Do the Oscars Matter Anymore?

On March 10, 2024, the 96th Annual Academy Awards, or OSCARS took place at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, Los Angeles. 

Not surprisingly, the usual hot takes and reasonable criticism were imposed against them. Far too white, far too centred on men, and too filled with blockbusters instead of better but less-seen films.

Since the beginning of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences back in 1927, there has always been some criticism of how the Academy chooses which films should be congratulated, or even nominated.

Academy members, thousands of people ranging from visual effects artists to actors, have made some questionable decisions. After years of controversy and screw-ups, maybe people are starting to wonder “Do the Oscars matter?”

It’s a challenging question to answer because it might mean something different to different people. Do the Oscars matter, compared to other more important issues going on in the world? Well, no, because the Oscars are a series of gold statues given mostly to rich people, but that’s not really what is meant by “Do the Oscars matter?”

Instead, the question is “Are the Oscars of great significance in the medium of film in determining who and what is the best?” That’s a more cumbersome question, but at least it narrows down what everyone is asking. Let’s try looking at this from a few different perspectives so we can get the truly complete picture possible.

The Oscar Rulebook

Among the most notable evidence that the Oscars is not a meritocracy of world film is that its qualifications and criteria immediately disqualify almost every motion picture made in the world every year. 

The criteria for what can and cannot be considered for an Academy Award is incredibly stifling, making it next to impossible for anything besides a movie in the English language with big studio backing to qualify. Even the rare independent film that blows up big with both audiences and critics is almost always distributed by a huge studio. At that point, it becomes another part of the Hollywood system.

However, awarding Parasite the 92nd best picture award did break some of the buzz. Nonetheless, a typical film that has humble origins but becomes popular is almost always distributed by one of the big Hollywood studios.

So, what are these qualifications? The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has a rulebook (96th Oscar Rulebook), often updated, that tells filmmakers and studios which movies “count” and which movies don’t. 

Some of the rules make perfect sense. For example, one rule states that a feature-length film is over 40 minutes. Anything less is a short film. Frankly, calling a 40-minute movie “feature-length” is overly generous, but that’s where the broad, inclusive nature of the Academy rules ends.

The criteria for whether or not your film can even be considered by the Academy is far more complicated, and it covers everything from where you screen your movie to what projector resolution you use.

To be considered for an Academy Award, a film must run in one of the U.S metro areas such as Los Angeles County; the City of New York [five boroughs]; the Bay Area [counties of San Francisco, Marin, Alameda, San Mateo, and Contra Costa]; Chicago [Cook County, Illinois]; Miami [Miami-Dade County, Florida]; and Atlanta [Fulton County, Georgia].

That doesn’t seem like a big roadblock if the movie in question is a big-budget film with a pre-release buzz like 1917, but the vast majority of films released across the world every year don’t have that luxury.

This means independent films and foreign films that can’t get a theater to show their movie for a solid week in a tiny corner of the globe are instantly disqualified. The competition for upstart directors all clamoring for a spot at an arthouse theater or a megaplex must be rough.

Foreign films especially don’t get a lot of theater space in America. Bong Joon-ho remarked upon this, calling the Academy Awards a “regional” movie awards ceremony.

For a foreign film to be nominated for an Academy Award besides Best Foreign Language Film, first, it needs to get picked up by an American distributor, then it needs to get shown in theaters in one specific country in the United States. But that only means that it is not immediately disqualified.

Realistically, it needs to do so well among both film critics and audiences that the Academy voters take notice. It’s got to be the next Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

In the past ten years, the only 8 non-English language films nominated for Best Picture have been Roma in 2018, Parasite in 2019, Minari in 2020, Drive My Car in 2021, All Quiet on the Western Front in 2022, and Anatomy of a Fall, Past Lives, The Zone of Interest in 2023.  

