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posted by martyb on Thursday August 09 2018, @06:14AM   Printer-friendly
from the shark-jumping-awards dept.

Academy Adds Popular Film Oscar Category in Desperate Ratings Move

At the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Board of Governors meeting on Tuesday night, the 54 governors voted to add a new category to the Oscars. Per tradition, some 7,000 Academy voters, experts in their field, voted in by their colleagues, will weigh in on the best films of the year in 24 categories covering the crafts of moviemaking, from cinematography to sound, as well as the four acting categories, directing, writing, animation, foreign language, documentary, and fiction shorts and features.

But this year there will be one more: Best Popular Film. The Academy is bowing to pressure from ABC, which is anxious about historic low ratings for its telecast. The next Oscars will air on February 24, 2019 and, in 2020, will move up from February 23 to February 9, the earliest date ever, in a bid to jump ahead of multiple rival awards shows–which will, in turn, move ahead of the Oscars. (In the early days of its history, the Oscars were held in May, moved to April and March, then February.)

The Board also finally succumbed to building pressure to keep the show to three hours and not present live some of the less sexy craft categories, following the lead of other awards shows like the Tonys. (Sexy categories like Sound Mixing and Editing will be presented live during commercial breaks, then edited into the show.) This also serves to undermine the integrity of these annual global awards, which may be losing relevance as a mainstream shared event, but are still revered by cinephiles around the world.

Also at Vanity Fair, Vulture, Slate, Variety, and Collider.

See also: Oscars Slammed by Film Journalists for Creating 'Best Popular Film' Category, Especially in the Year of 'Black Panther'


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  • (Score: 1, Flamebait) by VLM on Thursday August 09 2018, @12:30PM (4 children)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 09 2018, @12:30PM (#719335)

    Dying industries always go hard left. Or maybe hard left industries always die. They're always hand in hand, regardless. The politics is hard left but is irrelevant since the horse is already dead and beaten into a grease stain on the road.

    What is interesting is why the awards died. My theory is the movie industry is more formulaic than the past. Nothing out there but sequels, remakes, comic-book-to-capeshit movie conversions... there's nothing worth seeing... reminds me of modern commuter cars.

    To provide a bad SN automobile analogy, an era or industry with Prius and Tesla is exciting and you can get millions to tune into an awards show to see the best Tesla ever or debate on air if it crashes too much or now the Prius has a long range battery or whatevs. But do you seriously, seriously think that you can get viewers by the dozens of millions to tune into a party celebrating the 2002 Ford Focus (thats middle aged in the 1st generation, AFAIK nothing exciting happened in that model year).

    Movies are boring, thats the problem. And the execs who think you can turn what would be a boring shitty remake into something exciting merely by removing the white males and spending lots of money on special effects are disconnected from reality (see, hard left, for more evidence)

    I'd rather paint something and watch it dry. That's gonna be way more exciting.

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  • (Score: 2) by theluggage on Thursday August 09 2018, @01:40PM (3 children)

    by theluggage (1797) on Thursday August 09 2018, @01:40PM (#719358)

    Dying industries always go hard left.

    Except your mileage may vary as to whether the new "Outstanding Contribution by a movie called Black Panther" category is an act of political correctness or an act of snobbishness to prevent Black Panther winning Best Picture. (Of course, Hanlon's Razor says that it was just a badly-timed attempt to boost ratings).

    What is interesting is why the awards died. My theory is the movie industry is more formulaic than the past. Nothing out there but sequels, remakes, comic-book-to-capeshit movie conversions...

    Also: Social Media and Reality TV are (for better or worse (by which I mean 'for worse')) providing a new glut of celebrities (with the added illusion of 'it could be you') which dilutes the appeal of watching film starts gush at the podium. On the other end of the spectrum, the "high end" of TV production values is getting higher - and the new streaming players are taking greater risks.

    ...and if you are concerned about race/gender/diversity issues, TV has been ahead of the movies in that game for years (even if you think it could do more). Part of that problem is because of the movies' reliance, as you say, on remakes and (popular) comic-book conversions: when all of your source material is 50+ years old then of course its going to be mainly about straight white males and the occasional bikini-clad amazon. Black Panther deserves a ton of credit for "doing it properly" promoting new or lesser-known characters that can stand on their own merit as do Marvel's TV outings such as Luke Cage or Jessica Jones) rather than blackwashing, gender-flipping or outing established characters, which tends to trigger the trolls.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Thursday August 09 2018, @01:59PM (2 children)

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 09 2018, @01:59PM (#719368)

      Yeah maybe. Reality TV is far past peak, episodes struggle to approach ten million viewers for some years now. One way to test the reality TV theory would be to see if things improve for alternatives as reality TV has declined from its long ago peak. I'd suspect not, but collecting the data to prove one way or another would be rough and probably pretty subjective.

      As yet another alternative, there seem to be individual YouTube stars with more subscribers, and even more viewers, than some of the biggest name network reality TV shows. Looking at gross sales and estimating ticket cost, Black Panther as third highest grossing film of all time is about the same number of viewers as PewDiPie had at peak on youtube, so its significant.

      "Black Panther winning Best Picture" well is it merely the first/only "serious black people film" in at least one generation, which is, I guess, interesting or "outstanding" but not necessarily "best". Best would seem to imply more than capeshit comic-to-movie conversion with large special effects budget. Or if "best" is redefined to mean that little, then the word best doesn't mean much anymore, in which case its insulting to call "Black Panther" the best, if by the word "best" you mean the new meaning of "shitty". "Outstandingly politically correct and profitable" would be a great category for Black Panther.

      • (Score: 2) by theluggage on Thursday August 09 2018, @04:16PM (1 child)

        by theluggage (1797) on Thursday August 09 2018, @04:16PM (#719443)

        Yeah maybe. Reality TV is far past peak, episodes struggle to approach ten million viewers for some years now.

        ...but there's a lot of shows, and the past winners are still on the celebrity circuit.

        "Black Panther winning Best Picture" well is it merely the first/only "serious black people film" in at least one generation, which is, I guess, interesting or "outstanding" but not necessarily "best".

        Black Panther is a complete wildcard because, on the one hand, it represents diversity at a time when the Academy are on the back foot about such things, on the other, it ticks the "Oscar hate" ones (mass appeal fantasy popcorn spectacular). Certainly, it would be very, very embarrassing for the Academy if it walked away with a couple of "Best Make-Up" type awards.

        Of course, now that they've created a new category that sounds tailor-made for it, it will be impossible to disprove the claim that it would otherwise have won a "proper" award.

        ...although, if the competing awards (except the Razzies*) want to get one up on the Academy then all they have to do is make sure BP gets their top award... Wouldn't put it past them.

        (* Frankly, I never saw what was wrong with Catwoman given that it was about, well, Catwoman... If I buy a ham sandwich, I expect it to contain ham...)

        • (Score: 2) by VLM on Friday August 10 2018, @12:20PM

          by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 10 2018, @12:20PM (#719878)

          very, very embarrassing for the Academy if it walked away with a couple of "Best Make-Up" type awards.

          With the side dish of embarrassing for who and compared to what, given the industry problems with molestation and rape and meeeeeeeetwooo and all that. Just saying an industry focused around "Weinstein dindu nuthin wrong" would seem to imply some black action flick, no matter how temporarily interesting, can be swept under the rug in a relative sense, although I tentatively agree with you in an absolute sense that they'll get some flack.

          To some extent they need some kind of PR like "we luvs black people" to block out all the recent stories of rape and kiddie touching that Hollywood is now synonymous with.