Did you watch the 93rd annual Academy Awards? Preliminary numbers would suggest you didn't as ratings for the award ceremony dropped 58% compared to last year, resulting in 9.9 million viewers, a new all-time low!
What could explain this decline? Covid-19 some will yell. And why not? It has been blamed for everything else from slow mail delivery to being responsible for our rigged presidential election (I don't believe the election was rigged). Why shouldn't the Academy use it as a crutch for their failure just like everyone else! But how does that explain last year's (then) record low ratings? In fact, what did Covid -19 have to do with the yearly Oscars ratings decline between 2014 - 2018? Others will try to justify it by reasoning it is because no one saw or heard of the nominated movies. Could be. The audience didn't have an emotional interest and therefore had nothing to root for. But, are we all ignoring the elephant in the room? Could the ratings decline and by extension society's lack of interest have something to do with the perception that the Oscars have become too political? A couple years ago (2018) many articles were being written about this very subject - (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/movies/oscars-more-political.html)
Since I have begun writing this blog, back in 2008, I have written about the politicization of cinema. It slowly began in 2004 with Michael Moore's documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) and really kicked into high gear during the last two years of George W. Bush's administration. I have also written about my disappointment with the Academy, as I did in this piece from 2011! Unfortunately, nothing has changed.
The problem with the Academy is it has become too image conscious. It has bent at the knee to political and social demands forsaking any grandiose notion that the purpose of the award ceremony is to recognize "artistic merit" and to celebrate and honor those that are the best of their craft. I started this article pointing to the show's rating. It doesn't matter much to me but it is very important to the Academy. Seeking to capture the largest audience possible, there has always been a pressure to nominate more mainstream titles but many of those movies never had the cachet associated with them to be deemed "Oscar caliber". How many of you remember why the Academy expanded the number of nominees in the best picture category? It was because fan-boys were greatly upset the Christopher Nolan comic book movie, The Dark Knight (2008) wasn't nominated for best picture. Eventually their wet-dream came true when Black Panther (2018) became the first comic book movie to receive a best picture nomination. Succumbing to this pressure was evidence the Academy was not interested in maintaining its illusion that the awards represented artistic merit.
Next there were political and social demands by liberal activists. They believed the Academy was racist because not enough minorities had been nominated or won awards, hence various boycott movements like #Oscarssowhite. The liberal activists seemed to have had their demands met during the 74th annual ceremony when Denzel Washington and Halle Berry won the top acting prizes. Of course things reverted back to their old ways the next year when the Academy had the temerity to nominate male actors like Jack Nicholson, Michael Caine, Paul Newman, Christopher Walken, Ed Harris, John C. Reiley, and Daniel Day-Lewis at the expense of black actors. And if you think I'm engaging in hyperbole, you don't understand how liberals react to these things. Pay attention to the reaction on social media to Anthony Hopkins winning the best actor award this year. Pay attention to the clickbait headlines written and the angles writers took covering the event. Articles like this one imply Chad Boseman, for his performance in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (2020), was entitled to the award. Even the Chicago Sun-Times (my hometown paper) movie critic, Richard Roeper, a man I thought would know better, took the same approach in his article. It would seem to imply, at least from Roeper's article, if all the acting awards aren't given to black actors, the perception is the Academy is racist.
Liberal activists will jump to conclusions (they always do) and retort that I have a problem with minorities winning awards because I am a racist. They will also point to my comment "jump to conclusions" as evidence that I am a radical, right-wing, conservative culture warrior. Trust me, if you knew me, you would know how ridiculous that statement is. I will clarify though to provide comfort and solace to political activists reading this (whom I am sure aren't!) Activists, right or left, jump to conclusions because they feel they are in a constant position having to defend their political agenda. They have a heightened defense mechanism which causes them to jump to conclusions. It also helps them to immediately define a conversation and their perceived "opponent's" position. But my position does not stem from racism, a belief that race is a fundamental determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race. Had I said that I believe black, Hispanic, or Asian actors are incapable of acting because their skin color or ethnic background makes it difficult for them to express the emotional range needed for an actor, that would be racism!
My disillusionment with the Academy stems from my own naive belief that the Academy actually cared about artistic merit. While I have been writing about my problems with the Academy for years, it is difficult for me to ultimately concede that I was manipulated, even brainwashed, into buying their line. I even stopped watching the show twenty years ago but it remains hard for me to fully accept that the award ceremony is nothing more than a pop culture event, that bedazzled us with glitz and glamour, but was never able to live up to artistic standards. When the most popular question at the Oscars became "who are you wearing"?, it should have immediately opened my eyes.
My problem is I love movies as an art form. My earliest childhood memories involved watching movies with my grandparents but my grandmother in particular. The arts were important in my family. My father is a musician. Culture was all around me growing up. While the idea of going into the arts is a sign of mental derangement in most families, my family viewed it as honorable. As a teenager I made up my mind that I wanted to make movies and restore the sophistication Hollywood was once known for. Can you now understand why I bought into artistic merit and why it bothers me that the Academy Awards and the movie industry, in general, has become so political?
