Another year, another lengthy sigh upon opening my phone the morning after the Oscars. I didn’t watch the charade live; I haven’t for years. Unsurprisingly there was a boring monologue by one of the seven Jimmies of late-night television. He breezed lightly past historic industrial action taken by SAG-AFTRA and the Writer’s Guild, to save the responsible parties in the room from embarrassment, while stumbling through a tasteless and watery barrage of jokes. It was a thematic introduction if nothing else, as from that point onwards what followed was a watery barrage of predictable television. Oppenheimer swept. Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Jr. went on to make acceptance speeches almost as pretentious as the biopic. Nolan predictably dedicated his thanks for the Best Director award to Universal Studios, the Academy (like everybody else) and capital ‘C’ cinema as a whole. I came away with two questions: why did I bother watching coverage of this at all, and what does the validation of the Academy even mean?
The reality is, it doesn’t mean anything. The fact that the Oscars is for people in showbusiness doesn’t necessarily make it more significant than any other annual industry award show; we don’t celebrate the winners of the 2024 Motor Trading Industry Awards. But beyond that polemic, it is important to know the demographic composition of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. With over 10,000 globally registered members, the Academy is 81% white and 67% male (Statista, 2022). This gaggle of majority-white greybeards are positioned by the Oscars as the arbiters of taste and artistic value, the kindly cultural benefactors of the capitalist cishet patriarchy. It is my position that even debating what they deem to be significant is giving their opinions too much credence. But in the case of snubs, it’s no wonder that such wealthy, sycophantic dinosaurs would sing the endless praises of a bloated film about a murderous xenophobic scientist over the cinematic achievements of people of colour and LGBTQIA+ folks. This year, Lily Gladstone was robbed of the Best Actress win; next year, it will be somebody else. That’s not even considering the hundreds of quality independent films starring and made by marginalised people which will be relegated to the recognition of smaller festivals; this for failing to meet the Academy’s arbitrary entry requirement of a theatrical run. What the Oscars really recognise and celebrate, rather than the best achievements in film in a given year, is a select few pictures and people that meet the sanitised criteria of what the bourgeois elite of the Academy deem acceptable. It is a pop culture bandwidth limiter.
With this, we can also recognise how anybody who attempts to use the Oscars’ massive platform for calls to action about real issues is suppressed, both at the event and in the following publicity cycle. This year, Zone of Interest director Jonathan Glazer used the acceptance speech for his best international film win to raise awareness about the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. It was met in the room with an icy confusion of cowardice and smothered applause. The audience was visibly panicked. He has been hounded in the media since with attacks from supporters of the Israeli government’s colonial fascist regime. Let us not forget that Michael Moore was infamously met with open hostility in 2003 for decrying the Iraq war with his acceptance speech; the Academy serves the interests of American imperialism as much as Hollywood industry. Anything running counter to dominant narratives is choked, and attention is shifted back to empty platitudes about the importance of film and facile celebrity mishaps.
I don’t want to be the fun police here; my takeaway from years of watching this mulch is that if one must expose themselves to the Oscars, they must do so with a degree of removal. Much as I would love for things to be better than this, I simply can’t engage with it anymore. Obviously, the films you watched this last year that meant something to you are infinitely more important than whatever the Academy deems tasteful. My only hope is that eventually the Academy’s ratings tank and that my March will someday be untroubled by this nonsense. But that’s just me.
