Oh Academy, My Academy: The Fall of the Best Picture Award

Over the years, there’s been much debate over the Academy Awards’ recent picks, particularly for Best Picture. The nominations for Best Picture were extended this year from the usual five to ten, considered by most to allow for more popular fare to have a shot at being represented. The nominees for the Academy Awards were announced yesterday and the list would certainly support this theory since it includes movies like Avatar and The Blind Side. This is the culmination of what has long-been the disintegration of the award season’s integrity and merit, and in turn the regard with which the critical community and public give the Academy Awards.

The Academy Awards (nicknamed the Oscars after its statuette), first bowed in 1929. Its purpose: to honor excellence in cinematic achievements. It is considered the most prestigious award in the United States for the film industry. It upheld those beliefs consistently for the better part of seventy years. Oscar has since fallen from grace and seems to have lost the respect of the general public and the critical community. What happened? And if the Academy Awards are no longer the ultimate measure of the best film has to offer, what is?

Before we go any further, since we’re talking about something that awards the best in film for any given year, it is important to briefly discern what makes a movie the best. Well, since every film has to be taken on its own terms because comparing some films are like comparing apples to oranges, the most deciding factor must be which film best achieved what it set out to do with the least amount of flaws. Look through Oscar history and you’ll find dozens of nearly flawless films given the Best Picture honor (we’ll get more into that in a bit). The only other factor would be a film’s influence on the art; how much it contributed something new to the art form. Sometimes this takes time to understand, which is why Pulp Fiction lost to Forrest Gump. Since movies are a collaborative effort, it takes more than the performances or effects to become a best picture contender – it is greatness on the finished product’s entirety. That is why most blockbusters (Transformers, Star Trek) or character studies (The Queen, Capote) don’t earn best picture: some other film achieved more on the whole. Therefore, the aforementioned aspects must be the prevailing factors as to what makes a film the best of the year.

Moving on, if one looks at the history of the winners and nominees for Oscar’s Best Picture award, he or she will find that in its 80+ year history the Best Pictures are mostly movies that are still referenced or talked about by filmmakers and movie-lovers to this day. These are the classics, the movies that truly were the best of their years. These include:

- Casablanca in 1943 (over For Whom the Bell Tolls, Heaven Can Wait, The More the Merrier, among others)
- The Best Years of Our Lives in 1946 (over Henry V, It’s a Wonderful Life, The Yearling, The Razor’s Edge)
- From Here to Eternity in 1953 (over Julius Caesar, The Robe, Roman Holiday, and Shane)
- The Sound of Music in 1965 (over Darling, Doctor Zhivago, Ship of Fools, and A Thousand Clowns)
- The Godfather in 1972 (over Cabaret, Deliverance, The Emigrants, and Sounder)
- Gandhi in 1982 (over E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Missing, Tootsie, and The Verdict)
- Unforgiven in 1992 (over The Crying Game, A Few Good Men, Howard’s End, and Scent of a Woman)
- Schindler’s List in 1993 (over The Fugitive, In the Name of the Father, The Piano, and The Remains of the Day)
- Braveheart in 1995 (over Babe, Apollo 13, Il Postino, and Sense and Sensibility)

just to name a few. There have, however, been a few blunders on the Academy’s part in terms of awarding the most prestigious accolade to the lesser or fleeting nominee. Some quick examples include:

- An American in Paris over A Streetcar Named Desire in 1951
- The Greatest Show on Earth over High Noon in 1952
- Around the World in 80 Days over Giant in 1956
- A Man for All Seasons over Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1966
- Oliver! over the completely snubbed 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968
- Kramer vs. Kramer over Apocalypse Now in 1979
- Out of Africa over The Color Purple in 1985
- the aforementioned Forrest Gump over Pulp Fiction in 1994
- Shakespeare in Love over Saving Private Ryan in 1998
- and the complete snubbing of Toy Story 2, The Matrix, Fight Club, and Being John Malkovich over The Cider House Rules, The Green Mile, and The Insider in 1999.

but these examples (and others) are anomalies that number in the minority for most of the award’s history. However, they seemed to have become less so over time, which is why I stopped with 1999. Enduring influences aside, the past ten years is riddled with dubious Best Picture winners. The Lord of the Rings lost two years in a row (to A Beautiful Mind and Chicago), Crash beat out the favored Brokeback Mountain in 2005, The Dark Knight and The Wrestler were completely snubbed in 2008 (Slumdog Millionaire won). And now for 2009, it looks possible that films like The Hurt Locker and Inglorious Basterds could lose to Avatar or The Blind Side. What is going on?

