Are Oscars Worth All This Fuss?

  • I’m only slightly ashamed to admit that I found myself hoping that the strike would shut the Academy Awards down; that for once, in a year of such cinematic bounty and variety, appreciation for the best movies could be liberated from the pomp and tedium of Hollywood spectacle.

    The Oscars themselves may be harmless fun, but the idea that they matter is as dangerous as it is ridiculous.

    The top nominees often come into the ceremony with middling box office numbers. (This year “Juno,” the only PG-13 best picture nominee and the only one in which nobody dies a violent death, is also the only one to have topped $100 million in gross receipts.) A big victory on Oscar night is supposed to help make up the difference. And this, of course, explains the frenzied, overcrowded fall release calendar. The commercial fate of serious movies is now, to a disturbing extent, dependent on the Academy Awards.

    In the old days it was more often the opposite: the academy would belatedly gild the lily of commercial success with a shiny finish of ersatz class. This vulgarity was the saving grace of the Oscars. It was not necessary for film lovers to take them seriously or for media outlets to cover them like presidential campaigns, with horse-race reporting, sober analysis and war room spin doctoring. A bit of perspective is needed. The wonderful thing about the Academy Awards is that they are fundamentally trivial. To pretend otherwise is to trivialize movies.