The liberal activists, it would seem, never bought into (or cared about) the concept of artistic merit. Their first priority was the advancement of their political agenda. With that mentality, the Academy Awards were viewed as a cultural event, a symbol of social importance. A symbol recognized worldwide. At one time an Academy Award ceremony could garner somewhere between 30 - 40 million viewers in the U.S. alone! If the liberal activists could infiltrate the Academy and put social pressure on them it would be a major advancement for their causes. That, I believe, is all they saw when they looked at the Academy Awards - the potential to have their message exposed to millions of people. How many political activists do you think spend their time watching movies? How can you be an activist, sitting at home, in front of a screen?
Because of our fundamentally different viewpoints on what the Academy Awards represents, it creates a contrast and an inability for myself and the activists to understand the other's point of view. Remember, we don't really have conversations with one another in this country. We "hear" one another but we don't "listen". Have you ever spoken to a political activist or someone with a different opinion than yours? You aren't having a conversation, an honest exchange of ideas between people. What you have are two people repeating talking points to one another that they heard or read in mainstream media, social media, or their political organization. The activist will have the aim of trying to persuade you to their side, having no intention of ever conceding a point to you. The objective is, you come to my side. The non-activist wants to make sure their talking points are heard loud and clear. Depending upon the individual's personality, it could also be a matter of "putting you in your place".
The cultural war within the Academy, I concede, have resulted in the liberal activists winning, but it has had an unintended negative effect. Politics has tarnished the reputation of the Academy Awards, as evident by the decline in ratings over the years. The Academy, and Hollywood as a whole, have become too polarized. The outside pressure from the liberal activists hasn't just affected ratings but box-office attendance, perhaps a better indicator of the public's indifference to movies. We can't gather information from 2020 attendance because of Covid, so lets look at 2019 numbers. There was a 4.6% decline compared to 2018. While 2018 saw an increase in attendance, that was only because 2017's numbers were the lowest in 23 years, domestically. We can again come up with a multitude of reasons to explain this: bad movies were made, ticket prices were too high, it rained...etc. We can come up with rationale after rationale but at one point we must admit, politics and movies are too intertwined. If I admit to you that I like the movie Gone with the Wind (1939), I've just made a statement that can be interpreted as political and not just an expression of a movie preference. At least to the liberal activist's mentality.
Although it has been an on-going trend, 2020 was a noteworthy highlight in the ways liberal activists have used political and social issues to further attack art. One of the year's major social and political movements began after the death of George Floyd. This was after previous movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. Note how #MeToo only seemed to attack the entertainment industry and not corporate America. Taking their cue from former Chicago mayor (sadly) Rahm Emanuel, who famously said, "never let a crisis go to waste", it created a perfect storm for liberals to begin their crusade that the films of yesterday do not match the values of today. Now classic movies needed "trigger warnings", a new term I learned last year that I wish I hadn't. Warnings meant to provide a film within its historical context. It created a snowball effect with liberals seemingly attacking all movies and art made before the invention of the smart phone. Turner Classic Movies (TCM) even had to make an attempt to appease the liberal mob and bite the hand that feeds them by creating a show in which they discuss how "problematic" the films of yesterday are for today's viewers.
Within this environment what could the Academy do? How could it not grovel at the behest of the liberal activists? It wasn't just an issue of nominating a more diverse field of actors, the academy also needed to legitimize the liberal's message regarding older films. How could they do this? Look at the movies that were nominated. Many of the nominees were set in the past - Mank, Judas and the Black Messiah, The Trial of the Chicago 7. The messaging being, we must question and correct the past in order to move forward. David Fincher's Mank is an ideal representation of this. Nominated for 10 awards, it is the story of Herman Mankiewicz, the co-writer of Citizen Kane (1941). The movie suggested Mankiewicz was really the writer of the movie, not Orson Welles. It becomes a story of authorship. This can be expanded to suggest, who is the author of our past? This also legitimizes liberal's use of the expression "my truth". There's Orson Welles' "truth" of what happened regarding Citizen Kane and Herman Mankiewicz's "truth". By purposely redefining our definition of words, liberals are also able to redefine the conversation. There is no such thing as "your truth" or "my truth". What you mean to say is "experience". Our experiences in the world affect our viewpoint and thus our understanding. But we only live in a world of truth and lies, not multiple truths. We are seeing liberal activists use this tactic again in relation to the word "infrastructure". It is no different than when conservative communication consultant Frank Luntz came up with the term "job creator" to replace usage of the word rich. Who do you want to raise taxes on, the job creators or the rich? We are talking about the same group of people but the word changes our perception. The Academy countered these nominations with movies like Promising Young Woman, a modern day story set in our #MeToo world. Where one set of movies question our past, the other "corrects" our present and provides the new path forward.
