Should The Oscars Be More Like Boxing?
The Oscars continually try to reinvent themselves, maybe they ought to do something radical.
Howdy folks. I gotta apologise for the delay in getting this newsletter out, my schedule has just been all freaky-deaky as of late and I’ve been devoting a fair bit of my spare time to my other passion, making weird clay trinket dishes. I won’t make any promises about when exactly the next newsletter will drop but hopefully it’ll be appearing in your inbox somewhat soonish.
It's almost the end of awards season with the Oscars taking place on Sunday night. While I understand why others may dislike it, I kinda adore awards season. Of course The Academy can turn up some very frustrating results (Green Book winning Best Picture, Bohemian Rhapsody winning Best Editing, etc.) but I really appreciate the structure and language it provides us for discussing and reflecting upon the year in film.
Personally, the various Oscar categories were my very first introduction to the many different departments and roles on a film set. My foundational understanding of the filmmaking process and my mental map of a production, which I use basically whenever I think about a film critically, has been majorly informed by the Oscars.
Still though, the Oscars has its detractors and often times they’re their own worst critics. In recent years, in the face of diminishing viewership, The Academy has made a series of ill fated attempts to modernise and repopularise the ceremony. Just last year saw the calamitous inclusion of the “#OscarsCheerMoment” and “#OscarsFanFavorite” categories, a mistake The Academy are thankfully not doubling down on this year.
2018 saw by far the biggest and most controversial change The Oscars tried to introduce, a new “Academy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Popular Film”. Although details on the specific qualification requirements for the category were never officially announced, it’s broadly accepted that the category was intended to celebrate blockbuster films. The logic being that if more popular films were nominated for awards, the award show itself would be more popular. Presumably, The Academy envisioned Marvel, DC and Star Wars fans flocking to their television sets in droves to support their favourite films of the year.
The proposed category was met with widespread derision and was canned only a few weeks after being announced. Speaking for myself, I found the idea of a “popular” film category insulting to both blockbuster and arthouse films alike. It would be my opinion that a film is a film and that the sheer variety of ideas and images that are capable of being thrown by a film projector is one of the medium’s greatest assets. Segregating and delineating films, especially in terms of “popularity”, at the industry’s most prestigious awards ceremony would, to me, feel crass and vulgar.
Still though, the proposed category interested me in an almost morbid sense. Partly due to the limited information made available to the public (how exactly does one define popularity? In terms of box office receipts? Genre? Audience scores? Online votes? Random sample polling? Hours viewed on streaming?), I couldn’t help but continue to speculate and rejig the idea in my mind until I landed on what I think is an improved solution.
Before I dive in to my proposal, please note that I’m not arguing my idea is an improvement on the current Oscar ceremony. I really don’t think the Best Picture race requires any muddling. I’m simply saying that if The Academy is incessant on including more populist films, I think I have a better system than the one they tried to roll out in 2018.
In essence, my proposal is to ramp the crude financial mathematics of the Popular Film category up to eleven and embrace Hollywood’s tiered production system. Films would be divided into budget bands, similar to how boxers are separated into weight classes. Instead of just one or two Best Picture winners, each ceremony would have seven (or maybe even more), six awards determined by the movie’s budget and one overall Best Picture winner.
The budgeted categories would look something like this (I’ve even included some 2022 films in the category they would be eligible in).
BEST PICTURE ($5 MILLION BUDGET OR LESS)
Aftersun
Barbarian
Benediction
Bodies Bodies Bodie
The Eternal Daughter
Funny Pages
Kimi
Living
Marcel The Shell With Shoes On
Pearl
The Quiet Girl
The Whale
Women Talking
BEST PICTURE ($5-20 MILLION BUDGET)
After Yang
All Quiet On The Western Front
Armageddon Time
Bones And All
Corsage
Decision To Leave
Dog
Fire Island
Jackass Forever
Mrs. Harris Goes To Paris
Smile
The Banshees Of Inisherin
Till
Triangle Of Sadness
BEST PICTURE ($20-50 MILLION BUDGET)
Ambulance
Bros
Everything Everywhere All At Once
The Fabelmans
Glass Onion
Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio
The Menu
Scream
She Said
Tár
Where The Crawdads Sing
Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody
BEST PICTURE ($50-100 MILLION BUDGET)
Babylon
Bullet Train
Elvis
The Lost City
Minions: Rise Of Gru
Nope
The Northman
Puss In Boots: The Last Wish
RRR
Three Thousand Years Of Longing
The Woman King
BEST PICTURE ($100-200 MILLION BUDGET)
The Batman
Black Adam
Jurassic World: Dominion
Sonic The Hedgehog 2
Top Gun: Maverick
Turning Red
Uncharted
White Noise
BEST PICTURE ($200 MILLION BUDGET OR MORE)
Avatar: The Way Of Water
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness
Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore
The Gray Man
Lightyear
Thor: Love And Thunder
These lists would be whittled down to five nominees apiece and the final “true” Best Picture category would have a jumbo nominee list of 10.
I think being able to judge films contextualised by their budgets does have a certain value. You can draw your own conclusions of course but when reviewing the above list, I am struck by how competitive the lower budget categories are while the upper limit films have one or two clear leaders in the pack.
Indeed, seeing Avatar: The Way Of Water stacked up against its budgetary contemporaries really highlights James Cameron’s phenomenal directorial achievement. Out of all the contenders in the category I would argue his is the only one that, as famed film critic Harry Styles once famously said, “feels like a movie” and not just a focus grouped marketing exercise.
Another benefit of this system is that it would enable wider conversation and speculation in the lead up to the show. While this year it appears Everything Everywhere All At Once is marching towards the top prize, this format would mean there was still competitive fields elsewhere. The microbudget class would be a wide open race, as would, I believe, the $5-20 million and $50-100 million categories. Overall, it would shine more light on more movies, from the low budget indies to the blank cheque blockbusters.
And perhaps the most interesting effect this format change might have would only become evident many years down the line. Could we see directors adopt an undisputed prizefighter’s approach and strategically choose to move up or down a weight class to pad out their trophy cabinet? Would a Steven Spielberg type eventually tire of competing for high and mid budget awards and decide to drop down for a new challenge on the indie circuit? Could continuous success in lower budget tiers force the hands of studios to greenlight more auteur led big budget projects? Would the allure of an Oscar statuette encourage established studios to put out more midbudget fare? Could the Oscar weight classes act as a career ladder for upcoming filmmakers?
Truthfully, I think the Oscars adopting this sort of strategy would likely break the mystique, magic and prestige associated with the awards and could even lead to the death of the Oscars as we know it. That said though, recent Academy heads have seemed almost determined to break the show’s structure — I at least believe this overhaul would break it in an interesting way.
This year, The Academy has been uncharacteristically conservative, quietly reversing last year’s disastrous decisions (the twitter voting and the pre-recorded acceptance speeches) and going about the business of hiring a producer and host much, much earlier than they have in previous years. With any luck this will mark a turning point for the institution, where it will stop attempting to chase casual audiences but instead aim to please it’s extremely dedicated base. But should they get spooked by declining viewership, this proposal will always exist for them to turn to, even if they might change their mind a few weeks later.