Golden Slumbers: The Oscars’ Fall from Grace

News coverage of this year’s Academy Awards ceremony inevitably fixated on what has come to be known as “The Slap”, the incident between Will Smith and Chris Rock where the former slapped the latter for making a distasteful joke about his wife’s shaved hairstyle due to her alopecia. The internet has run wild with opinions and taking sides in the conflict;Will Smith has even resigned from the Academy over the altercation. However, the Slap overshadowed a reality about the ceremony itself– that the ceremony was a messy, disjointed, and crude show long before Rock and Smith stepped on that stage. 

Weeks leading up to the ceremony, the Academy announced that eight categories – Documentary Short, Film Editing, Makeup/Hairstyling, Original Score, Production Design, Animated Short, Live Action Short, and Sound – would not be included during the live broadcast. Instead, the awards would be presented at a ceremony an hour before the show, hosted by Jason Momoa and Josh Brolin. This decision was met with immense criticism and outrage from trade guilds and members of the film community including Steven Spielberg who remarked that, “I feel that at the Academy Awards there is no above the line, there is no below the line. All of us are on the same line bringing the best of us to tell the best stories we possibly can.”

Spielberg is not the only industry player that feels this decision by the Academy creates a hierarchy between the televised awards and the awards that are pretaped. Many other trade guilds and craft organizations feel this move by the Academy effectively segregates the celebrities and auteurs from the less famed, but equally as important craftspeople. 

Over 80 members of Sound Artists signed a petition lamenting the decision to not live broadcast the winners of the redacted categories, claiming “Every film is greater than the sum of all of the parts and it only gets made by the joint effort and contribution of all the people involved in creating movies.” 

While this decision was made presumably to cut time for the broadcast which typically runs over three hours, the producers still made time to integrate new categories and bits this year. Included in the live show were presentations of the “Fan Favorite” Oscar, the “Cheer Worthy moment”, and also lengthy montages celebrating the anniversaries for the James Bond films and The Godfather. 

The theme of the Academy Awards this year was “Movie Lovers Unite”. It was obvious from the producers’ choices and some of the presenter’s jokes that there was a serious effort to expand the audience beyond the overtly pretentious cinephiles and “film bros” that are presumably tuning in every year with a vested interest. 

While ratings were up 58% from last year’s ceremony, it is impossible to know how much of that is due to these new categories and efforts from the producers. The rating increase could very well be because this was the first “back to normal” ceremony after two award seasons affected by the pandemic.

Is having Tony Hawk, Kelly Slater, and Shaun White to present the James Bond montage really going to bring in a sports-minded audience to the show? And when both the Fan Favorite Oscars and Most Cheer Worthy Award were coopted by the Zack Snyder fanbase (Netflix’s Army of the Dead and Flash’s race in Justice League), the Academy quickly presented the runner ups in a montage to confused, scattered applause from the live audience. One has to wonder if they would have made a bigger deal of the award’s presentation had it gone to a film like Spider-Man: No Way Home, which smashed pandemic box office records, as opposed to Snyder’s streaming cult horror film. 

Whether or not they succeeded in bringing in more viewers for ABC, the inclusion of these new cashgrabby awards and montages, as well as the simultaneous exclusion of the craft awards does NOT reflect the theme of “Movie Lovers Unite”, but rather something more akin to the MTV Movie Awards. 

Part of the allure of the Academy Awards is their slightly pretentious snobbery. What sets the Oscars apart from similar award shows like the Screen Actors Guild Awards or the Golden Globes (which are now no longer televised due to their own set of controversies) is that they award the crafts of sound, costume, documentary short. Rather than uniting Movie Lovers, the move to exclude the eight categories from the live broadcast dampens the inherent camaraderie in the craft of filmmaking. In fact, the result is the exact opposite. It institutes a formalized hierarchy of the statues awarded– those deemed good enough to be televised, and those relegated to the pre-show. 

The ceremony was not without its bright moments, including the historic win of Ariana DeBose, the first openly queer Afro-Latina actress to win for her role as Anita in West Side Story (playing the same character that Rita Moreno won for 60 years prior). Additionally, Troy Kotsur is the first deaf male actor to win an Oscar(and second actor overall, the first being his costar Marlee Matlin back in 1987. CODA’s wins for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Picture also were a major win for the deaf community. 

In spite of these high points, however, the Academy has a lot of work to do to restore their prestige. Perhaps instead of awkward bits that let Twitter fanbases run the show, maybe let the craft of storytelling and film speak for itself. If the goal is for movie lovers to unite, then let them do just that, and celebrate everyone who is integral to the making of films. In today’s overly saturated media landscape, it’s impossible to compete with pre-streaming ratings, so you might as well spend that time actually celebrating the people who make the movies that unite us.