The Slippery Slope of the Oscars

A fan of The Dark Knight gets ready to post on the Internet.

A final note on the Academy Awards, and then we will never discuss them again. Ideologically, I hate what the Oscars stand for; I watch them every year because at heart, I secretly love the pageantry and melodrama. This is the definition of a real guilty pleasure: When you enjoy something that you should truly hate for objective, not subjective, reasons. To me, the Oscars are the most egregious pseudo-events, a way for conceited “artists” (read: PR people & White Elephant auteurs) to celebrate the most commercial aspects of film, with more emphasis placed on the costumes and drama of the event than the art itself. This is why I hate the Academy Awards. At the same time, they offer a populist, sometimes entertaining validation of things I like as well as a smorgasbord of hot actresses to fawn over. This is why I love the Academy Awards.

The one slippery slope that everyone seems to have trouble with every year is populism; namely, how populist should the Oscars be? It was never magnified more this year than the Best Picture nomination The Dark Knight didn’t receive, instead losing its spot to the infinitely more honest/less entertaining The Reader, probably because Harvey Weinstein is a Hannibal-esque manipulator behind the industry scenes. The common cry heard from people was, “The Dark Knight was the biggest movie of the year! The Academy is irrelevant by snubbing it!” The question posed by this: Should the Oscars nominate the best or the most notable movies of the year? In 2028, what movie will be casually watched: The Dark Knight or The Reader? Is cultural relevance indicative of worth?

Sometimes, the best movie of the year is also the most notable one, thought not often: This phenomenom probably peaked when The Godfather Part II won Best Picture. While The Dark Knight is the most notable movie of the year, it is not the best, and far from it, for multiple filmic reasons. Subtlety is a big part of this. Pacing is another. Characterization. A quick critique: When the dialogue verbalizes all of the thematic ambiguities of the film and clarifies them in the most obvious way, that is not sophisticated filmmaking; it is populist art, broken down in the simplest way and forcefed to an audience that doesn’t want to consider the gray areas. This is The Dark Knight, and it is blockbuster film-making at its bluntest.

Moving on: Should the Academy only nominate movies that will stick in the public consciousness? Well, no, because then they’d be subjecting art and criticism to public demand, and the public is not always informed enough to make a decision. As it has always been, people will see movies in determination of what gap it fills in their life: If they just want entertainment, they’ll only go to the theater, and if they want to know about film, then they’ll rent movies and read books and jump into the deep end of the medium. What the Oscars tries to do is ease the populace into the latter mindset, and this is done by awarding the least shitty movie nominated, most of the time. Most of the time, they fail, but when you look at the five Best Picture nominees, they usually represent a decent slice of American mainstream film-making and higher thought. Then again, sometimes it’s 2002 and both Chicago and Gangs of New York get nominated. Whoops.

If someone wants to really know about movies or film-making, they will push past the Academy and get into movies on their own. The Academy’s responsibility is not to hold hands through the artistic process, but to provide the clearest channel of populist understanding, a task that they fail at all the time. If The Dark Knight had been nominated for Best Picture (and God forbid, won), the Academy would have been doing a bad job, because while The Dark Knight is a culturally important film, it’s not an artistically important one. Should we not try to expose ourselves to the best art possible? Why then would anyone want to quanitfy The Dark Knight as high, or even good, art? Critiquing that movie is a giant can of worms that generally, people don’t want to discuss because if the “Heath was so good! Bale was so good! etc.” line of thinking that makes up pack criticism, which is what happens when you offer a contrary opinion in a room and everyone jumps on you. But the Academy’s refusal to honor the movie as one of the best of the year is not a problem, and it shouldn’t be their task to reward the most popular movies if they kind of suck. To everyone complaining that “no one” remembers the “artsy” movies that get nominated, come on; you are just being lazy as hell, and it’s not anyone’s fault that you don’t give a shit. Push harder. Try harder. Care more. If you can’t do that, then you deserve to be unsatisfied by the Oscars.