You’ve probably heard that a few days ago the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences announced some changes to their regular Oscar agenda, the most significant one being a new category to award outstanding achievements in “popular” films. Though it hasn’t yet been made clear what the factors that’ll be taken into account for this award, many seem to believe that it will basically look at box office numbers. This has been met with a good amount of criticism from casual film goers, film enthusiasts and real cinephiles, and I must say I agree with most of them. There’s a lot to be said about this new development -and hardly anything positive. I was planning on doing a new review after my last couple of LOTR articles, but this bit of news is really worth discussing.

First of all, we have to try and understand the reasoning behind this decision on part of the academy, and it may not be as complex nor surprising as one may think at first. People have called this as an attempt by the academy to stay relevant with the times, since they’ve been losing viewership exponentially for quite some time now, so this might be read as a misguided attempt to cater to a wider demographic of film goers, who might not be really interested in the Oscars because their favourite films, like the latest “Star Wars” or “Avengers”, weren’t really in contention for anything “important”. But if we look a little deeper the pictures grows a little darker. There’s a reason a used the two examples above, and not mainly because they’re probably the most popular franchises right now, but also because they’re owned by the very same company. See, the official broadcaster of the Oscars in the US is ABC, and can you guess which mega company owns it? Exactly, the house of mouse. There track record with the Oscars isn’t really impressive, besides technical categories and Pixar’s domination over the Best Animated Picture category. They’ve only been nominated twice for Best Picture this century, for “Up” and “Toy Story 3” back in 2009 and 2010, respectively, and that was after the format was exapanded to ten elligible films. So this move by the Academy does feel like an attempt to create a consolation prize that would rather be used as a adevertisement for films that are already turning in billions at the world box office.

This does spell disaster for genre films. Even if commonly they aren’t taking as seriously as dramas or art house projects, the Academy did seem to be embracing such movies in the past few years: seeing the recent success of “Get Out”, “Mad Max: Fury Road”, “Gravity”, etc. one would be forgiven to think that they are finally wrapping their head around the idea that genre films can also qualify as art, and going even further the last couple of decades has been full of such instances, for example “Avatar” and “Inception” being serious contenders for Best Picture, and lets not forget “Lord of the Rings: Return of the King” becoming one of the three most awarded films in history, a list that includes another very popular film at its time, “Titanic”. And yet, this new announcement feels like a step backwards in this regard. Now it will be harder for deserving genre films to break into the Best Picture race, having to settle for a consolation prize that in reality nobody really cares about.

As stated before, this move seems to be prompted by the decline of viewership in Oscar night. The real question is if this is actually a solution or just a desperate attempt to get fans of “Transformers” or “Fast and Furious” to tune in. I think its the latter. The thing is, the Oscars aren’t the only ones losing in ratings, but probably the entire television industry. It all probably stems out of the rise of streaming practices and people preferring to watch online than on their TVs. Sure, the academy does have their good number of sins (#OscarsSoWhite anyone?), and that has certainly lead to people losing their interest, but in truth the problem most probably lies on the medium itself rather than on the content. So what could they do to stay relevant instead of becoming a parody of their own selves? Simple: stay true to their roots and become a real celebration of cinema itself, not a competition of predominant policies and ideologies and certainly not an excuse to advertise films that don’t need any more exposure. I believe the few people that still care about the Oscars are the ones that deeply care for cinema, so instead of catering to the average movie goer that can’t hold their attention span for more than five seconds they should cater to them, to us, true cinephiles. It could be an opportunity for them to go back to honouring the actual best a film year has to offer, to focus on more independent productions of artistic merit and to champion their value as aesthetic and cultural products. Instead, they’re going on the opposite route: championing movies as a product for mass consumption.

It might be a little early to draw any definite conclusions, they haven’t even explained how and through which procedures the entries for the new category will be chosen and evaluated, but I’m with most people who say this is a really, really bad idea. The Oscars are becoming ever more unreliable, politicized and a joke of themselves with each passing year, and while they seemed to finally be getting on the right track for the past two years, it may appear that they’re reaching a point of no return. Just think about it: would you like to live in a world where Michael Bay is an Oscar winner? Where the constant input of sequels, prequels, remakes or reboots gets rewarded instead of being dennounced for the cash grab it actually is? Where the Oscar, the supposed most prestigious award in the film world, boils down to a showdown between the latest “Mission Impossible” vs the latest “Fast and Furious”? I certainly don’t.

Sorry if that seemed a little negative, this was a rant that needed to happen. I really think this is a bad move on their part, but who knows? Maybe something good turns out of this. Thank you for reading and I hope you liked it. If you could leave a like and share this with your friends and family I would be very grateful. Also, if you want to stay up to date with the contents of this blog don’t forget to follow. Until next time!