There is more. The major motion picture studios are populated by Academy voters and board members, and they have recently tightened qualifications to kneecap Netflix. If a film is released through streaming services or video-on-demand first or even simultaneously at the time of its theater release, the movie is disqualified.

That’s why The Irishman and Marriage Story, two Netflix films nominated for Best Picture in 2019 year, had limited theater releases even though Netflix obviously wants these films to be exclusive to their streaming service to drive up subscriptions. 

So, if the question is:

“Are the Oscars of great significance in the medium of film in determining who and what is the best?” then the answer based purely on this is only…kind of?

Some of the best motion pictures made every year are in the English language or are popular foreign films praised by English-speaking critics, such as Parasite.

However, if almost everything is immediately disqualified and almost everything else is not considered, then “kind of” is the most charitable answer to the question. But there is so much more to how the Oscars are chosen…

Related: Are TV shows replacing Cinema?

The Voting Campaigns 

A studio campaign for an Oscar is and is not similar to a presidential campaign. Both use tremendous amounts of money; both are out to convince those who can vote who they should vote for, and both can be deeply dishonest and malicious. But they also differ greatly and not only because the stakes are so much lower for an Oscar.

The money to elevate a movie or actor in the eyes of the Academy doesn’t come from donors, it comes straight from the coffers of the studio. It Is strictly forbidden by the Academy rules to look like you are asking for votes, even though that’s what they are always doing. 

According to the rules, the studio must only look like it’s “celebrating cinema”, and must appear almost disinterested in the award itself. That’s why “For Your Consideration” is such a popular phrase and not some campaign slogan about why their movie is the best. This actually avoids a lot of embarrassment. It allows the studio to appear as though they are only gently reminding the Academy of the existence of the movie. 

This is all nonsense, of course. The studio is actively campaigning, it’s just being done more quietly. The billboards and ads in trade publications are only the public faces. The real campaign is happening more quietly.

In the 90s, campaigning for the Academy Awards began to change, and while it might not be entirely fair to blame this one gross monster, I mean, it is kind of his fault, right?

Harvey Weinstein ran what was, for a while, a small production company and a small production company like Miramax could make a lot of their money after their Oscar nomination. Miramax did everything it could to earn Academy votes. 

They called voters at their homes, were on vacation, set up screenings for *where* They were on vacation, threw parties attended by actors in their movies, and invited the press, sometimes straight-up lying to Academy voters. They even set up screenings at motion picture retirement homes for elderly Academy voters, who were on life support but could still vote.

Academy voters receive For Your Consideration booklets, DVDs, copies of screenplays, and CDs of soundtracks. Voters are invited to tons of screenings and can only go to so many, ramping up the competitiveness among the studios. Voters are targeted by For Your Consideration ads in industry publications, on social media, ads on billboards, subways, and taxis.

Those last few are generally only in New York and Los Angeles. The process usually starts in the fall, after the blitz of film festivals in Venice, Telluride, and Toronto, and ramps up over the next six months leading up to the Oscars.

All of this raises awareness of the film and creates the notion among the voters that this movie could win and therefore must be on their must-watch list.

Movies that aren’t pushed as hard by studios or not at all are not nominated because the voters are never given any reason to believe they could win.

The Academy is massive, and though estimates vary, it’s at least 7,000 but possibly higher than 8,000. This means that the campaigns reaching every voter must be massive, too. Both the actor’s and directors’ campaigns. Tom Hanks, for example, is said to be involved in campaigning in all of his films, and he can turn on the charm.

There are endless Q&As campaign events and dinners. Academy voters are “judges” but they are not a hopefully unbiased jury. They party with the nominees and spend time on their vacations with them. Many Academy votes are probably acquaintances or even friends with the people who are nominated.

Winning an Oscar has about as much to do with making a great movie as it does with campaigning and convincing others to vote for your movie. So, if the Oscars are about hobnobbing with the right people and earning their votes through parties and advertisements, do the Oscars matter? “Kind of”?

