Just as watching the Oscars is an annual tradition for households across America, so is complaining about the Oscars. It's a parlor game that never gets old and because it never rarely deters people from watching the Oscars anyway, it's largely irrelevant.
This year, however, the ceremony was so surprisingly subpar that even people attending the show admitted that they felt the show bombed. I'm therefore delighted that discussions about what's wrong with the Oscars are brought to the forefront..
24-year old wunderkind critic Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, has been under a lot of scrutiny due to his sudden ascension from being a random blogger no one has ever heard of to the most coveted job in film criticdom as the successor to Roger Ebert. The Daily Beast ran a feature on him where they asked him ten questions about films which promted websites such as AOL's Movieline to run a story "New Ebert Protege Ignatiy Vishnevetsky Fails Movie Quiz"
To deem Ignatiy Vishnevetsky a failure because he answers all the questions right is to assume that the questions have equal value. The prolific blogger and film scholar failed to name the fictional town where John Hughes sets his films (his defense: "Those films are really bad") but was able to name the first three films in chronological order of Andrei Tartovsky without a hitch. I'm with Ignatiy on this one: If anything, knowing too much about John Hughes films is a weakness.
More interestingly, Vishnevetsky could only name one of the last ten films to win an Oscar. Before this year, I would have thought Vishnevetsky's non-chalante attitude about the Oscars a strange abberation. I ordinarily watch at least 30 films a (callender) year by Oscar time and this year I've only seen that half that number. I haven't really been able to follow the Oscar race this year and as a result, I'm astounded by the degree to which the vast majority of the Oscar-related articles that appear in the press don't really seem to say much anything.
I've been following the Oscars since 2001 which was an earlier stage in the evolution of all sectors of internet including movie fandom. Since then, I've watched communities and websites centering around movie fandom grow with a disporportionate volume of that growth going in a disconcerting direction: Predicting the Oscars.
Before the internet, professional writing about films were relegated to book writing and print critics whose jobs consisted mostly of previewing the upcoming week's movie. With no looming deadlines and no print readership to satisfy, the internet supposedly would have allowed writers to take the discussion about films in a new direction.
Instead, the most prominent film-centered websites are the ones dedicated to scrutinizing every development during awards season and explaing what it means for the prospects of the "Oscar Race." In effect, film writing (or at least, the most popular form of it) has been taken over by glorified statisticians. The basic format of these articles is Picture A now has more of a chance of winning the best picture Oscar than Picture B because it just won award x and y% of best picture winners in the past z years have won award x. For me, the low point was reading an article a couple years ago in which a "handicapper" noted in an article that because "Slumdog Millinaire" was the second-highest nominee and that nominees who usually gross the second-highest win the best picture. How is that relevant or interesting? Likewise, if I said that 82% of best picture nominees had 3 different vowels in the title, would that be a good predictor or just a coincidence?
The people behind these Oscar-centered websites have become semi-prominent and their websites have been major sources of traffic in the process. Sasha Stone, who runs awardsdaily.com, and Kris Tapley (www.incontention.com) are both quoted here in this USA Today article from the 2009 Oscar race. Stone and Tapley both are verifiable experts on the films and there's no doubt that interesting content appears on their website but the vast majority of the content is centered around forecasting and prediction, and their quotes in the newspapers center around prediction. Even worse, newspapers have followed suit like the Toronto Star and Los Angeles Times have created websites and sections devoted entirely to following the Oscar race.
Los Angeles Time's Gold Derby website is headed by Tom O'Neil who wrote a very popular book, "Movie Awards." Far be it for me to criticize someone who's far more successful at writing about movies as me, but I just browsed through this book at my local library and found it almost entirely devoid of anything meaningful to say. These books generally promise the reader the insider scoop and O'Neil's idea of juicy insider knowledge is giving us the exact vote totals that the various pre-Oscar voting bodies (i.e. the National Board of Review, the New York Film Critics Awards) in their decisions and explaining how the awards handed out from these groups affected the films' prospects of getting awards by other voting bodies and eventually the Oscars.
For contrast, a book like Damien Bona's Inside Oscar is a very interesting book because it's not exclusively focused on treating the Oscars as if they're a horse race (an entirely faulty analogy that too many Oscar prognosticators have gotten behind). Bona writes about the films, the filmmakers, the critical reception of those films and how the careers of the filmmakers were changed by the process.
In Bona's book, the Oscar Ceremony is the event that ties all the discussion about the year's films together and an ideal springboard for larger discussions rather than the end-all point of the conversation. The Oscars, after all, were meant to get us talking about great films and it's a shame that Oscar discussion on the internet is mostly focused on getting us in the best possible shape to win our Oscar pool.
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