Well, it’s been said there are two types of great movies: the populist blockbuster and the artsy important film. More often than not, the latter is favored over the former (so much so that the former type gets completely snubbed). Little by little, we’ve seen the movies that everybody saw take home the Oscar more often than not. It started out as mostly an oddity (occasionally the Sentimental Win). But it became more than that, starting with Titanic in 1998. To be fair, Titanic is one of those movies like The Sound of Music and Lawrence of Arabia before it that was certainly popular at the time (all three were the highest grossing films of their years), but also truly epic and great for its historical appeal (who didn’t feel practically aboard the sinking ship while watching in theaters?) and overall execution. But since then, nine of the Best Picture winners were the highest or second-highest grossing films of those nominated (Shakespeare in Love, American Beauty, Gladiator, A Beautiful Mind, Chicago, Return of the King, Million Dollar Baby, The Departed, No Country for Old Men, and Slumdog Millionaire). And now this year, the highest-grossing film of all time, Avatar, is nominated for Best Picture in a year when the nominations are expanded to include popular movies. Avatar may shape things to come due to its obscuring the line between real and CGI, but it is far from flawless, which begs the question: would it have been nominated for Best Picture if the Academy hadn’t opened the category up?

It’s important to note that the Oscars began televising in 1953 with 40 million viewers, a figure it held roughly until 1991 when the ratings increased steadily; peaking at 57.25 million in 1998 (the year Titanic won Best Picture). The ratings have decreased ever since to below 40 million for most of the past decade, bottoming out in 2008 with 31.76 million viewers (when No Country for Old Men took the top honor). Even though the Oscars have been nominating high-grossing films, the public seems to be losing interest. Evidence seems to be pointing toward an emphasis by the Academy with its nominations that is less on merit and more on popularity and viewership. It is desperate to maintain its esteem as the record-keeper of what is great. So says Oscar!

But Oscar is becoming The Great Oz and critics are, like Toto, the discoverers of the man behind the curtain, with the public following after a la Dorothy. Not only are films held in higher regard losing (Brokeback Mountain) or being ignored (The Dark Knight) occasionally, but it’s been apparent for years that there’s more behind the voting than merit. Aside from some winners simply not standing the test of time, the Academy seems to favor some kinds of stories over others. A popular joke is that if you make a movie about the Holocaust, you’ll get a nomination for Best Picture (if not win a performance award). Dramas with social messages are preferred more than any other story, which is why many cited last year’s Invictus, the story of Nelson Mandela, as Oscar-bait – even Morgan Freeman expected a Best Picture nom! Also, science fiction and animation has never had a film earn a Best Picture award (Avatar may be the first). And acting or directing prizes often have political or business influence. After years of being ignored or settled with a nomination, Martin Scorsese won his first Best Director award in 2006 for The Departed; he was nominated five times previously. After being snubbed for over a decade of dramatic work, Johnny Depp earned his first nomination for his biggest blockbuster and most flamboyant role in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl.

Due to all of this – and more – critics have lost interest in the Academy Awards as an important statement of the best in film each year. Even Oscar’s little brother, the Golden Globes, which is considered an indicator of what will be nominated (and win or lose) at the Oscars, has lost some of its luster. Last month, the Golden Globes awarded mostly movies that made a lot of money and were more popular with average movie-goers than critically lauded. While Oscar may follow along next month, trying to court those audiences who paid lots of money for its nominees and thus completing its destruction of its own self-respect, it may be too late. And all we’ll have to look to is our own humble opinions of what is the best in film.


* all data and research found on Wikipedia’s Academy Awards page and its links.