When those heavy little gold statues are handed out at the biggest film awards ceremony in the world, the only people who will be happy are the award winners. One wins one of those statues because a bunch of supposedly elite experts in film craft say it’s deserved. Who are these people, anyway, and why don’t the average movie going public have a say?
Why are the movies nominated come out at the end of the year when nominations are due? Why are the most popular movies often snubbed (Star Wars) and movies which could easily be accused of being interminably boring art projects featuring currently high ranked talent getting overpaid for emoting for two hours get multiple nominations (The Revenant)? You can always tell when the elite members of the group determining the winners have snubbed a movie because the best it gets is technical, sound or costume nominations. Often they also lose to a period piece.
As far as this (and other) years’ elephant in the room–the subject of non-white nominations–I was hoping John Boyega and Daisy Ridley would be nominated for Star Wars. Unfortunately big box office doesn’t always mean big nominations. Some time between the age of big epics like Ben-Hur being nominated from everything except the kitchen sink and today, the voters decided that arty movies are the only ones deserving of a nod. It’s a rigged class structure with rules meant to favor their own. This means that movies either have to get their attention, or the voters have to open their minds to other opinions of what makes a good movie. The mind is hard to turn, so we will always be at odds when it comes to that. We may never see a good pool of nominees as a result. But at least watching the red carpet is still fun.
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