So the 85th Academy Awards were last weekend. All across the internet and in real life professional and amateur movie critics alike were weighing in on who would win and who should win. It is important to note that there are always those two categories at play and very few ever seem to accept the "best film" as the actual "best film" of that year.
Now films and their relative quality is an incredibly subjective topic and definitive answers can probably never be conclusively given. That said name the greatest director ever: Stanley Kubrick? He never one a single Oscar and to this day hasn't been awarded even an honorary one. Alfred Hitchcock perhaps? He never received one either. Let's play a different game, name a truly great movie: "The Shawshank Redemption"? No Oscar. "Pulp Fiction"? No Oscar. "2001: A Space Odyssey". No. You can see where I'm going with this.
What has won? "Shakespeare in Love". A good film no doubt, but do you know what it beat? "Saving Private Ryan". "Crash" is officially (sort of) better than "Brokeback Mountain". You remember "How Green Was My Valley" right? What? You don't? Never mind, it only beat "Citizen Kane".
To a good chunk of you reading right now this isn't news, it's a long standing fact that the Academy Awards aren't really "Award" shows as such, they're more like advertising. You see the sole criterion for a film to be considered for the Oscars is that it plays for at least one week, in at least one theatre, somewhere in Los Angeles county California sometime before midnight on the 31st of December of that year.
This means that the general public doesn't even have to have seen the so-called "Best Film/Performance/... of the year" for it to win. Unsurprisingly this creates a rift between the Academy itself and the larger critical/consumer world.
Another thing which causes this rift is the makeup of the Academy members. According to a February 2012 study conducted by the Los Angeles Times (sampling over 5,000 of its 5,765 members), the Academy is 94% white, 77% male, 14% under the age of 50, and has a median age of 62.
In addition, 33% of members are previous winners or nominees of Academy Awards themselves. In other words these judges of western culture's creative works are in no way representative of current western culture's gender, racial and age make-up. Not to mention the fact that the only way into the Academy membership is either by getting an oscar nomination or being invited by an existing member.
This means that out of touch ideas of quality are propagated as the only people who will ever get a chance to vote are the people who pleased the old guard.
What does this mean for the future of film-making? I have no idea but what I do know is that the truly great movies will almost always find an audience and remain a touchstone for future generations. So for all those that are livid that, say "Zero Dark Thirty" didn't take the big prize, don't worry I'm sure there are plenty of others that share your view and won't let it fading, undignified, into obscurity.