Despite the campaigns and the lack of anything resembling integrity, sometimes great performances and great movies are rewarded. Would they have been rewarded without a successful campaign? Probably not, because a strong campaign will beat a strong movie, but in a better world, they would have “earned” the award. 

Even if it was for the wrong reasons, sometimes the right movie or right person wins even if the endless campaigns mean they always win them for the “wrong” reasons. But there is still one more perspective on whether or not the Oscars matter.

Representation

If the Academy Awards are not a meritocracy in terms of judging films across the world or in terms of judging films based on quality and not campaigning, then what about inclusiveness?

Are all films even within the limited scope of the Academy given a fair shake? 13 years ago, a woman won the Academy Award for Best Director for the first time in history. It took Kathryn Bigelow and The Hurt Locker for this to happen, afterwards, Chloe Zhao and Jane Campion followed for 2020 and 2021 respectively. 

Only seven women have ever been nominated for Best Director. In addition to this, films that could be described as “male-coded” or appealing to male demographics look to be the big nominees.

1917, a movie populated almost exclusively with men for somewhat obvious reasons, The Irishman, taking place in the patriarchal mafia, Ford v. Ferrari, a dad movie set in the world of car racing, and dude-bro messiah Quentin Tarantino. Furthermore, the best picture nominees, with Parasite being the lone exception, are deeply…white.

In early 2015, following the popularization of the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag, detractors of the hashtag and movement did what detractors always do when the subject of representation is broached. They claimed that the cream will always rise to the top, that no actual barriers have ever existed, and that choosing a person of color for an acting award or directing award amounts to quotas.

The truth is, the Academy Awards have never been a true meritocracy, actual barriers have existed for a long time, and nobody is asking for a person of color to receive an award on that basis but rather to be considered equally.

The Hays Code

The unequal treatment goes back to The Hays Code of the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s. While the code was most notable for censoring “risqué” material, the code also forbade miscegenation, a now rarely used word that effectively means the mixing of races. These severely limited roles for people of color all on their own, but they particularly affected women of color.

In those days, most leading roles for women were as the romantic partner of the leading man, and miscegenation rules mandated that they either both be white or both be black, since Hollywood wasn’t in the business of heavily promoting black films, the former was almost always the case. If there were no leading roles for women of color, then there were no opportunities for Best Actress in a Leading Role.

Although the Hays Code ended in the mid-20th century, this remained the standard operating procedure for a long time due to Hollywood’s now-infamous inability to accept change.

Times have changed, but the demographics of the Best Picture and Best Director nominees are not radically different.

This is not to say that there is some secret, shadowy cabal actively working to keep the Oscars as white and male as possible. There is no “dude Illuminati”, but it still happens. Rather, it has to do with the demographics of the voters. To this day, long after the demographics controversy, only 16% of Academy voters are people of color, and only 28% are women.

Producer Amy Pascal explained it like this: 

“[Voters think], these kinds of stories are important to me, and these kinds of stories are less important to me…

… I do wonder if many thousands of voters, deciding what to watch on their screeners or deciding which ones they go to, might have an unconscious reaction…”

This is the most charitable explanation for exclusion, an unconscious reaction, but it still doesn’t neatly solve the issue.

The Academy does occasionally award Best Picture to a black film about the black experience, but with the exception of Moonlight, there is always some catch.12 Years a Slave is set in the distant past and Green Book is set during segregation. 

Not to mention that it’s a white savior film, a black helplessness narrative that was rightly excoriated by black film critics and activists. Both of these films are…safe. They do not challenge white audiences about their present-day attitudes but instead, tell white audiences and white Academy voters how far they have come.

This is particularly true for aging white Academy voters who remember those days and can applaud themselves and pretend such attitudes are things of the past. Bear in mind, 12 Years a Slave may be “safe” for white audiences, but it’s also really good and deserving of recognition, unlike Green Book, which is not. It’s bad. It’s a bad movie. They are not the same. 

