This years nominees for the Academy Awards have finally been revealed and, as you can guess, I have some thoughts regarding them. There were some surprises here and there, but we mainly got the usual suspects, all the movie names that have been thrown around in the award ceremonies of late. On the positive side, I was pleasantly surprised to see Phantom Thread and Paul Thomas Anderson get nominated for Best Picture and Director respectively: it hadn’t received much attention from other major awards and most “experts” were writing it off from the competition; I’ll admit I haven’t seen the film just yet, but by the looks of it and the talent behind it, not to mention that it is supposed to be Daniel Day Lewis last appearance as an actor, it does seem worthy of such praise. And it was great to see Get Out and Jordan Peele getting major nominations, truth be told I was expecting it, but wasn’t sure until the last moment that the Academy would take such route, but its worth applauding.
On the rather negative side, I was quite disappointed that The LEGO Batman Movie was snubbed at the Best Animated Feature race, but The Boss Baby did get nominated, go figure. Also, In the Fade was excluded from the Best Foreign Language Film category (I haven’t seen neither The Insult, nor On Body and Soul nor A Fantastic Woman, the last two being played at the Berlinale last year but I remember obnoxiously deciding to skip them). And Martin McDonagh’s abscence in the Best Director category does come as a rather unpleasant surprise, but if we’re being honest there’s an aray of directors this year that were completely ignored.
Making some early predictions now, The Shape of Water seems poised to sweep the majority of awards, including Best Picture and Best Director – thirteen nominations is no laughing matter. I predict that Blade Runner 2049, Dunkirk and Baby Driver will take all the technical awards. In the acting categories there are already some frontrunners, namely Oldman, McDormand, Rockwell and Janney, but there is still some time to go before that being set in stone. Best Animated Feature will most definitely go to Coco, while Best Foreign Language Film will most likely go to The Square (with which I’m extremely pleased), but anything can happen.
Now, it is time to talk a little bit about the problems that abound the Oscars and virtually every other award show out there. If I’m being honest, every year with months in advance I’m on the look for the films that’ll most likely get nominated and pay close attention to the award circuit, but by doing this I’ve noticed certain issues surrounding all this award culture. Theoretically, these awards should be designed to reward the highest quality in the film medium, but we’ve seen time and time again that this is definitely not the case. Disregarding the fact that the Oscars mainly reward american productions (they have the Foreign Language category, but they limit each country with only one entry in order to participate, and usually this is one of the categories that receives the least amount of attention), behind all the glamour and gala hides a huge amount of politics and often dark influences.
Already in October or November the big studios start campaigning and championing their films for the big awards, investing huge amounts of money on advertisement, and the result ends up being that the film that received the biggest exposure, the one that could move more influences within Hollywood, receives the biggest prizes, not the ones that truly deserved it. Granted, there is no way of objectively deciding which films were best and which deserved the highest honours, but one doesn’t have to be a genius to notice trends within the industry. The so-called oscar bait phenomenon shows up every year: the clearest example of that this year is The Post, directed by Oscar favourite Steven Spielberg, starring Oscar favourites Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, about a political intrigue based on real-life events, also a topic favoured by the Oscars – the only way this could’ve been more oscar-baity was if it was set during World War II.
All of this devolves into (another) big problem: these award shows become even more predictable and boring every passing year. We always see the same names, the same faces, basically the same movies each time around, and after a while it stops being exciting. Like I said, I do tune in every year and I try to watch as much of the nominated films as possible, but because of all the differente award shows between December and February and their perceived importance (for example, the Kansas City Critics Society Awards don’t hold much weight compared to the Guild Awards or the BAFTAs), by the time the Oscars come we all know who’s gonna win and there’s no room for surprises. The only time I’ve been surprised by the Academy Awards in recent memory was last year with that Best Picture fiasco at the end, but that was because they screwed up, not because they were trying to actually do something interesting for a change.
Returning to a point that I mentioned before, a huge amount of political discourses reigns above the Oscars and all of these industry awards. The reigning discourse of today’s climate is that of political correctness, that’s why we see more (forced) diversity in recent years, with films like Moonlight and Call Me By Your Name gaining major attention, compared to a few decades ago. Often it comes as a reaction to current political situations, like when The Salesman won the Best Foreign Language award as a response to Trump’s ban on muslims from entering USA (though that film did deserve the award on its own cinematic merits). In essence, the films that get chosen tend to be the ones that best represent the academy member’s current ideology – and it happens to change more often than they’d like to admit. We can expect this year a lot of people claiming their support towards the people who have been affected by the sex scandals that have seen recently exposed, albeit this support is most definitely superficial and all soaked with the ulterior motives of winning the academy’s favour.
So, I’ve already voiced my thoughts on this year’s Academy Awards nominations and my criticism with film award shows in general. As you may have noticed, I deeply dislike such culture, but my eternal contradiction is that each year I spend a lot of my time and attention with most things related to them. In a sense, it is a way to find new films and to stay tuned with what goes on in the industry, but like I said, most of such shows become boring and predictable with time, and are plagued with deeply rooted political biases and ideological discourses. Anyway, I’ll still try to watch as many of the nominees as I can before the ceremony, and when I do I’ll be posting my more thorough predictions. If you like this blog I would really appreciate it if you leave a like and subscribe, and you can be of big help if you spread the word and share this with your friends and family. Thanks a lot and until next time.
Breaking the Fourth Wall 