Do you think Academy Awards has hurt film?

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I would say yes....who are the ten best film makers of the last twenty years.

How many of them have Oscars? Now what value is it to win an Oscar if the majority of the great filmmakers are disqualified from winning best picture?

The last two winners were basically new film makers who were tied to streaming services (HULU/APPLE). Meanwhile the films that actually save the theaters (Encanto, Spider-man:Far From Home, Horror Films) the academy turns it's nose up on them, because they are "genre" works.

The Academy's political bias's are also a major issue. The director of Ishtar got an Oscar this year along with the star of Snakes on a Plane and the guy that played "Stinky" in Dirty Grandpa. Not that the Academy actually put those people in the show...part of what made me love film was this.


Now the award seems to go towards who looks good in a photoop. Here's an honory trophy...we just won't "honor" you during the broadcast.



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I would say yes....who are the ten best film makers of the last twenty years.

How many of them have Oscars? Now what value is it to win an Oscar if the majority of the great filmmakers are disqualified from winning best picture?

The last two winners were basically new film makers who were tied to streaming services (HULU/APPLE).
Feels like this point does hinge on who exactly the "ten best filmmakers of the last twenty years" even are, which is obviously going to be a matter of subjectivity anyway. It's also worth noting that the directors don't receive the Best Picture Oscar, the producers do.

Meanwhile the films that actually save the theaters (Encanto, Spider-man:Far From Home, Horror Films) the academy turns it's nose up on them, because they are "genre" works.
This is the same Encanto that the Academy gave the Best Animated Feature Oscar, nominated for Best Song, and allowed to perform a second song that wasn't even nominated. That sounds like a sufficient amount of acknowledgment to me. That's without mentioning how the Academy tried to rig up fan-voted awards with the apparent intention of acknowledging films they wouldn't otherwise award but they got gamed by Zack Snyder fans voting for Army of the Dead and the Snyder Cut anyway (at least one of which I'd pick over No Way Home anyway). I don't know how much the Academy really owes to the films that "saved theatres" anyway - that just strikes me as an appeal to popularity, as if a film deserves some kind of participation trophy just for crossing a billion at the box office even during a pandemic.

The Academy's political bias's are also a major issue. The director of Ishtar got an Oscar this year along with the star of Snakes on a Plane and the guy that played "Stinky" in Dirty Grandpa. Not that the Academy actually put those people in the show...part of what made me love film was this.


Now the award seems to go towards who looks good in a photoop. Here's an honory trophy...we just won't "honor" you during the broadcast.
isn't that the guy from Supergirl

I thought the problem was that the Academy shuffled those awards off-screen to make room for stuff like the aforementioned fan-voted awards, which everyone took for the cheap popularity ploy that it was. Besides, why are you bringing up these people's most infamously bad work while also seemingly having a problem with them being pushed off to the side?
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Feels like this point does hinge on who exactly the "ten best filmmakers of the last twenty years" even are, which is obviously going to be a matter of subjectivity anyway. It's also worth noting that the directors don't receive the Best Picture Oscar, the producers do.
See this is a straw man argument...you can't list the ten best directors and exclude...

Quentin Tarrantino
Wes Anderson
PT Anderson
David O Russell
David Fincher
Christopher Nolan
Adam McKay
Alfonso Cuaron
Darren Aronofsky
Denis Villeneuve

You are more than welcome to make your own credible list...but it will be a list worth judging.

This is the same Encanto that the Academy gave the Best Animated Feature Oscar, nominated for Best Song, and allowed to perform a second song that wasn't even nominated. That sounds like a sufficient amount of acknowledgment to me. That's without mentioning how the Academy tried to rig up fan-voted awards with the apparent intention of acknowledging films they wouldn't otherwise award but they got gamed by Zack Snyder fans voting for Army of the Dead and the Snyder Cut anyway (at least one of which I'd pick over No Way Home anyway). I don't know how much the Academy really owes to the films that "saved theatres" anyway - that just strikes me as an appeal to popularity, as if a film deserves some kind of participation trophy just for crossing a billion at the box office even during a pandemic.

The Academy has an obligation to support it's exhibitors that's were the jobs are and where the revenue comes in. The Academy has now given back to back Oscars to Disney and Apple

The BP is supposed to make around 200 million in box office. It's a major factor in the award to promote the film the box office for the last two BP winners

Coda - 1.5 million
Nomadland - 39.5 million

By bringing in about 25% of the revenue that a BP should win over the past two years that hurts the industry. The point of awards like this is promotion and preservation. That's not happening right now.

isn't that the guy from Supergirl

I thought the problem was that the Academy shuffled those awards off-screen to make room for stuff like the aforementioned fan-voted awards, which everyone took for the cheap popularity ploy that it was. Besides, why are you bringing up these people's most infamously bad work while also seemingly having a problem with them being pushed off to the side?

