As you’ll undoubtedly know by now, what with the internet going ablaze over the event, the 84th Academy Awards happened last week. I stayed up 'till 5am to watch, but as you’ll notice, I haven’t bothered writing a lengthy post about how fabulous the winners were and how terrible it was for the losers but how delightfully sportsmanlike they were anyway and how all the ladies looked glamorous and how Angeline Jolie’s leg made more headlines than The Artist winning five awards.
Mainly because none of that matters.
Why doesn’t it matter? Because, dear reader, the Oscars are a farce. If you know me at all, you’re perfectly entitled to bellow cries of “J’accuse!” and complain I’m just bitter that Drive didn’t win anything. Because I am. But my argument isn’t completely ungrounded. Recently I’ve been reading Mark Kermode’s latest book, entitled ‘The Good, The Bad and The Multiplex’, in which he makes some very good points on this very topic. Mr Kermode describes the Oscar nomination process as follows…
The Academy, comprised largely of Americans, decide it isn’t worth watching every film, so only watch a handful, and wait for the Golden Globes shortlist to decide the rest. The Golden Globes selection process entails, as Kermode puts it, “90-odd Pharisiac hacks [getting together] once a year to draw up a list of famous people they really want to meet and hang out with. They then proceed to invite these famous people to what is essentially their annual work knees-up, by nominating their crap films for Golden Globe awards.”
Thus, the very nomination process for the Oscars is skewed; let alone who actually wins the awards - which is another matter entirely. I find further fault with ‘Oscar season’, as it’s come to be known among cineastes and cinephiles, for its horrible banality to focus only on recently released films. While a handful of films released throughout 2011 were nominated, the majority of winners were films released towards the end of the year (or early 2012).
Take the evening’s major winner: The Artist. Premiering at Cannes in May 2011, the film saw wide cinematic release just in time for the Oscars (how convenient!), from December 2011 to February 2012 around the world. In fact, almost all the major winners at this year’s Oscars were released in the last quarter of 2011 or later in the UK (Hugo won five Oscars and was released 2nd December 2011, The Descendants took one after being released 27th January 2012, and David Fincher’s remake The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo also won a single award after a release date of 26th December 2011).
The major films of 2011 released before this period could be counted on your fingers, and those that actually won awards on one hand. For an award ceremony celebrating a year of film, the focus of the Oscars seems conveniently focused on what’s just come out recently - perhaps because the Academy do indeed have an average age of a hundred and seven, as Kermode laments, and can’t remember what they saw past last week.
Hence why I haven’t reported the Oscar winners. Aside from the fact that there’s a thousand other avenues to find out the information, and I’d simply be wasting my breath (fingers?), the very process of the ceremony doesn’t accurately reflect the state of modern cinema. And what use is a film awards ceremony that doesn’t care about film?
Photo: Babble
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