The 89th Academy Awards
Well, it's that time of year again - the granddaddy of all awards shows is upon us. After a couple of years of nominations that were conspicuously free of diversity (to put it as diplomatically as I can), this year's awards are a decidedly more accurate image of the real world. People of color are heavily represented in this year's nominees, with two prominent nominees - "Fences" and "Moonlight" having primarily black casts and black directors, along with the racially diverse films "Hidden Figures" and "Lion." But while nominations are a good first step, don't celebrate too much just yet - because the whitest film of the year (and maybe the century) is looking like the favorite to sweep just about every category. That's right - "La La Land" might end up winning almost every goddamned award, despite the fact that it's a fucking musical.
Racial diversity and unbearable singing and dancing aside, this year's nominees are not the best representation of the past year's best movies. If anything, the Oscars themselves represent what's wrong with movies. I could spend the rest of my pointless fucking life writing about why I hate the Academy Awards (and at the rate that I'm huffing paint as I write this article, it WILL be the rest of my life) but I'm going to try and be as brief as I can.
The Academy Awards are not the word of God: The Academy Awards as an institution has achieved a perception in the minds of some people (those that aren't capable of forming opinions for themselves) that it is the final authority in quality of film - therefore, if something wins an Oscar, it must be a good movie, regardless of the fact that taste is subjective (and regardless of the fact that "Slumdog Millionaire" is an objectively bad movie). Not only is the Academy fallible, but they compound their mistakes by trying to make up for them. Frequently, a high profile director or actor who has gone without an award will be essentially be awarded an Oscar as a consolation prize....meaning that more deserving recipients get passed over, continuing a cycle in which awards are basically being handed out to random fucking people.
Like when Pacino lost Best Actor for The Godfather and Dog Day Afternoon, only to win for THIS....
The movies that get attention are frustratingly predictable: The kind of movies that the Academy nominates tend to represent a maddeningly specific set of criteria - period pieces (particularly those that take place during the Holocaust or which involve elaborate costumes), character-driven or biographic films (particularly those involving characters with disabilities), and, (in a trend that's downright masturbatory) movies telling stories about show business are going to get the nominations.
Better than Gangs of New York, Adaptation, and The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, apparently.
The Academy almost unfailingly excludes comedies and other movies that don't live up to their standards. In the last few years it seems like the only movies that anyone's interested in watching are superhero movies, which regularly come out on top in terms of ticket sales but on the bottom in terms of Oscar nods. And before you scoff and say that comic book movies aren't as artistically valid as more highbrow work, I stand by the fact that I enjoyed "Captain America: Civil War" infinitely more than I did several of this year's Best Picture nominees (including "Fences", which made me want to kill myself), and if the Academy was in it for the art rather than the money, independent and low budget films would see representation.
"Oscar Season" is counterproductive: In preparation for the big day, I've been trying to see as many of the nominated films as I can, and when I pulled up the list of this year's films I was struck by the fact that I hadn't fucking heard of most of them. It's common practice for studios to wait until the end of the year to release the movies that they're counting on to win the most golden statues, so that they're fresh in the minds of the Academy voters...sometimes waiting so long that the movie hasn't even seen a wide release until AFTER nominations have been announced. This makes it damn near impossible for the viewing public to actually see the movies - which is why the Oscars are without fail the most boring thing on TV each year. How invested can I be in watching an awards show wherein a handful of movies I haven't seen, and therefore have no opinion of, are being honored? The 89th Academy Awards are allegedly celebrating the best in film of 2016, but in actuality are celebrating the best in film of the last few weeks of 2016.
Finally, and because it wouldn't be an article on the Academy Awards without some Oscar picks, here are my thoughts on who should and/or will win. Not predictions, necessarily, because unless you skipped the rest of this article just to get to the predictions, you understand that I don't exactly trust the Academy to get it right (also, as you may notice, most of my picks didn't receive nominations).
Best Picture: "Green Room."
Best Director: Robert Eggers, "The Witch"
Best Actor: John Goodman, "10 Cloverfield Lane"
Best Actress: Natalie Portman, "Jackie"
Best Supporting Actor: Jeff Bridges, "Hell or High Water"
Best Supporting Actress: Angourie Rice, "The Nice Guys"
The 89th Academy Awards will air on ABC on February 26th, 2017.