Because you just pointed out the issue...yes Peter O'Toole had bad films but he had a legacy of great films that the Academy showed and they let him speak. What the Academy has done is less about recognizing the work and more pushing for presenters and "bits". If you are going to give an award you need to show or tell about the work...they didn't do that. That's a problem.



The BP is supposed to make around 200 million in box office. It's a major factor in the award to promote the film the box office for the last two BP winners.
I missed this in the rules of eligibility. "Supposed" by who?
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See this is a straw man argument...you can't list the ten best directors and exclude...

Quentin Tarrantino
Wes Anderson
PT Anderson
David O Russell
David Fincher
Christopher Nolan
Adam McKay
Alfonso Cuaron
Darren Aronofsky
Denis Villeneuve

You are more than welcome to make your own credible list...but it will be a list worth judging.
And that list isn't worth judging? I definitely don't think McKay or Russell are anywhere near the "best directors" conversation, much less holding such unimpeachable positions as you seem to suggest (and the former's already got an Oscar anyway). Besides, all of them have at the very least been nominated for Best Director and had films be nominated for Best Picture so I'm not so fussed about them being "disqualified" by the Academy just because most of them never won anything (especially compared to other potential best modern directors like Apichatpong Weerasethakul who operate on a whole other wavelength to what the Academy tends to acknowledge).

The Academy has an obligation to support it's exhibitors that's were the jobs are and where the revenue comes in. The Academy has now given back to back Oscars to Disney and Apple

The BP is supposed to make around 200 million in box office. It's a major factor in the award to promote the film the box office for the last two BP winners

Coda - 1.5 million
Nomadland - 39.5 million

By bringing in about 25% of the revenue that a BP should win over the past two years that hurts the industry. The point of awards like this is promotion and preservation. That's not happening right now.
I mean, it's the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It's ostensibly meant to celebrate cinema as an art form rather than just thoughtlessly heap awards on whatever is most profitable regardless of its actual quality. Otherwise, you end up ignoring good films because they didn't make enough money and rewarding bad films simply because they managed to pass an arbitrary threshold for success.



28 days...6 hours...42 minutes...12 seconds
Being able to watch it makes it accessible. If anybody can make a movie, doesn't that totally negate your original point, which was "If there were no award shows, then people would only be making blockbusters"
Sorry. Let me be clear.

I'm not talking about Joe Blow from Ohio with his moms digital camera. No offense.

I'm clearly talking about the Hollywood Film Industry. Not every single person on the face of the earth.
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I'm clearly talking about the Hollywood Film Industry. Not every single person on the face of the earth.
Oh I see. Well yes, that wasn't clear at all. Taking Hollywood alone without any context of cinema as a whole is always a poor idea.



I get what TUS is saying in relation to the film industry, and I imagine it is the common view of movies in general. And I think he is probably correct looking at it within these margins.But it is very much this Hollywoodism which has been functioning as the deep rot that is doing a lot of harm to how we think about what film is.


We don't have similar qualifiers to an artist who paints on canvas. We don't need them to have their work in the MOMA to register them as a painter. We don't have the same qualifiers for an artist who is involved in music. We can see them standing in front of a crowd with a guitar and view them as a musician.

Yet, in film, it often seems one first has to go through the standards of being approved by an established studio, or be screened at the most proper movie theatre in town, or be awarded at a film festival, for a person who makes a film to be considered a director. Frequently, the budget of a film is also considered a qualifier to being seen as a legit film (I can't count how many movies I've seen dismissed on this factor alone), leading to this being actually be seen as a serious knock against its critical viability. I think its a huge mistake. We don't have a similar volume of complaints against the cheapness of the paints a painter uses, or the second hand guitar a guitarist may be playing.



The more we allow money and distribution as a dominating factor in what we consider as a film worth considering, the bigger disservice we ultimately do to the actual art form. The more we delegitimize truly independent film (at a time when the means to make a film have finally been put into the hands of virtually anybody who wants to make a film) the more we stagnate the creative pool the work can emerge from.



28 days...6 hours...42 minutes...12 seconds
Oh I see. Well yes, that wasn't clear at all. Taking Hollywood alone without any context of cinema as a whole is always a poor idea.
Hit me up with a link to watch your film if it is available.



