In the lead-up to Sunday’s 94th Oscars ceremony on ABC, there’s been all kinds of panicked flop sweat about dwindling audience numbers and reversing the trend. The deeper anxiety is that the Oscars are losing their relevance altogether as a must-see event. To which I say: They are and so what?
Nothing stays the same. The movie business itself has changed dramatically: What gets made. What gets the big marketing push. How all of it gets distributed. If the Academy Awards don’t have the cachet they once did, that’s because “the movies” aren’t the shared cultural experience they once were. And if we aren’t collectively watching the same films anymore, outside of a handful of blockbusters, of course interest in the Oscars is going to wane.
Good movies are good movies, regardless of how many people tune in to watch a few statues being handed out. But if we think about the Academy Awards as the elaborate promotional scheme they actually are, then maybe it’s time Hollywood finds other ways to hawk worthy films. For years, Oscar presenters would stand on stage and declare that one billion people worldwide were watching the broadcast. It was never true. But that kind of hyperbole is emblematic of a mindset that insists Hollywood has to be the center of the movie universe. More and more viewers, I suspect, are starting to feel otherwise.
I never liked the horse-race reporting around the awards circuit anyway. The Oscars have a long and entrenched problem of prioritizing the talents of white people, both in front of and behind the camera, while ignoring the work of others. But the Oscars weren’t founded on merit or a noble urge to celebrate the best in film anyway; the Academy itself was launched as a way to subvert the efforts of actors and others in forming labor unions. This isn’t an obscure detail, but it’s one we probably don’t talk about enough.
Back in the mid-1920s, MGM founder Louis B. Mayer and his fellow movie moguls decided they needed “an organization to handle labor problems at the studio without having to get into the union thing,” the film critic and historian David Thomson wrote in a 2014 piece for Vanity Fair that details the cynical mindset behind the Academy’s launch. “It would be a public relations operation that pumped out the message that Hollywood was a wonderful place where delightful and thrilling stories were made to give the folks a good time.”
They decided to call it the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, as if “the Academy had always been there, arranged by God and Harvard and Albert Einstein,” is how Thompson puts it. (Reader, I laughed!)
Someone at their first banquet suggested they hand out prizes and the rest is history. The Hollywood biography “Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer” quotes the big man himself on this development: “I found that the best way to handle (moviemakers) 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.”
For its first few years, the Academy functioned as its own union — essentially a company-controlled union as opposed to an independent trade union — that had its own standard contract outlining terms and conditions of work. That is, until company unions were outlawed in 1935.
So those are the origins of your not-so-precious Oscars. Which is why I can’t get worked up over a PR scheme that is starting to falter nearly 100 years after it began. They had a good run! Doesn’t mean I don’t like seeing great films (and the people who helped make them) get a boost. Doesn’t mean the prospect of a live broadcast featuring no shortage of egos (and occasionally the rare glimpse of humility) isn’t fun to watch. But this was never a pure endeavor. I guarantee on Sunday we’ll hear at least one presenter utter some version of the phrase “the magic of the movies.” That sentiment starts to sound pretty hollow when you read through any of the brutally honest anonymous Oscar ballot pieces published by The Hollywood Reporter each year. If Academy members can’t summon enthusiasm for the nominees — their own peers, for crying out loud — why should audiences? Do people who make movies even like the industry they’re working in?
The producers of this year’s broadcast have made a number of strange decisions in the hopes of luring audiences back. But if you haven’t been watching the Oscars in recent years, I’m not sure the prospect of (checks notes) non-movie professionals like Tony Hawk, Kelly Slater and Shaun White showing up as presenters will change your mind. Nor will the change this year that moves eight awards, including film editing and production design, to a pre-show slot, where they will be taped and then sliced and diced and edited into the main event.
Did you hear that Disney failed to use one of its allotted tickets to ensure that Rachel Zegler, the star of the studio’s best picture nominee “West Side Story,” would be in attendance? If the Oscars are really just a glamorous PR project — and they are, Blanche, they are — why so many unforced PR errors? Anyway, the Academy stepped in and invited Zegler to be a presenter, so crisis averted. But as film editor Myron Kerstein, nominated this year for “tick, tick … Boom!,” noted on Twitter: “With all due respect to the great and talented Rachel Zegler, there seems to be more support for a star than all the categories who won’t be able to be featured live on the broadcast. What is wrong with this town?”
I mean … what is wrong, indeed!
I’ve been pretty hard on the Oscars and while it’s not my job to brainstorm marketing schemes for Hollywood — people get paid a lot more money than I to do just that — I do think a new series on HBO Max called “One Perfect Shot” offers some ideas about how to promote movies and the people who make them.
Created and hosted by Ava DuVernay (a past Oscar nominee herself) and inspired by the Twitter account of the same name, the six-episode docuseries allows a director to talk about one scene, from one movie, and how they got the shot.
The series needs work and doesn’t yet live up to its title; there’s too much emphasis on the director’s biography and not enough on the technical aspects of the scene in question. But I like the idea behind it. What if the Academy scraped the Oscars — or at least stopped worrying so much about the broadcast’s shrinking ratings — and focused on producing a series like this every year? It’s a way to honor innovative work, but also give audiences a sense of what problem-solving looks like on these massive creative endeavors.
The Michael Mann episode features the director talking about the ways his Chicago upbringing influenced his filmmaking: “Film directors that come from Chicago and lived in the inner city make films like ‘The French Connection’ or ‘Heat.’ But if they lived in suburbs, they make comedies.” He’s not wrong! Mann chooses the climactic shootout from 1995′s “Heat” starring Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. I’ve never gotten around to seeing “Heat,” but you know what? Now I want to after watching Mann’s episode of “One Perfect Shot.” That’s marketing.
Aaron Sorkin is featured in another episode and, while he’s a visually indistinct filmmaker, I appreciate that he walks us through a technical challenge from 2020′s “The Trial of the Chicago 7″ when filming the melee that took place between police and protesters in Chicago's Grant Park. The budget only allowed for only 120 protesters: “How do you turn 120 protesters into thousands and thousands? Through a crowd duplication technique called tiling.” And then he shows exactly what the CGI entails.
Understanding that doesn’t make me like this particular movie any better. But I have a deeper understanding of how it was made and why, which just generally has a way of creating more interest in movies in general.
Far more, I would argue, than an Oscars broadcast ever did.
———
