The Academy Awards has faced a lot of criticism over the decades ranging from the awards ceremony itself to the nominations to Oscar bait films getting more attention to certain films that are just as well received as the Oscar bait movies getting passed over, it’s been a mess for many, many decades.
And what the Oscars have done now may be the icing on top of the cake.
Last Wednesday, they announced some major changes coming to the Academy Awards in 2019, one thing being the fact that the Oscars was going to be trimmed down to a three hour show, which, to be perfectly honest, is a welcome change of pace. One of the biggest criticisms of the Oscars in the past few years has been the way they’ve been trying to drag on and on these long pointless bits centering around movies that just seems like filler at this point instead of actually bringing focus to the show itself. So, yeah, the fact that the show is trimming down to three hours is something that needed to be done.
It’s the other major change that’s got me, as well as many others, the cold shoulder. This is the point that the Oscars literally have shit being thrown into the fan:
The Academy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Popular Film (or the Academy Award for Best Popular Film) is an award to be presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), which was announced as a brand new category by the Academy on August 8, 2018.
On August 8, 2018, the Academy sent a message to its members with several announcements, one of the announcements read: “New award category — We will create a new category for outstanding achievement in popular film. Eligibility requirements and other key details will be forthcoming”. This is also the first new category announced by the Academy since Best Animated Feature, which was added in 2001.
AND….you can already start to see the problem here? There are SO many things wrong with this new category and out of everything the Academy Awards has done that has made people scratch their heads and go what the fuck were you thinking? This has to be the absolute worst thing they are doing right now.
This whole thing is completely ridiculous and so stupid, it makes no sense on so many levels from its’ concept to the fact that it doesn’t solve the problem, it makes the problem even worse.
Oh how there are so many things wrong with this addition, let me count the ways.
1. It completely proves that the Oscars are not willing to accept that genre blockbusters are just as important as the Oscar bait films are.
Yeah, I know what you’re going to say “but The Lord Of The Rings trilogy was nominated for Best Picture, Return Of The King even won it, Titanic, Star Wars was nominated as was Raiders Of The Lost Ark, E.T., Avatar, Up, Toy Story 3, blah blah blah” Yeah, I’m fully aware that genre blockbusters have been nominated in the Best Picture category in the past but here’s the thing.
Now that you’re going to have these two different categories, the main focus of the Best Picture is going to be more of these Oscar bait pictures, half of which aren’t even that great by the way, they may have great acting in some of them but let’s face it, half of the Oscar bait movies that get nominated are not that good. I don’t care what anybody else said The King’s Speech sucks.
2. It shows the Oscars are regressing rather than progressing.
After a year that saw great things at the Oscars like Jordan Peele winning Best Original Screenplay for Get Out, seeing Logan, a comic book movie, get nominated for Adapted Screenplay, seeing Guillermo Del Toro finally taking home Oscars for his sci-fi film The Shape Of Water, Kobe Bryant won an Oscar for god’s sake. This news is not what you want to hear.
This past Oscars proved that the Academy is finally listening to the constant criticisms about them passing over great films either because they were genre films, popcorn films, or just because they weren’t released in the prime Oscar season release pattern between September – December. With this new award coming in, it completely reverts the progress they’ve made and instead brings it back to where they were before this past year.
3. It proves the Academy is failing to connect with not just the movie loving public but the typical Oscar watcher in general.
The biggest problem with the Academy Awards is that they don’t get how to keep people invested in their show, to try to simplify the awards by splitting up into these two categories not only goes against everything the Academy Awards is suppose to be and appeal to movie lovers but it makes the Oscars look like they don’t know how to appeal to the typical viewer.
4. It makes other award shows look dignified by comparison.
When you’re making award shows like The Razzies, the MTV Movie Awards, and the Nickelodeon Kids Choice Awards have their categories make more sense than ‘Best Popular Film’, you’ve screwed up big time.
Hell, just in the last two days, the Razzies took a jab at the Oscars for doing this:
The Razzies on Sunday published an open letter to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences addressing the Oscars’ new category honoring the best popular film.
“The Razzies don’t always get it right. We get called on it. We usually ignore it because well — who takes the Razzies seriously?” began the letter from the organization, which recognizes the worst movies and performances of the year the day before the Academy Awards. “But seriously we’re not the Oscars. The Oscars are not the low-brow $4.97 statuette that reminds otherwise good talent they done bad or the talent-free they done made too much money.
“The Oscars lowering themselves to ‘honor’ popular fare just to get more eyeballs is not conducive to their brand. Everyone depends on Oscar to point out the good stuff that might not otherwise be seen,” the note continued.
The letter added that the new Oscar category may overshadow the Razzie Awards’ work: “We sift through bottom-of-the-barrel mindless popular and sometimes unpopular entertainment. The Razzies invite the ‘dis-honored’ to humble themselves and ‘own their bad.’ That’s our job.”
