Best Picture nomination - whether that be the kind of film they make, the time
they release the film, or the marketing strategy surrounding it.
Oscar bait can only exist *because* the Oscars are so predictable, for all the previously
cited reasons.
This mutually reinforcing system means that studios KEEP making more English Patients
and War Horses and timing them to coincide with the fall “Oscar season.”
While Oscar bait existed as early as the 1930s, it really came into its dismal own when the
studio system was broken up.
This meant that film studios no longer could control movie theaters, meaning they had to
more strategically plot to snag their movies impressive theatrical runs.
Arguably the biggest breakthrough in Oscar marketing came in 1978 with the late December
release of Deer Hunter.
The film is great, but Universal Studios determined that it was too intense and sad to organically
become a box office success, so they planned its entire marketing strategy around an Oscar
nomination.
Spoiler alert: the strategy worked and Deer Hunter snagged 9 nominations, and 5 wins including
Best Picture.
In the process, it changed the way studios thought about the awards.
And so every fall, we get a predictable parade of movies about a world war, or a conflicted
monarch, or an inspiring character overcoming the odds to succeed because that’s the gosh-darned
American way.
And yes - exceptions exist, but it’s an undeniable trend.
Along with the rise of the Oscar bait has come the intensification of pre-Oscar marketing
campaigns.
Now, swaying Academy judges with more than just talent is as old as the Oscars themselves.
When the awards were just a year old, best actress nominee, Mary Pickford had the entire
voting committee over for tea at her estate, an invitation then considered Tinseltown’s
greatest status symbol.
She subsequently won her Best Actress award, but could victory really have felt that great?
Advertising campaigns soon extended beyond tea parties, with “For Your consideration”
ads debuting in newspapers in 1936.
By 1955, the film Marty boasted an Oscar budget of $400,000 that was higher than its entire
production cost of $343,000.
For this effort, the film won four little gold men.
As we entered the new millenium, marketing had "escalated to unprecedented degrees,”
as Bona notes.
All of which is to say, independent films like “Sorry to Bother You” simply can’t
compete, as Boots Riley explained on Twitter.
That’s even if, based on merit, those films are just as excellent.
And the films that DO win nominations or Oscars get incomparable boosts in ticket sales and
name brand recognition, even if they’re called Crash.
So what is the mindless production, promotion, and consumption of Oscar-bait films, doing
to the industry?
We’d argue that, over the past half-century, it led to a great many talented people producing
a great many NOT awesome films, with the conscious or subconscious goal of winning a little gold
man.
Those studio-backed films then suck up nearly all available press attention What that inevitably
means for a population with only SO much time and money to spend at the movie theater is:
Less attention and less acclaim for genuinely GOOD and provocative films that don’t conform
to stodgy Oscar standards.
When you look through the history of films that have truly made the medium what it is
today, you don’t find a filmography of Oscar Best Picture winners - you find films that
were too daring to pander.
All of which is to say, skip the Oscars this year and watch a couple of movies that aren’t
afraid to alienate you.
Try Brazil or Spring Breakers, Advantageous or Personal Shopper, The Witch or Under the
Silver Lake.
Honestly, anything but Green Book.
But hey - what do you think?
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And as always, thanks for watching.
Later.