You may not care about the Oscars, but the Oscars definitely don’t care about you.
The producers and broadcasters of the Academy Awards ceremony want us all to watch, of course, and they fret about the decline in ratings. There has already been ritualistic worrying about the low box-office returns collected by some of the best picture nominees this year. While “Slumdog Millionaire” and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” have done pretty well, the combined grosses of the other three would barely reach the bellybutton of “Paul Blart: Mall Cop.” Has the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences lost touch — or broken faith — with the moviegoing public?
The question makes sense only if you believe that any such faith existed in the first place, or that the moviegoing public is something more than a mathematical abstraction. But hand-wringing about the state of the audience has become such a staple of Oscar-season discourse that its peculiar double-edged logic deserves some unpacking.
There is a fake-populist version, favored by hard-nosed business columnists and trade paper wiseguys, which condemns the elitism of the academy. All those heavy-duty, deep-dish, politically correct dramas! Don’t those academicians understand that the people want “Friday the 13th” and “The Dark Knight,” Harry Potter and Pixar?
The response is simply to turn the accusation on its head, to answer fake populism with ersatz high-mindedness and lament the coarsening of popular taste. All these wonderful, serious films, and so few discerning customers paying money to see them! Offered an exquisite delicacy like “The Reader,” Americans flock to, um, “Paul Blart: Mall Cop.” Apparently you’d rather watch an overweight shopping center guard chase bad guys than watch an illiterate concentration camp guard have sex with a teenager. What is wrong with you people?
Underlying both the sighs of the art lovers and the grumblings of the democrats is a shared fantasy, a cloudy, rose-tinted memory of the days when good movies were popular and popular movies were good, and the Academy Awards floated serenely in the cultural mainstream. Remember “The Godfather”? A heck of a picture, that one — a blockbuster and a critical favorite, the film of the year and one for the ages. Those were the days.
Actually, though, there have been only about three or four such days in the eight-decade history of the Oscars — serendipitous moments when mass taste, artistic distinction and a majority of academy votes magically fell into alignment. And it can happen again. But most of the time it doesn’t. The best picture winner and its satellite laureates are filed away in the cabinets of cultural curiosities, while the parallel histories of cinematic accomplishment and fan behavior go on to write themselves.
In other words, the Oscars have always been trivial, and are best appreciated when they are allowed to be. They have over the years provided an annual sideshow, where the stars dress up, the host cracks awkward jokes and the viewing population feasts for a few hours on the inimitable combination of vulgarity and high-mindedness that defines the image of Hollywood.
And to the extent that this year’s Oscars will uphold this tradition, supplying a dash of sentimentality, sweet (those “Slumdog Millionaire” kids) or bitter (Heath Ledger), a spoonful of suspense (Mickey Rourke or Sean Penn?) and perhaps even a surprise (Melissa Leo!), they may exceed the low expectations that surround them. But the problem — the reason for those low expectations — is that in the past decade these awards have transformed themselves from a harmless, annoying, sometimes enjoyable sideshow into the main event. Less through the ambitions of the academy itself than through a combination of entertainment-media overkill and film industry anxiety, the Oscars have taken on a cultural and economic importance that they can’t possibly sustain and were never meant to have in the first place.
As studio profits have increasingly come from globally marketed, hugely expensive (and often pretty good) franchise movies, the less tangible but still vital reward of prestige has been passed down to a different class of movie. The “A” pictures of an earlier era (sweeping social dramas like “The Best Years of Our Lives” or bittersweet comedies like “The Apartment”) have been reborn as the middle-sized, serious movies that dominate this newspaper’s Friday arts section from October to Christmas. These tend to be literary adaptations (“Brokeback Mountain” and “Atonement”) or biographies of admirable figures of 20th-century history (“Capote” and “Ray”).
Sometimes one of the two or three remaining movie stars will be involved, but more often the casts are composed of actors whose reputations have been secured by previous awards and nominations. Similarly, the directors have usually achieved a level of name recognition that allows them to be referred to, in a shorthand whose theoretical origins are all but forgotten, as auteurs.
What unites these movies is Quality — not as a designation of merit, but rather as a brand. Whether or not particular films qualify as successful works of art, the most important thing is that they be marketed successfully as art films, not in the old sense of being difficult or esoteric but in the tautological new sense of being the kind of movie that might qualify for an award.
And the kind of movie that does best is one that manages to blend art-house or “indie” cachet with old-fashioned populist appeal, combining a degree of originality with reliable and recognizable genre elements. That formula, which worked last year for “No Country for Old Men” — a western and a heist movie as well as a prestigious literary adaptation — has been wielded with particular success by Fox Searchlight, distributor of “Slumdog Millionaire.”
For four of the last five years Searchlight has had a best picture nominee that manages to be both a scrappy little underdog and a specimen of an established mainstream breed. “Sideways” was a buddies-on-the-road comedy. “Little Miss Sunshine” was a family-on-the-road comedy. “Juno” was a teenage romantic comedy. And “Slumdog” is a twofer: a coming-of-age comedy and a fast-paced crime drama.
These are likable movies, and it’s hard to begrudge them their success. But why should an industry award be the measure or the spur of that success? More to the point, why should the inability of other movies to occupy the narrow middle ground of Oscar-worthiness be taken as failure?
Each week, as the fall weather grows colder, a new batch arrives, first in New York and Los Angeles (sometimes by way of Cannes or Toronto) and then in other cities, and every movie is greeted with the same question: Will it get any nominations? The early answer will depend on reviews and on initial grosses; if those auguries look promising, more money will be spent trying to generate momentum, to spin news coverage and to solicit the favor of the voters.
To what end? The phrase “Oscar campaign” has entered the lexicon, but it’s an odd kind of campaign, involving an office with neither symbolic nor actual power and a public that is constitutionally barred from voting. But perhaps the metaphor is military rather than political, since what is required is for one movie — or five of them, in the early phases — to wound, exhaust and ultimately kill the others.
The losers in this cultural blood sport are ambitious, idiosyncratic films that never get a fair chance at an audience, and filmgoers whose attention is distracted by endless, empty chatter about the state of the contest.
Or maybe not distracted. It seems just as likely that the vast, multifarious, unpredictable public is tuning out the Oscar noise and going to see, for example, Clint Eastwood’s “Gran Torino,” which has made more money so far than any of his academy-honored efforts. Or maybe they’re fanning out in search of DVDs of the interesting movies the academy overlooked, or taking comfort in the kind of entertainment the academy never seems to recognize. It may be that the more movies matter, the less the Oscars do. And vice versa.
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