The note concluded: “So a tip to our older more distinguished bald brother: You are our inspiration — don’t fail us now. The Razzies are co-dependent on Oscar. If you are devalued — so are we.”
THE RAZZIES ARE COMING OUT OF THIS LOOKING LIKE THE BETTER AWARDS ORGANIZATION!!!! THE RAZZIES!!!! Do you realize how bad it is when the Razzies are looking like the better man in the situation than the Academy Awards is?
5. It’s a failed attempt for the Oscars to appeal to the youth by not even bothering to call it ‘Best Popular Picture’ but instead ‘Best Popular Film’
Instead of actually keeping in tradition with the Oscars itself and calling it Best Popular Picture, you call it Best Popular Film as if you’re trying to say “well, if we call it a picture, that means we actually have to acknowledge that it’s just as important in some way to the Best Picture category” You couldn’t even keep the name of the award close to what you would expect for a show called the Oscars.
6. It’s ABC meddling in and providing another baffling and bizarre thing that the Disney organization has done this summer.
Yeah, this whole reason we even have this category is because ABC meddled in with the Oscars.
Variety put up an article detailing how Disney-ABC came in to tell the Oscars how to do their job and honestly, there are so many moments in this where you will slap your hand to your face at how stupid this is:
Days after the 90th Academy Awards telecast aired in March to record-low viewership, Disney-ABC Television Group executives met with leaders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to convey a message:
You are facing irrelevance.
Newsflash, the Academy Awards isn’t facing irrelevance, the Oscars have been on the same levels that they’ve been on for years now.
Just a year and a half earlier, Disney-ABC had set a long-term pact with the Academy to broadcast the Oscars through 2028 — long past the point where anyone can predict what linear-television consumption will look like. Then the ratings fell off a cliff. The 26.6 million viewers averaged by the 2018 Oscars, according to Nielsen live-plus-same day numbers, represented a 19% decline from 2017, and 39% drop from the show’s recent peak in 2014. Numbers for younger viewers were even worse. Ratings in the 18-49 demo fell 24% from 2017 and 47% from 2014. The 18-34 demo was down 29% from 2017 and 56% from 2014.
Other awards shows, such as the Primetime Emmys and Grammys, have also faced recent ratings declines, but none nearly so steep.
If anything, the Emmys have suffered in the ratings more than the Oscars do, the Emmys at one point in 1994 averaged 21.4 million viewers, the most recent awards show averaged 11.4 million viewers.
The Grammys peaked in 1984 with 51 million viewers and then again in 2012 with 39 million viewers, partially because of the speculation as to how the Grammys would honor Whitney Houston who had died a day before the ceremony, this last ceremony averaged 26 million viewers.
The Oscars ratings have only dropped below 30 million viewers one time…this year. So because one time the Oscars fell below 30 million was this year, it means scrap everything and start from scratch, excessive much?
Disney-ABC executives had for years pressed the Academy to impose changes that would shorten the Oscar telecast and incorporate more widely recognized films. (The 2018 Oscars clocked in at an unwieldy 3 hours, 53 minutes; the nine best-picture nominees this year averaged $78.7 million at the U.S. box office.) But at the come-to-Jesus meeting after March’s show, the TV people walked through the lousy ratings at a granular level, identifying precise moments during the show that prompted viewers to stop watching. They made several recommendations about the ways that the telecast’s length could be reined in, and proposed a “best blockbuster” category that would reward films that had been seen by larger audiences. They also argued that viewers had become fatigued by the ever-increasing number of televised awards shows — including the Golden Globe Awards, whose viewership has been relatively stable in recent years — and that the Oscars should be moved to an early calendar period.
What people don’t understand is that all the award shows are losing viewership right now, not just the Oscars but also the Emmys and the Grammys and even the Tonys, hell, they don’t even do the Daytime Emmy Awards on TV anymore because nobody is watching them. It’s not just a one time thing for award shows, it’s happening all over the goddamn place.
Academy officials acknowledged that the ratings situation was dire. At a meeting several weeks ago, AMPAS board members discussed the changes proposed and pushed for by ABC. On Tuesday night, the board voted to move the Oscars up to Feb. 9, 2020; to cap the telecast length at three hours by moving several awards categories into commercial breaks; and to create a “popular film” category, the criteria for which has not yet been divulged.
ABC has not commented on the changes. But sources at the network expressed relief Wednesday that the Academy had finally taken action. The Oscars telecast is the biggest piece of event programming for the Alphabet — the only one of the Big Four broadcasters without an NFL package, and thus lacking the boost that its competitors get from television’s most powerful driver of live viewing. Network insiders were also unmoved Wednesday by evident social-media backlash to the announcement, particularly to the addition of the popular film category, noting that changes to longstanding institutions such as the Oscars often yield complaints, and predicting that audiences would ultimately embrace the new format.