And so we clearly see the Academy making the nominations within themselves political and thus we can't expect anything honorable from the Academy. Do you know why the Academy Awards were created in the first place? Louis B. Mayer (one of the M's in MGM) created the "Academy" as a way to prevent actors and filmmakers from creating a union. That's right. The invention of the Academy Awards was a union busting effort. With a beginning like this, how could something honorable come from it? It takes no time at all for scandal to hit. By the Academy's second year, actress Mary Pickford had starred in her first "talkie", Coquette (1929). Pickford had high expectations for the movie. For younger readers, Pickford was a major star in the silent era. Having begun acting as a teenager, she achieved stardom after appearing in movies like Pollyanna (1920). She would go on to be one of the four founders of United Artist studios (along with D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin and Pickford's husband, Douglas Fairbanks). Fairbanks was the Academy's first president and Pickford wanted a best actress award. Even though Pickford received mixed reviews, some said she was too old for the part (a coquette is generally identified as being a young, flirtatious woman). Pickford ended up winning her Oscar but allegations of bribery and pressure on the Academy's Board of Judges tainted her win. For the record, I am both a fan of Pickford's performance and Coquette.
This also helps illustrate that when I say the Academy is "political", it doesn't mean I am always talking about race. I think society has been conditioned to associate words like "political" and "social" as synonyms with race (again, control the language, control the debate). By political, I mean behind the scenes campaigning that goes on, which is not unlike the ugliness of a political campaign, as Academy members are pressured to vote for one film or another or one actor over another. Artistic merit often isn't a deciding factor in their decision. Many times decisions are made based on a movie's popularity, the social relevance of a film, the life story of an actor...etc. Even great white artists have never won a competitive award (not counting honorary awards) - Alfred Hitchcock, Cary Grant, Buster Keaton, Fritz Lang, Luchino Visconti, Charlie Chaplin, Carole Lombard, Gene Wilder, Robert Redford, Kirk Douglas, Greta Garbo, Steve McQueen, Harvey Keitel, Richard Harris, Max von Sydow, Veronica Lake, Peter Sellers, Richard Burton, Robert Mitchum, Gene Kelly, Irene Dunne, Fred Astaire, Tony Curtis, Mikey Rooney, Judy Garland, Bob Hope, Ingmar Bergman and Jack Benny! So much for artistic merit!
Being as image conscious as the Academy is, they do realize this problem and have tried to "correct" it in one of two ways - either presenting an individual with a lifetime achievement award or with what is known as a "pity Oscar" - an Oscar win for a lesser work meant to be symbolic of the artist's body of work. For years a reason people would give as a shining example of the Academy not always celebrating its finest talent was the fact that Martin Scorsese never won a best director Oscar and none of his movies were ever named best picture. Some called Scorsese's Oscar win for The Departed (2006) a pity Oscar. Another example was Al Pacino. Pacino never won an Oscar until his performance for Scent of a Woman (1992). Many people thought that year the real winner should have been Denzel Washington for Spike Lee's Malcolm X (1992) but the Academy needing to rectify their misjudgment presented the award to Pacino. Fittingly when Denzel Washington did win the Oscar for Training Day (2002) it was thanks to a similar campaign by Hollywood insiders feeling Washington should have received an Oscar by now. It also helped with the Academy's perceived race issue. A final example I'll give you was Peter O' Toole. Widely regarded as one of his generation's finest actors, whether on stage or film, O'Toole never won an Oscar, despite multiple nominations. In 2006 the Academy wanted to present O'Toole with the lifetime achievement award. Initially O'Toole wanted to decline. He had given a performance in the film Venus (2006) and was nominated for another Oscar. He understood what the lifetime achievement award meant and publicly said he still believed he could win a competitive Oscar. He didn't win that year, losing to Forest Whitaker for his performance in The Last King of Scotland (2006) and he eventually agreed to accept the lifetime achievement award.
Desperation for TV ratings, kowtowing to political and social pressure, lack of artistic merit judgement - it is a shame what the Academy has done to itself. There is no sign of a correction course and quite frankly after 93 years, it's too late. Liberal activists now have too strong of a grip on the ceremony and the demands won't cease, they will only push the Academy further, like this writer does in her article. Notice, no mention of artistic merit. In the writer's judgement wins and loses should be based upon race and the symbolic effect these Oscar wins will have on society. It was the same logic liberals came up with back in 2008 for voting for Barack Obama. A vote for the first black man for president would be good for the country because of what it represents, it would "heal" the country. Note it had nothing to do with policy.
I question exactly how large of an audience these writers speak for. I would venture to say it is not a majority of the country but they definitely represent the echo chamber of social liberalism. I see I have been defending an out dated position regarding the Academy Awards. I also see how effective these liberal activists are at instituting change. Not change at the governmental level, where it is sorely needed but low hanging fruit change - changing the names of statues, trigger warnings for classic films, turning the Oscars into a political social event, getting businesses to display Black Lives Matter signs, promoting gender ambiguity...etc. It really does impact society and adds up to the illusion of change. It's almost better than the real thing. Great taste, less filling. It really makes me look forward to next year's Participation Awards...er I mean Academy Awards.
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