There is no way around it, so let’s just face it head-on: The Academy has truly botched this. The announcement that eight awards will be presented prior to the airing of the Oscars broadcast let the air out of the room on a show that needs to be good.
For the future of the Academy Awards as a relevant marker of cinematic achievement, this show needs to be good. For the future of awards shows as a whole – seemingly in a bottomless decline – this show needs to be good. To some degree, for the future of an industry that must be more than IP and superheroes, this show needs to be good. And maybe it will be, but it will not be the show anyone who cares about these awards desires to see.
Apparently pressured by ABC to bring in viewers or face cancellation, the Academy caved and will present off camera the awards for Editing, Production Design, Makeup and Hairstyling, Sound, Original Score, and the three shorts categories – Live Action, Animated, and Documentary. This is a colossal blunder the organization was shamed into backing out of just a few short years ago. There will be no backtracking this time, and it is an obvious detriment to the meaning of the Academy Awards.
I have been on the record on this site for years: The Oscars audience will never return to the levels of the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. The reasons for this are many and are mostly irreversible. We have talked about them before and I will not go into them again, but the time has come for the Academy to walk away from ABC. Go to a streaming service. Go to pay-per-view. Go to social media. The Oscars at ABC – or on network television at all – will become what the Golden Globes once were, eventually to become what the Golden Globes are now: the punchline to a not-particularly-funny joke.
More will be said here about the five below-the-line categories left out of the show when we break down the individual categories, not to mention the three shorts categories, whose absence from the show is a genuine slap in the face to the film community and film fans. Suffice it to say, if the purpose of the Academy Awards is to honor the art of cinema, then to ignore the tools of the trade is to fall well short of that goal.
The other change, meant to be seismic but more just pandering and sad, is the introduction of the #OscarsFanFavorite and the #OscarsCheerMoment. It is an attempt by an awards body painfully out of touch with the realities of online culture to involve the fans – and by the organization’s estimate, to ensure that a popular film is represented with an “award” on the show. They tried to do this with an official category a couple years ago and, again, were shouted down by the lovers of the art they claim to celebrate.
It seems clear that those changes were always coming. The inevitable was only postponed. More changes are ahead, and based on this year, those changes will not be of the kind that makes anyone happy. What is worse, they will not bring the audience back, and they will not save the show. As Roman said to Danny and Rusty – for my Ocean’s 13 fans out there – they are analog players in a digital world. Only radical change can save them, and the Academy is anything but radical.
As for the awards themselves, frontrunners and whatnot, we will have plenty of time to talk about that in the days ahead. It is a refreshingly wide-open year. Best Picture seems to be a toss-up, made even more so by the fact that many of the traditional Oscars bellwethers have gone their own way (The Lost Daughter winning at the Independent Spirit Awards) or just gone away (the Golden Globes’ embarrassing Twitter announcements). The Power of the Dog, the nominations leader, perhaps still has the edge. CODA looks strong after a triumph at the Screen Actors Guild Awards. And any of Belfast, King Richard, or Dune could surprise.
The acting categories are taking shape, and perhaps BAFTA will further solidify things Sunday. Will Smith seems on the path to his first Oscar for Actor, while Ariana DeBose is running away with Supporting Actress. Troy Kotsur has taken the lead from Kodi Smit-McPhee in the Supporting Actor race, while Best Actress remains a mystery that will not be solved by BAFTA, where there is no crossover in the nominees with the Academy.
Dune looks likely to rule over the crafts, à la Mad Max: Fury Road, and the screenplay categories both feel like anything could happen. Will Maggie Gyllenhaal win a writing award before an acting award for the stellar The Lost Daughter, or does Jane Campion get her second writing Oscar, joining the short list of people with wins in both Original and Adapted Screenplay? Does either Kenneth Branagh or Paul Thomas Anderson finally walk away with a statue for their respective paeans to youth?
For those who truly care about the work and have a genuine love of cinema, there is actually a lot to be excited about in these awards. One simply wishes that excitement could be enough for the Academy. Instead, the organization wanders aimlessly through a landscape it does not understand, chasing the ghost of an audience that long ago vanished.
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