The Oscar changes came just two days after the Big Four and the Television Academy announced a new deal for telecast rights to the annual Primetime Emmy Awards. The networks and the TV Academy had wrangled over similar issues, with broadcasters pushing to move several Emmy categories out of the telecast. Both sides agreed to effectively punt on proposed telecast changes, however, and revisit them in 2019.
With a new format locked in, the Academy is expected to next turn to naming producers and a host for the 2019 Oscars. Sources told Variety on Wednesday that no conversations have taken place with Michael De Luca and Jennifer Todd, who produced the last two telecasts, or with Jimmy Kimmel, who hosted the last two years.
This whole thing just smells awful and the fact that ABC is basically saying nothing and refuses to admit that this is a terrible decision adds into another bizarre summer for Disney for some of the things they’ve done, not only this but also refusing to allow reviews for Christopher Robin to come out after 5pm on the opening Thursday, firing James Gunn from Guardians Of The Galaxy 3 because of tweets that the studio already knew about when they hired him back in 2012, and refusing to put out a Nutcracker & The Four Realms trailer online after it premiered in theaters with Ant-Man & The Wasp and instead put out a trailer that makes me want to see the movie less, I just don’t know why Disney continues to do these bizarre things.
7. Instead of filling up the 10 best picture nominations with popular films, they just create a random category.
Yeah, remember when they said back in 2009, they were going to present 10 best picture nominations because of the backlash they got for refusing to give The Dark Knight a Best Picture nomination? Yeah, guess how many times they’ve had 10 best picture nominations since then….twice. Twice in the last nine years, it’s been 10. Every other year, it’s just been 9 or even 8 Best Picture nominations….why not just put two popular movies in to fill those spots? You keep saying you’ll have up to 10 best picture nominations each year and yet, you only make it to 8 or 9 when there are two movies you could throw in there.
I mean, for this Oscars coming up, you could’ve easily put Black Panther and Mission: Impossible – Fallout in those two spots but no, you had to make it difficult and give them their own category instead of just admitting that you refuse to accept popular blockbusters as actual Best Picture worthy.
8. How the hell do you classify ‘Best Popular Film’?
This is going to be the biggest factor with this new award is how are they going to classify Best Popular Film. Are they going to look specifically at how the films did critically or financially. By not being specific on this, it’s basically saying that any popular movie that makes over $100 million can be in this category. Basically, it’s going to lump great movies like Black Panther, Avengers: Infinity War, and Mission: Impossible – Fallout within the same caliber as stuff like Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom or Ocean’s 8 or even A Wrinkle In Time, hey it made over $100 million at the box office so that classifies as popular films apparently.
In all seriousness, I do hope that they aren’t just looking at the financial factor and are going to look at the critical factor.
9. It proves that the Academy Awards doesn’t care about making blockbusters be in that caliber of the Oscar tradition.
It’s been notoriously known that the Academy Awards refuses to accept genre blockbusters as actual Oscar caliber fare, the inclusion of this category basically is the academy telling movies like, again, Black Panther, Avengers: Infinity War, Mission: Impossible – Fallout, A Quiet Place, “yeah, we will never accept you as movies worthy of a best picture award so, here’s a table scrap award for you guys to make us think that we actually care about you when we don’t really.”
10, and the biggest problem with this simply comes down to this, this is nothing but a participation trophy.
That’s all this is, it’s to give movies that could easily compete with other films in the Best Picture category a category of their own to make you think they are just as important when they’re not. It’s like when they put in the Best Animated Feature category in 2001, it was implemented to basically tell animated movies you will never be accepted as Best Picture worthy so here is an award just for you. This is nothing but a participation trophy for the Oscars, a trophy that says “thanks for participating, now get the fuck out of here for the real shit.”
This addition of the Best Popular Film category is the absolute worst thing the Oscars is doing right now, they’re not fixing the problem, they’re making the problem even worse. This addition is the equivalent of punching a hole through your wall and then instead of getting some caulk to fix it, taking a piece of Scotch Duck Tape over the wall and then saying, “here, problem’s fixed.” Well, it’s not fixed, you’re just trying to cover up a problem by being lazy.
That’s what this category is, laziness, it’s pure laziness on the part of the Academy Awards who have basically just said “we don’t care about change, we will never change our ways on how we view Best Picture and here is our lame ass attempt to try to make the dimwits think we’ve solved a problem when we’ve made it more difficult to begin with.”
I see absolutely nothing good coming from this at all and if the Academy is smart, they’ll reconsider this category sooner rather than later. If not, then the Oscars will continue to fade into irrelevance for sure.
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