Oscars About to Add A New Major Category

FlyRy

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Dominic Brehetto said:
Just read that Disney is the only major studio to never win a best film Oscar. :jbhmm:

Now they push for an award they will probably win every year.
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Well if that's true they now own fox searchlight which has won 3 of the last 5
 
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The name sounds so condescending. Why don't they just stop rewarding obvious Oscar bait films and just add the good popular films to the list of nominees?
 
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So it's basically the MTV movie award

But yeah there should be a comedy award too

But now the term Academy award winning film will be watered down
 
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Michael Bay like

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The Deep State


Populist or elitist?The Academy announces a misguided new category
Critics see the “achievement in popular film” award as a way of ghettoising blockbusters

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Prospero
Aug 10th 2018
by N.B.

THE Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced on August 8th that it will be introducing a new category in time for next February’s awards ceremony, one that honours “achievement in popular film”. The idea is that, alongside the time-honoured “Best Picture” category, there will be another for films which have a broader appeal: blockbusters, in other words. Ironically, the announcement has been anything but popular. On social media, responses to this idea have ranged from hostile to very hostile indeed. Many feel that the once-prestigious Oscars are dumbing down to the level of the MTV Awards. What’s next—Best Kiss? Loudest Shoot-Out? Most Skyscrapers Flattened by Aliens in a Single Action Sequence?

The concept of the “Hit Oscar” or the “Popcorn Oscar”, as it has been nicknamed, raises other questions, too. To start with, who decides whether or not a film is popular? What are the criteria or thresholds? And isn’t it an insult to nominees, the implicit suggestion being that hit films can’t be artistic (and vice versa)?

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The timing, too, is off. “Black Panther” (pictured), Marvel’s Afrofuturist superhero blockbuster, could well have been nominated for best picture in 2019. Indeed, it could well have won, thus acknowledging the superhero boom as well as emphasising just how successful films with black casts and creative teams can be. But it is now likely that “Black Panther” will be shoved into the “popular” ghetto, and that the best-picture prize will go to an indie drama. If so, the introduction of a new category will have helped maintain the status quo, rather than upending it.

Some commentators have pointed out that the two-tier system has a precedent. The very first Oscar ceremony in 1929 had separate awards for “Outstanding Picture”, which was won by “Wings”, and “Best Unique and Artistic Picture”, won by “Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans”. It is also understandable that the Oscars’ organisers should want to shake up the ceremony’s format, bearing in mind how low its television ratings have fallen. One reason for this decline, the theory goes, is that best-picture winners are no longer the films that the great American public is queuing up to see.

Perhaps there’s something in that. There was a time when the likes of “Braveheart”, “Titanic” and “Gladiator” could make zillions at the box office, while also scooping up armfuls of golden statuettes. But in the past decade the top Oscar has gone to auteur projects such as “The Shape of Water”, “Moonlight” and “Birdman”: terrific films, but by no means the so-called “tentpoles” that keep a roof over the studios’ heads.

The Academy attempted to address this trend once before. In 2009, after “The Dark Knight” and “WALL-E” were snubbed, the number of slots in the best-picture shortlist was increased from five to a potential ten, specifically so that commercial genre movies might get a look-in. But instead of more blockbusters being nominated, it was idiosyncratic, lower-budgeted films that filled those extra slots. You can see why the Academy—terrified of being lumped in with the liberal coastal elite—is resorting to desperate populist measures.

The fact is that if hugely profitable, crowd-pleasing films aren’t winning best picture these days, it is not because the Academy’s voters are becoming more snobbish or sophisticated in their tastes. It is because Hollywood has stopped making “prestige pictures” of the “Titanic” and “Braveheart” variety. That is, it has abandoned the kind of middlebrow historical epics that used to be a shoo-in. What the introduction of the popular category acknowledges is that there are now hardly any studio films in the chasm between shiny comic-book movies and quirky indie experiments. The industry is producing nothing for grown-up viewers who want more scale and spectacle than they can get from a low-key drama, but who but don’t fancy seeing people in colourful costumes firing laser beams at each other.

The new division between best picture and popular picture may be ill-judged, but it reflects a pre-existing dichotomy between arthouse and multiplex fare. So have pity on the poor Academy. If Hollywood studios weren’t quite so obsessed with superhero franchises, the Oscars might not be in this mess in the first place.
 
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