The Oscar awards are coming up in a month or so, but Oscar season is officially under way, meaning there's a whole lot of campaigning, polling, deals arranged behind the scenes, appealing to the voters.....it's kind of like election season for politics. Everyone trying to get enough votes and momentum to win the top prize, and it's not always the best film (or actors/actresses) that win it, where famously Crash beat Brokeback Mountain in 2005 in a late surge by Crash that everyone sort of disagreed with after the fact (I actually watched Crash in theaters and thought it was in interesting film set in L.A. about race relations). Last year, I thought 100% that Coda was the best film that I'd seen, but then again I didn't see Power of the Dog (Jane Campion) which had been pushed heavily by Netflix so that Netflix could win its first ever Oscar, but ironically all that pushing just made them lose, not to a traditional movie studio (MGM, Universal, etc.) but to its rival AppleTV, who did Coda. Funny how that works, but of course the actual Oscar ceremony was overshadowed by "the slap" with Will Smith and Chris Rock.
When I was 16 I had a world almanac which listed the names of all the major categories of Oscar winners (best actors, directors, best picture) in neat little grids year-by-year, and even before my trivia-loving days I thought I'd memorize all the category winners for each year, just boom-boom-boom be able to name them for every year, like Quentin Tarantino memorizing all the movies he'd ever watched. The problem I ran into, of course, was that a lot of Oscar winners are...not movies most people watch, and sometimes movies I'd never even heard of, making the memorization of them kind of trivial. I look back at the Best Picture list and now I've changed a bit on that perspective, but 16-year-old me definitely wasn't hip to "Chariots of Fire" (1982), "Ordinary People" (still not sure what that is), "Midnight Cowboy" (1970, an X-rated movie), and for Best Actress, who was this "Katherine Hepburn" that kept winning in the earlier days of Hollywood.
It's a testament to how deep the knowledge of different categories of knowledge can run, just Oscar winners, even though Oscar-nominated films are just a small percentage of the movie knowledge base one is excepted to know. There are some genres of movies people love that just have no chance of ever winning an Oscar, like "M3GAN" (horror films), comedies, animated movies (at least for best picture). To prepare for Oscar season, I had to go out of my way to watch some Oscar-nominated films (which I normally wouldn't have sat through) like Tar with Cate Blanchette. That is NOT a movie that general audiences would choose to watch except for Oscar viewing for the artistry of the movie, as a half hour into a 3-hour movie it had produced 20-minute discussions about the aesthetics of Bach and other musical pieces. No CGI, no chase scenes, no jokes for comedic relief, just straight dialogue without cutting to different shots of the restaurant they sit in while talking.
I think the Academy understands the sentiment I've presented as the general consensus of Oscar-nominated movies, though, and in order to attract more general attention and trying to answer affirmatively the question of "Do the Oscars still even matter?" have nominated more box-office friendly hits, especially this year with Top Gun: Maverick (I ain't worried bout it winning though), Avatar: The Way of Water, and Everything Everywhere All at Once. The favorite, EEATO (nice that they've abbreviated the title to make everyone's life easier) would mark another milestone for Asian American actors/directors/films in the last few years, so yay for that. I didn't get the movie; but that's OK! I don't get a lot of Oscar-winning movies.
Oh by the way, fun fact: the name "Oscars" was coined by an Academy librarian who said the Oscar award trophy looked like her uncle Oscar. A trivial reason for a (still for now) non-trivial award.
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