The Best Picture race is not hard to figure out. It’s a system that can be easily gamed if you know your voters. It isn’t exactly rocket science figuring out which films they will choose in the end when looking at the array of options. As a result, it is often disappointing that it becomes such a limited selection, given the possibilities. This Academy, even after adding more members who are young and many of them international voters, is less concerned with movies that resonate with the public as it seems to be with films that resonate with more sophisticated filmgoers or the hive mind of critics.
Drive My Car vs. Spider-Man: No Way Home is probably your best example, but there are plenty of others. It wouldn’t really matter if the situation weren’t so dire. But the situation is, indeed, dire.
The Oscars have evolved from being one of the industry’s most powerful publicity tools to becoming something more like a stamp of quality to represent the ideology of Hollywood. Think of it like McDonald’s selling salads to show they care about offering healthy options. Most people aren’t going there to eat salad and everyone knows it, but just showing they care enough to offer those options allows them to continue to make money selling burgers.
There is a growing chasm between the mainstream American public and the increasingly niche media, which includes film critics, outlets like The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, etc. The class of people who still read those outlets are your target demo for the Oscars. As long as the Academy gets good press for choosing movies like Drive My Car, or Nomadland or any other critically acclaimed (and inclusive, above all) movie, they aren’t going to change nor feel any need to change.
If you remove box office as a measure of success, and you don’t really care what the invisible majority thinks, you can basically exist inside your own utopian bubble. And that is where we find ourselves now, in the summer of 2022, when a movie has captivated audiences with an A+ CinemaScore and an insane Rotten Tomatoes rating from critics and audiences:
After hearing all of the hype about Top Gun: Maverick, I finally went to see it in an actual movie theater. I wasn’t expecting it to be good. I was expecting decent. I wasn’t expecting a movie I never wanted to end because it was so enjoyable. There is no scenario that this doesn’t become one of the most memorable and beloved movies of 2022. It isn’t just the movie itself, which is as pitch perfect and as …….