Hit me up with a link to watch your film if it is available.
Will do once it's available. Just applying for a few festivals at the moment (I don't expect to get accepted but it is worth a shot). Making a tiny 9 minute short with zero dialogue and on a less than shoestring budget has made me appreciate how difficult getting any feature film made is. New found respect for all filmmakers.



I agree with Holden that a large box office should not be a criteria for awards recognition, including a Best Picture nomination, and that it isn't and never has been a prerequisite for Oscar recognition. At the same time, it can be viewed as a proxy for being "widely liked and appreciated," and I think, as I stated before, the perception of the Oscars as going smaller, has impacted their legitimacy in the eyes of many in the public, and it is likely that it will continue to do so.

I think for me, the Oscars are simply selecting Best Picture award winners that are qualitatively different than they were before. There are a couple of reasons that could explain this. I think my original premise was that this was intentional, and that the Oscars membership as a body was choosing award winners that fit diversity and inclusion criteria, even if unofficially. Movies that were smaller, more like independent films, and which were either made by, or made about, minority and underrepresented groups, or that reflected liberal themes that the Academy wanted to promote and give its imprimatur. That is one explanation.

Another is that the types of films that are now widely seen and appreciated, and that have become popular, are now comic book movies, or sequels or remakes to existing films. The Academy, this thinking goes, can't award those because they don't represent the true excellence in filmmaking that the Academy Awards was designed to recognize. In support of this, some say that the types of films that used to be widely seen and appreciated, which were popular, and which still represented excellent filmmaking, are now instead limited series, and that streaming series have supplanted motion pictures as the home of mid-budget, quality content for adults. I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle. It's kind of hard for me to believe that the same Academy that will soon impose diversity and inclusion mandates as criteria for being awarded an Oscar, is not also allowing that same ethic to currently determine, or influence, the nominees, and especially the winners, that it chooses for Best Picture.

I think a way that I could explain this in another way, which may be less divisive, but still get to the same point that I'm trying to make, is that the movies that were awarded Best Picture 10 years ago, for example, generally met two criteria. They were broadly entertaining, and were usually widely seen and appreciated by the public at large, AND they also were technically proficient and represented excellent filmmaking. I think for me, now, the Academy seems to have moved away from awarding films that meet both criteria, and that seems different, to me, than what was done as early as 10 years ago.

For example, there are a lot of films that I recognize as being technically proficiently made, which represent excellence in filmmaking, but that are less entertaining, and I think the fact that they are seen by some as less entertaining, also makes them less popular, and them being less popular leads to the Academy losing some of its cultural relevance and influence.

For example, since I'm a Clint Eastwood fan, I will use a couple of examples to illustrate this point, "Gran Torino," and "Letters from Iwo Jima." To me, "Gran Torino" doesn't represent excellence in filmmaking. While it has an engaging story, and it's a good role for him and Clint is great in the film, the acting from most of the other main characters, especially the Hmong costars, is pretty terrible. "Letters from Iwo Jima," on the other hand, in my mind represents excellence in filmmaking. It's one of his best directed films, and it's technically very proficiently made. In my opinion, it even stands apart as being one of the best war films ever made, but, again, it's not his most entertaining film. Since it's in Japanese, it's less accessible than "Gran Torino," and thematically, it's also quite depressing. The subject matter of the film is also far less entertaining than "Gran Torino," which limits its mass appeal. I'd much rather watch "Gran Torino" more regularly than "Letters from Iwo Jima." The point I'm trying to make is that, in my mind, there are films that are excellent in a technical capacity, that may also be less entertaining, and viewed as less entertaining by the public. My point is not that depressing films are always less entertaining, because they're not, but that in some people's minds, the films that are viewed as most entertaining are often not the ones that represent excellence in filmmaking, and that in years past, the Academy seems to have chosen more reliably films that simultaneously met both of these criteria. Some films, which are more rare, like "Million Dollar Baby, to stay with this theme, represent both, and those are the films that typically won Best Picture. I recognize that not everyone may think of films this way, and that's okay too.

This is kind of how I think of the Oscars now. They are awarding films that, to them, represent excellence in filmmaking, but many of them are not as accessible, and partly due to that, they're not as widely seen and appreciated. Films that met both criteria are what I think of as Best Picture award winners. I think prior to five or so years ago, the Academy typically recognized films that were both thoroughly entertaining, as well as that represented excellence, while now, I think it many cases, they are choosing less entertaining films. I'd personally like to see both entertaining as well as technically excellent films be recognized more regularly by the Academy. More like "Argo," "Gladiator," Titanic" or "Braveheart." It remains to be seen if the Academy will return to once again honoring those films.



