ALTERNATIVE OSCARS - Gareth Higgins
First things first — the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences never gave a Best Director Oscar to Alfred Hitchcock or Mira Nair (yet), and movies that didn’t “win” Best Picture include Do the Right Thing, Citizen Kane, The Tree of Life, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Daughters of the Dust, Stories We Tell, Jean de Florette, Toni Erdmann, and The Piano. Hal Holbrook didn’t win for his exquisite supporting performance in Into the Wild, the film score I listen to most often wasn’t even nominated, and A Hidden Life, the best film I saw last year, has received precisely zero recognition from the Academy.
For what it’s worth, I could write a book about the movies that should have won but didn’t ( Danny Peary already did, and it’s lovely but due an update.) The Oscars are not an indication of the greatest achievements in cinema; they are instead the result of what happens when popularity meets expensive campaigning, the relationships among people in the film industry, a desire to do the right thing (unless that’s the name of the film), or at least to look like the right thing is being done, making up for mistakes of previous years, and the sheer luck of timing. When your movie is released matters — both in terms of how fresh it will be in the memory of Academy voters, and in which other films it’s up against. So, let’s agree: just because Oscar says it, doesn’t make it so. And saying that the Oscars represent the views of “the Academy" is like saying that any given president represents the views of all U.S. Americans. The only way to be truly sure of this would be to have mandatory voting for all members, and a commitment from the voters to watch all the eligible films, and that’s effectively impossible.
So let’s not overstate the meaning of the Oscars — at their best, they can bring some attention to movies that deserve a wider audience, and sometimes to questions of making a fairer world; and the night itself can bring a hearty laugh or heartstring moment. The rank order voting system introduced for Best Picture nominees in recent years does help widen the field (and if we used it in “real” elections, could transform national politics for the better); and the conscious recruitment of more women, people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and other minorities to the Academy membership is not just a popular move, but the right thing to do. In a society beginning to face the unjust consequences of one group’s unearned power being used for personal gain, any move to enlarge the table has to be a good thing.