In the January 14th issue of Time, film critic Richard Corliss eschews reviewing the week's releases (it is January, after all) to instead pontificate on the state of the Oscars ("How to Save the Awards Shows"). As many are wont to do, Corliss offers his suggestion on how to improve the Oscars. He throws out the notions usually bandied about in bids for cheap audience thrills, and suggests something that he considers self-evidently simple: give the awards to popular movies.
Now, with all respect to Mr. Corliss, I agree that the Oscars don't have the finest track record for nominations, let alone for awards. But if I may be granted my say, the problem with the list is that it usually slants too commercial. Does anyone really think The Departed was the best picture of 2006? Or Crash the best picture of 2005? Or Million Dollar Baby the best picture of 2004? Or... well, you get the idea.
Granted, these are not bad films. (Okay, Crash is a bad film.) But they are populist films. And whether or not they make as much money as unsophisticated comedies or franchises or sickeningly saccharine schmaltz is regardless. These are films with big names both in front of and behind the camera, with money to spare on production and promotion. By now, they even have a subgenre of their own: Oscar-bait.
Corliss points out that "In the old days, the Best Picture prize went to box-office hits like Casablanca, The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Sound of Music." Is anyone really going to debate that Casablanca and The Bridge on the River Kwai are classics in all senses of the word? (Let's not debate The Sound of Music; as far as I'm concerned, that's one of the most erroneous awards the Academy has ever given. But I digress.) There's a difference between saying Gladiator is in the spirit of Spartacus and saying that Gladiator is as good as Spartacus. There's an intelligence, a tastefulness, and an artistic merit in a Spartacus that is lacking in favor of the bombast and the superficial showmanship of a Gladiator.
I am of the opinion that Little Miss Sunshine, though brilliant, was overpraised. I do not feel it was the best original screenplay of the year, nor do I believe that it was among the five best pictures of the year. But let's put that aside and consider not the film itself, but what it meant within the context of its fellow nominees. Little Miss Sunshine was "the little indie that could," a film that could have gone straight to DVD and had a small devout following, but because of early critical praise and festival buzz, worked its way up to the Oscars. How precious. No one seemed to notice that Steve Carrell is one of our most bankable stars at the moment, not to mention the presence of other big name players such as Alan Arkin, Toni Collette, and Greg Kinear. No one that would necessarily pull a record breaking opening based on their name alone, but this isn't an indie in the Jim Jarmusch sense of the word. (Or -- excuse me, I forgot I was on Spout for a moment -- the Joe Swanberg sense of the word.)
I would love to see Juno nominated for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay, and Ellen Page nominated for Best Actress. To my delight, if the pre-Oscar buzz is to be trusted, there's a strong possibility of this coming to pass. But, as Karina has so eloquently pointed out on her blog, Juno is, like Little Miss Sunshine before it, not an indie. But if/when it gets nominated this year, it's going to be this year's "little indie that could." There will be those who champion it for it's decidedly outsider aesthetics and subversive attack on the general public; there will be those who lash out against it, saying it was only nominated to fill a quota. Both of these camps are wrong, and I find each one equally disheartening.
Until the Academy is required to sit down and watch every film that comes out over the course of a year -- Oscar bait or not -- their awards are always going to be slanted and biased. Now, I'll admit that I don't think it would hurt if someone lost their copy of, say, Underdog, but once again, this is a slippery slope.
I think back to my halcyon days of working video retail, when a precocious teen could stand behind the register, content and safe in his sense of cinematic superiority. I had a phrase, a credo if you will, for why I would never let a customer blindly refuse a letterbox edition of a film. "Educate, don't placate," I would say, as I took out a piece of (approximately) 2.35:1 paper and demonstrated, "This is how a movie is shot, but this is all you're getting to see," while ripping the paper in half. (I also had diagrams I would draw, but that would take too long to explain.)
I would like to instruct the Academy to do the same thing: don't simply placate the masses who want validation that the films they paid to see are good. Chances are, they're not. No offense. Educate them on some of the better films they may have missed or not bothered to see. The film critic is always going to be hated by the populace, who routinely declare "I always disagree with reviews." There's no reason for intelligent, discerning people to sacrifice their integrity and pander to a constituency that isn't going to listen to them either way.
EDIT: A very truncated version of this rant was printed in the Letters to the Editor section of the January 28 issue of Time magazine, several pages away from an interview with Woody Allen. I plan to gloat that Woody Allen and I were both published in the same issue of Time for many years to come.