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Gotta admit I was a little surprised that Argo got held up as some kind of populist entertaining choice on par with Gladiator or Titanic, then I looked it up and find it grossed about $232m against a $44m budget. At least those movies, for all their faults, have left something of an imprint on the culture whereas Argo feels like a footnote in Oscars history only a decade later - it doesn't even have the infamy of being a contentious winner like The King's Speech or Crash, it's just...there.



Iroquois, this is a fair point. I used it because it was both a relatively recent film, successful both critically and commercially, awarded Best Picture, and I do think its entertaining and characteristic of the kind of films that won in the past, but that no longer do. I think it illustrates the larger points. All of us may choose different examples to illustrate this phenomenon, and that's okay with me, but I'd encourage everyone to focus on the main argument, and would be happy to review comments or thoughts on that, to see what everyone thinks. Thanks!



So Moonlight, Spotlight, 24 Years A Slave, Parasite and Birdman, which to me are entertaining, shouldn't win because they aren't Argo, Gladiator or Braveheart, which I find boring?



Who decides what is entertaining? Is there some metric I was supposed to study before I emotionally responded to these not-entertaining films? Would it have kept me from enjoying them so I could get with the program and denounce their Oscar victories? Or have politics programmed me to like specific kinds of movies more than others.


Or, is it possible, other people have different interpretations of what is good? Of what is entertaining? Of what is worthy of an award that has always been awarded to a wide spectrum of different kinds of movies?



So Moonlight, Spotlight, 24 Years A Slave, Parasite and Birdman, which to me are entertaining, shouldn't win because they aren't Argo, Gladiator or Braveheart, which I find boring?
Spotlight - yes shouldn't have won
Moonlight - yes shouldn't have won
12 Years a Slave - maybe not sure
Parasite - I'm okay with this one
Birdman - should have won

For me the measure of the value of the award is, will the filmmakers followups get national releases. If a filmmaker makes the "best" pictures and those followup's aren't released in theaters, bomb, and you question if the director is going to even have a body of work.

Crash (Paul Haggis) - never had another hit
Cimarron (Wesley Ruggles) - never had another hit
The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino) - released a bunch of flops

I think it's also very telling that while you might argue my list of the generations best filmmakers and how they have been consistently snubbed from the major prizes...no counter list.



Spotlight - yes shouldn't have won
Moonlight - yes shouldn't have won
12 Years a Slave - maybe not sure
Parasite - I'm okay with this one
Birdman - should have won

For me the measure of the value of the award is, will the filmmakers followups get national releases. If a filmmaker makes the "best" pictures and those followup's aren't released in theaters, bomb, and you question if the director is going to even have a body of work.

Crash (Paul Haggis) - never had another hit
Cimarron (Wesley Ruggles) - never had another hit
The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino) - released a bunch of flops

I think it's also very telling that while you might argue my list of the generations best filmmakers and how they have been consistently snubbed from the major prizes...no counter list.

Moonlight may be the rare example of a film winning that I might actually consider being the best American film of that year.



Michael Cimino also directed Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, Year of the Dragon and Heaven's Gate (all great films), to go along with directing The Deer Hunter (which absolutely was deserving of the Oscar, if any movie ever really is deserving of best picture distinction)


Also, where did I argue with your list? Why am I obligated to counter it? I like all of those directors, even though I think it is silly to consider the idea that people are obligated to include any of them in their personal idea of what a best director is ( PT Anderson might be the only one I might raise an eyebrow over if it wasn't included, but still, to each their own)



Moonlight may be the rare example of a film winning that I might actually consider being the best American film of that year.
Not even in my top ten Silence (Scorsese), Lion (Davis), Fences(Washington), Manchester by the Sea (Lonergan), Allied (Zemeckis), La La Land (Chazelle), Hacksaw Ridge (Gibson), Neon Demon (Refn), Tower (Maitland),Moana.

Michael Cimino also directed Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, Year of the Dragon and Heaven's Gate (all great films), to go along with directing The Deer Hunter (which absolutely was deserving of the Oscar, if any movie ever really is deserving of best picture distinction)
Animal House, Grease, Superman and Halloween all came out that year. Those are generational classics, I saw 2/3rds of those films I would say they were good not great. Frankly it wasn't even the best Vietnam film of the year Coming Home was.

Also, where did I argue with your list? Why am I obligated to counter it? I like all of those directors, even though I think it is silly to consider the idea that people are obligated to include any of them in their personal idea of what a best director is ( PT Anderson might be the only one I might raise an eyebrow over if it wasn't included, but still, to each their own)
If you are going to argue the central thesis of my post than yes you do have to list the generational directors...because that's the point.