That throwaway line from Aladdin, one uttered by Jafar to his talking parrot, is a running joke used by my brother and I on a regular basis. It is also what I am saying to myself slowly but surely as I try to reel from the truly awful, heinous, "worse than when they gave Crash Best Picture" news the Academy tweeted today. This morning, we welcome the Trump Era came to the Oscars-making the show generic, cheap, ugly, and demeaning to artists everywhere who have dreamt of being on its stage.
I don't say this lightly, and admittedly it's become common sport for fans of the Oscars to complain about its changes. Most people, myself included, hated when they added Best Animated Feature, expanded the Best Picture field to ten (and then to the current weird yo-yo category), and changed the rules about how many films could be nominated for Best Original Song. By-and-large we've been proven right, I'd might add. The yo-yo numbers on the Best Picture race feels stupid, and just is confusing to the lay fans of the show they were trying to attract. The Animated Feature race may have given us more of a market for The Secret of Kells or The Breadwinner, but it also gave us Oscar-nominated garbage like Surf's Up, Despicable Me 2, and The Boss Baby. And the Best Original Song race contracted just in time for a resurgence of musicals, so that pictures like The Princess and the Frog and La La Land were left in the cold rather than joining the three-nominations club.
But this morning's announcements crossed a line, and it's hard for me to say "I love the Oscars" in the same way anymore even if I'll always love the movies. The leadership announced three changes, all of them bad ideas, but to varying degrees. We'll start with the least egregious first-changing the date of the ceremony. The reality is that the Oscars are considerably later in the year than most awards shows, and I kind of get why they'd want to move it up. Most Oscar-nominated films have been out of theaters for months by the time the Oscars come out, and it does seem weird that an awards show geared toward honoring the best of 2017 takes place in March of 2018. This will have the effect of potentially getting more people to see the films in theaters, though I worry that'll short-change independent films that might have grown with a longer awards season, and further force precursors, who can't possibly be after the Oscars (heaven forbid), play a new game of dominoes. It's not a good idea, because it's a "what does this really do?" but it's not one I particularly care about one way or the other.
The other two changes are travesties. The first is that they are now introducing a category called "Best Popular Film," and while the parameters of this award are still unknown, presumably this is meant to be "Highest Grossing Film that Isn't Transformers" or "Best Effects Picture that still has a Fresh Rating on RT." There are so many reasons not to have this award I can't even count them, but I'm going to underline three major ones. The first is that it's a ghetto category-it's not replacing Best Picture, it's just admitting that the "Best Picture" isn't actually going to recognize only $100 million grossers, but the internet demanded we have this so that films geared toward teenage boys have a say on Oscar night, despite the fact that said teenage boys are not going to watch the Oscars.
Secondly, this isn't needed because Oscar does a pretty good job of honoring films that do well at the Box Office. In the past 25 years, only twice did the year's highest-grossing film not get nominated for an Oscar (Catching Fire and Spider-Man 3), and in many cases they win. Films like Avatar, Toy Story 3, Inception, Gravity, American Sniper, La La Land, and Dunkirk all made over $400 million, and all of them were nominated for Best Picture. Films that aren't nominated for Oscars for Best Picture that people complain about frequently aren't missed because they are too populist-they miss because they're not very good. I know film is subjective, but honestly-The Avengers is an okay action film, but the likes of Sasha Stone (the single worst voice of Oscar pundits on the internet, and the only person I know of who writes about awards and claims to love the movies and seems excited about this idea...she is to Oscar punditry what Peter Travers is to film criticism or what Michael Bay is to the director's chair) seem hung-up on getting it into the Oscar conversation. People have trumpeted online that this now makes room for Rogue One or Deadpool...but these are truly awful movies. The former is a boring, plodding picture with weak lead performances and the latter is Shrek but with swear words. Yes, Oscar already nominates the occasional terrible movie, but this just seems to re-enforce bad opinions because a studio put enough money behind it.
Which brings me to my final point (there's lots more-share in the comments if you need to vent): high-grossing films already are their own reward. A movie like Deadpool or Transformers makes hundreds of millions of dollars and has ardent fans. It gets its stars big paydays on the sequels and is celebrated in pop culture. It doesn't also need the Oscar too. By taking this award, it is rewarding mediocrity just because enough people saw it, but the mountain of gold that this film is sitting on was enough hardware-it doesn't need an Oscar too. It should be an honor to win an Oscar, and it is depriving gifted artists who have no voice to give one to middling artists that already have a loud one, just to try to seem more relevant to an audience that's never going to watch the ceremony to begin with.
Because the third change, and perhaps the most heartbreaking, is that with this inclusion, the Oscars is now going to take away categories from the telecast to shorten the Oscars. It's stupid (no one is going to start watching the Oscars now that it's three hours rather than three-and-a-half), but it also means that moments like Roger Deakins finally winning his trophy or the befuddled look on Colleen Atwood's face when she won for Fantastic Beasts are gone. No longer will we have Jessica Yu proclaiming "you know you've entered new territory when your dress costs more than your film." The Academy has already done all it can to marginalize actual film fans by removing the Honorary Oscars to a separate ceremony you can only watch on YouTube (depriving the world of primetime celebrations of Lauren Bacall, Angela Lansbury, Maureen O'Hara, and Debbie Reynolds), but now we only focus on the "important" categories, skipping celebrations of the behind-the-scenes people who actually make the movies magical. Every year I see how this works at the Tony Awards, and it breaks my heart for the ceremony to pick "who deserves a voice, and who doesn't" among those it's honoring. This is a dark day for the Oscars, one that I struggle to see them coming back from. In many ways, it feels like, indeed, the Oscars have given into the despair and mediocrity of the Trump Era.
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