In contrast, movies like Sorry to Bother You do not receive Academy Award nominations. Part of this is due to director Boot Riley infamously not wanting to do the campaign game, and partly because movies like this are less…safe. 

Sorry to Bother You is set in the modern day and shows white audiences where their guilt lies. It’s not an “Academy” movie. The intersection between whiteness and dudeness is that even when a movie breaks through, there is usually a catch.

Only one best-picture winner over the past decade has had a woman protagonist – The Shape of Water, starring Sally Hawkins but directed by Guillermo del Toro. When a woman director’s movie is nominated for Best Picture, there is a good chance, she will not be nominated for Best Director, and should such a movie break through, it will almost certainly be a movie about white women.

It should be noted that part of the issue is the aforementioned squeezed numbers among Academy voters who favor white men. There is also a matter of studio control over which movies are singled down for academy voters to view and favor in the first place. 

Studios pick their candidates based on “electability” and pour money into them, targeting Academy voters with ads, mailers, screeners, events, and more. Studios engage in a self-fulfilling prophecy. They know the demographic makeup of the Academy voters, and they cater their campaigns toward those demographics.

Then, when we get years of #OscarsSoWhite and only men nominated for best director and bro-movies and so-called “safe picks” instead of something intriguing and new, the studios have plausible deniability. They didn’t choose the best picture nominees. The Academy voters did.

But of course, the Academy voters were nudged in those directions by the studios, sent particular screeners, invited to specific events for specific movies, and so forth.

This is how a movie like Joker 2019, which received mixed reviews and has the least amount of critical appraisal out of all the Best Picture nominees, can be the most nominated movie of the year. Least praise, most nominations.

Whether you loved Joker or hated it is irrelevant to the point. Joker discourse is over, please spare us your hot take, nobody cares.

The point is that any movie that almost half the community of critics gave a thumbs down to getting the most nominations over everything else is an indicator of an effective campaign and not any inherent quality.

Academy voting is not a meritocracy – it is a game.

Warner Bros put all their eggs in this basket. They went hard on Joker, and it received 11 out of Warner Bros’ 12 overall nominations. The 12th was for Kathy Bates’ performance in Richard Jewell.

Warner Bros clearly did not try to position Just Mercy for that spot, despite being released in the prime December spot for Academy voters and despite an overall better critical reception than either film.

You can draw your conclusions about why, but the studios know the demographics of the Academy voters, and they model their campaigns around electability. The Academy members and therefore voters are predominantly people who work in the motion picture industry in Hollywood.

Though everyone from costume designers to directors can be members, the actual membership has a disproportionate amount of actors. If the “goodness” of a movie is judged mainly on the performance by the lead actor, that can be enough to grant it Best Picture status due to the disproportionate number of actors as Academy voters.

All-inclusive

So, based on all these biases and weirdly specific demographics and privileges, do the Oscars matter? Kind of? The Academy Awards still, more often than not, chooses good – albeit sometimes not great – movies.

Certainly not the best movies even within the stringent and exclusive qualifications and biases, but “best” is subjective enough that “kind of” might be the best answer here too.

Honestly, the biggest piece of evidence that the Academy Awards don’t matter is how forgettable the Best Picture movies are. Two years after the statues are handed out, does anyone really remember the nominees? Is anyone out there, still standing hard for…Belfast?

Does anyone still talk about Best Picture winners like Argo or The Artist? Is anyone’s favorite movie Best Picture nominees like Philomena or Brooklyn? Did anyone even see Brooklyn?

Is there a big fandom for Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close? Are there brainy, academic courses about garden variety biopics like The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything? Is anyone dying for a sequel to The Big Short? 

Movies are great, but the Academy doesn’t always pick great movies. The Academy Awards ceremony is a terrible predictor of what will remain important to the medium. The list of nominees is a snapshot of what studios and paid consultants have decided to present on one night of the year and happily throw away the morning after.