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| Why the Academy Awards Matter Less and Less |
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by Stephen Marche
When Chris Rock hosted the eighty-eighth Academy Awards in 2016, he oversaw managed decline -- a tough gig. No more exhausted gag runs through Hollywood than the Oscars. You couldn't make jokes about how long the ceremony is; they've all been made. You couldn't joke about how white it is, it always returned to the same level of white. The biggest advantage to hosting the Oscars to that point is that there was no way to hate-watch the thing anymore; it was hate-watched too many times already. Despite the intensity of exhaustion, the race for the little golden statues remains as ferocious as ever. The hope of practically every movie that's not about somebody in tights doing magical things to evil geniuses, of every movie that's not a rehashed version of something children watched in the 1980s, aims squarely at winning as many awards as possible. Winning has become the goal of all art forms, not just the movies. Culture has entered the twilight of the awards. The decline in direct influence, for the Oscars at least, has been both sudden and profound. The 2015 broadcast had a 17 percent drop in ratings from the previous year's, part of a broader trend that began in 1998, the year of "Titanic," peak Oscar. The Oscar bump is still significant: Being nominated is worth about a 20 percent increase in box-office sales, and a win another 15, with a significant pay raise for winning actors (not as much for actresses) -- but even those numbers grow suspect when you consider that the year's best movies are always released in the middle of Oscar season. Was the rise in ticket sales for "American Sniper" due to its nomination or because word of mouth caught on right at that moment? After "Birdman" won for Oscars in 2015, the subsequent marketing push managed to lift it, the next weekend, all the way to twelfth at the box office. Twelfth.
No one can deny, though, that the Academy Awards are almost single-handedly keeping the dream of the serious mainstream movie alive -- without them, there would be tiny indies and massive franchises and very little in between. The same cultural process is at work in the art world, which has become dominated by biennales. And the literary world has been completely overwhelmed. Winning a Booker can increase a book's sales by 1,900 percent. Mainstream literary publishing and the pursuit of awards have become quasi-identical activities. How could it be any other way when even a nomination can multiply a book's impact?
The power of prizes across all forms contains inherent paradoxes, however. All these accolades, from the biennales to the Oscars, claim to be celebrations of art and of artists. But for the artists, the spike in the career, the rush of fame and money, is just that: a rush. A book's sales will be elevated, but the authors, for the most part, return to where they were before. People who watch Oscar movies or read Booker-prize books are going to watch Oscar movies or read Booker-prize books the next year. Prezes are how celebrity culture cannibalizes the antique fascination with creation. Many hundreds of millions more people will discuss the dresses worn to the Oscars than will watch the nominated films. In a kind of unconscious compensation for this fact, the Academy tends to pick movies about making movies for Best Picture (three out of the last four from 2012-2015). It has to prove that it loves the movies at least slightly more than the glamour.
At the bottom of all the winning is a great emptiness. In ancient Greece, literary prizes for drama were associated with athletic competitions. Poetry was an integral aspect of the Olympic Games, and the dramatic prizes celebrated skill and strength of language rather than of body. Even in antiquity there were controversies, of course. In one legend, Homer's "Iliad" lost to Hesiod's "Works and Days" because the agricultural information in Hesiod was considered more useful. Contemporary losers should take comfort. Even Homer got robbed.
Long ago the Oscars stopped registering the year's best movie or performance. How long ago is a matter of debate: Was it when the Academy picked "Forrest Gump" over "Pulp Fiction" or "Rocky" over "Taxi Driver"? Was it the snubbing of Robert Redford or Peter O'Toole? Quality is too thorny a question for the members of the Academy. The question they ask themselves is not "What is good?" but "What deserves to be famous?" Which is why the defining feature of all contemporary Oscar victories is the virtuous triumph over suffering. The Academy wants to see actors, in the glow of health, playing autistic savants and schizophrenics and Holocaust survivors and slavery survivors and AIDS victims and people with developmental disorders and stutters and blindness and quadriplegia and early-on-set Alzheimer's. For the Academy, suffering -- suffering in the world an suffering in performance -- is shorthand for virtue, and it wants to reward virtue. Why else do you think you can see Leonardo DiCaprio swimming through Canadian rivers in winter and sleeping in a horse carcass and crawling across frozen mud in "The Revenant"?
It needs to reward virtue, in whatever crude form it can imagine, because otherwise it's unclear what the prizes are for, other than to give the most blessed people on the face of the earth further blessings. The Oscars used to be a show about other shows that everybody watched because everybody was watching it -- the definitive event of the society of the spectacle. But the power of spectacles always diminishes over time, and eighty-eight years as of 2016 is a lot of time. Unfortunately, the culture of prizes is not some imposition from institutions on high; it reflects the general diminishment of judgement. Prizes have risen to prominence because the world lost faith in critics, and before that, lost faith in its own taste. The prevarication is widespread: Most of the time, most of us can't figure out whether we like a movie or a book because it's fun or because it's well made or because it makes the world a better place. But everybody understands celebrity. The Oscars are a ceremony at which a year's worth of art is sacrificed on the altar of a night's glamour. May as well have a party. |
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