Ranting On...the Shortened Oscar Season

In the era of Trump, the name of this blog has lost a little bit of meaning.  Compared to the atrocities coming out of this administration, it's difficult to feel anything but rage, but as this blog is how I spend much of my free time, I can't constantly write/focus on that for my own mental health.  However, we're going to have a rare throwback Friday rant, and it's going to be on something that's obviously frivolous by comparison but still something that is important in my universe.  I hate (HATE!) the shortened Oscars season.

For those that are unfamiliar, perhaps because we haven't had much time to discuss the Oscars, this year the Academy Awards will be on February 9th, which is a good 2-4 weeks before where it'd been historically since it moved to late February (and to Sunday nights, as it used to be in late March on a Monday).  As a result of this, so as not to compete with the Oscars (and to inform the ceremony's ultimate results), other awards bodies (such as the SAG Awards and the Golden Globes) altered when they would announce their winners & nominees, and we have less time than is typical with the actual nominations.

This, as someone who writes a blog that talks profusely about both the Oscars (then & now) has made it increasingly difficult to interact with the nominees in a serious way.  For example, I would normally try and see all three of the Oscar shorts screenings prior to the ceremony, and likely have articles devoted to these categories leading up to the ceremony, both to celebrate the most obscure films on Oscar's radar as well as to help you with your ballots.  But the Oscars shorts screenings didn't start in most markets until today, and with just a week to go before the ceremony, I'm going to struggle to get to more than one of these, and certainly all three are off of the table since the screenings overlap (and because I'm not a professional writer-just one who puts this out as a labor of love).

This is true of other films, as well.  While we're relatively caught up with most of the Oscar nominees (we visited the French contender Les Miserables earlier this week), I still have not had as much time to interact with the nominees as I'd like, both through reviews and through trivia articles discussing this particular batch of contenders.  Films like Breakthrough, The Lion King, Klaus, and Honeyland are all nominated for Oscars this year, and I very much plan on catching them throughout February, but it'll be difficult to get to all of them in such a turnaround, and in the case of something like The Lion King, this just became available on streaming.  As a result, I won't get to go into Oscar night having shared my thoughts on some of the films that are competing with all of you.

This is taking apart the fact that this year's rather uninspired Oscar nominations list is almost certainly due to Academy members also not getting to some "less mandatory" screeners on their pile, rushing to get through major contenders like 1917, Joker, and The Irishman, and therefore ignoring films that could have snuck in in a different era.  Give voters a few more weeks, and it's possible that, say, Alfre Woodard's terrific work in Clemency might have gotten into the conversation or Celine Sciamma's direction of Portrait of a Lady on Fire could have continued to gather steam, gaining her a nomination (or at least something for Costuming).  The uniformity of this year's nominations I'm attributing directly to an Academy that was rushed, and therefore couldn't explore more contenders (I'm also blaming critics who never seemed to care about more than 1-2 names in each major category this year).

I bring this up because I've seen critics on Twitter discussing how they like the brisker season, and I want to put in my two cents that it seems terrible.  It does a disservice to not only film fanatics like me who run blogs, but also to people who are out there seeking out, say, Jojo Rabbit or Marriage Story as one of the maybe 10-12 movies they see in a year before the big day, when they'll only care about the winners (and only then care about them for a short time).  The Oscars are moving back from this experiment next year, thank heaven, but we need to realize that when we misuse the Oscars (and boy howdy has it become a favorite cultural pinata in recent years where everyone seems to have an opinion no matter how uninformed), we also hurt the movies that they're honoring, and the conversation that sparks people seeing & loving these pictures.  I love the Oscars, but that adoration needs a chance to breath & grow when he gives me a list of new films to celebrate.