Thatâs like your opinion, man (aka why Iâm over the Oscars)
Not sure why itâs taken me so long to realize this, but movies, like any art is inherently subjective. Yeah, I know, no duh. But seriously, I think Iâve spent most of my life thinking I just didnât âgetâ something, or there was some secret creative sauce that professionals had the recipe for.
Sure, there are fundamentals that make some movies better than others (e.g., more compelling characters or believable conflict, better pacing, etc.) However, after you pass a certain threshold of good, like 80% Rotten Tomatoes good, your personal tastes/background matter far more than anything in the script or on the screen when it comes to whether a movie will resonate with you or not.
Which brings me to the Oscars, which literally is trying to award the best of the best. The problem is, in many categories, itâs really unclear what makes one movie better than the other nominees, and more broadly, what makes these 5-10 nominees better than all the other great movies out there. Especially for categories like âBest Picture,â Iâm sure picking the winner at random would be equally crowd-pleasing as picking it through the mysterious criteria (aka the subjective opinions) of The Academy.
Once you really start to notice this, you canât really look at the Oscars the same way againâwhich leads me to my second point.
If after a certain âgreatâ threshold, what makes one movie better than another one is mostly subjective, then the bigger problem with the Oscars is that rather than acting like a person (or group of people), it tries to act like an impartial governing body over film.
It sounds silly, but I believe this is why most film nerds, and general movie fans in general, get pissed when the Oscars âget something wrongââas opposed to an individual film critic. Itâs almost like The Academy is a jury in a trial (who we also donât see) that we trust to make an âofficialâ unbiased call based on evidence. ButâŠthatâs impossible to do with movies.
Still, The Academy casts a long shadow because of how it brands itself as this official, impartial judge. When more diverse movies are desperately trying to break through, the belief that The Academy is always ârightâ can become a big problem. Just take a movie like The Farewell. Itâs a phenomenal movie (in my opinion), which should have gotten nominated for Best Picture. If it did, it wouldâve gotten vastly more attention, which is something a movie with an entirely Asian cast needs, and deserves.
Thatâs why I actually love how gaming blog Kotaku did its âtop 10 games of 2019â list this year. The site itself, which obviously has no thoughts of its own, didnât publish its âofficialâ list of the top 10 games. Instead, it published the personal top 10 lists of a few of its journalists. For example, https://kotaku.com/zack-zwiezens-top-10-games-of-2019-1840540510
I love this approach because it acknowledges the inherent subjectivity with picking the top 10 games of any year. In reading each of these stories, I found certain journalistsâ lists resonated with me more than others, but overall, I got exposed to way more games than I would have if Kotaku the site just published a single story, which wouldnât have entirely satisfy anyone.
I really hope more publications start to follow Kotakuâs model in the coming years. As for the Oscars, I think itâs just time for them to go away.
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