Oscars

The Oscars are good because they’re bad. If the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences exclusively bestowed trophies on the best movies, actors, and artisans, they would instantly become irrelevant—because nobody would have anything to complain about. It is the job of this institution to be wrong, to frustrate and antagonize, to create grist for the online mill of campaigning and caterwauling. What other ceremony could inspire such crazed rhetoric, like people clamoring that Emma Stone’s win last year for Poor Things was illegitimate because it came at the expense of Lily Gladstone for Killers of the Flower Moon? The internet feeds on outrage, and the Oscars foment fury with annual, reliable precision.

They also, as it happens, tend to nominate pretty good movies. My own ballots rarely overlap with those of the Academy, but that’s less a function of incompetence than excess; there are simply too many good options for everyone to agree on the same subset of five (or, in the case of Best Picture, 10). The Oscars don’t matter in the same way that MVP awards in sports don’t matter—the token recognition doesn’t change the underlying performance—but they nevertheless shine a light on pictures which mainstream audiences might otherwise ignore. For that reason alone, they’re worth paying attention to, if not obsessing over. Read More