Hollywood got what it deserved last night: Consequences that it cannot live down because they're set both in text and on live broadcast forever. And those consequences are entirely the Academy's own damned fault. In no particular order:
- Best Picture was, as is all too frequent, an avoidable mistake. Inevitably so, thanks to the Academy's membership demographics. It's ironic that the segment of the Academy that is most responsible for entrenching the awful demographics in the "working" branches — the public-relations and associates branches — is also the least diverse, least amenable to considering either the value of a complex work as a whole or long-term merit/value, and entitled to nominate (and vote) for Best Picture while having no credentials to do so. The Academy makes a big deal about limiting nominations to those portions of its membership who actually work in those areas, but allows the publicity dorks — who work in precisely no areas relevant to a completed film's merit (except in excluding the "hard to market" folks from opportunities, that is) — to vote on the category that requires the greatest appreciation for how the elements of a film fit together for themselves and not for ticket sales. It's not quite like putting three Klansmen on a jury considering the 1957 slaying of a civil-rights activist in Mississippi (even today!), but the optics are unfortunate. Ironically so.
I suppose we should just be thankful that there isn't an Oscar for Best Publicity Campaign. Harvey Weinstein would claim the right to even more of them (and, BTW, we won't talk about the intellectual property theft intertwined with more than one of "his" wins in the past; I literally can't due to confidentiality requirements). But as an "executive" Weinstein isn't/wasn't part of the publicity branch…
- Spike Lee must have a suspended driver's license. Whether or not Do the Right Thing was "the best" film of 1989, there's little question that it was objectively superior in virtually every aspect not related to ease of publicity to the winner that year, Driving Miss Daisy. Repeat for 2018, with BlacKkKlansman sideswiped by Green Book. (The irony that the scripts for Driving Miss Daisy and Green Book seem to have consciously avoided obvious aspects that would have made publicizing those films more difficult seems a little less than merely "ironic.") At least Lee got something this year. Almost exactly three bloody decades late.
- It's time for my periodic disgust for the "community" of critics' collective wet dreams over The Godfather — a film I've always found vastly overrated. Maybe it was more meaningful to the Pauline Kaels and others from N'Yawk who considered that city to be in the grasp of The Mob (especially immigrants and first-generation Americans) at that time, and for whom it therefore had immediate resonance. (The tinge of nepotism in selecting some of the secondary acting — and other — roles seems to have escaped them, however.) Fundamentally, The Godfather (singly and as a "trilogy") is an idiot plot in which none of the protagonists or antagonists demonstrated much grasp of either tactics or strategy… and the central protagonist was set up as an Army veteran who was a commissioned officer… But the critical community is just unwilling to look.
I'm sick to death of critics using "But The Godfather only got three Oscars" as their touchstone; they'd be better off looking slightly later in the decade, but then they'd have to reverse course and explain why Dustin Hoffman's Best Actor award for a film I refuse to name is blowback for The Graduate or the prudishness of Midnight Cowboy or… and then the critics would just engage in some particularly unconvincing film-is-all-and-no-other-artform-matters critsplainin'. And "particularly unconvincing critsplainin'" is up against some really, really stiff competition.
- Worse yet, the Academy magnifies that first point above by making the awards too bloody soon; the cart is so far in front of the horse that the horse hasn't been cast yet, and the script is still not locked down so it might turn out to be a V–8 Interceptor instead of a cart anyway, and then we'd need about four hundred horses… "Best" (or "outstanding achievement" to use the official title of many categories) cannot be judged based upon a single viewing helter-skelter at the end of the year, usually specially arranged by those nonworking branches. If these awards are supposed to reflect merit and not marketing opportunities… oh, there's the problem: I'm expecting the awards to be what they say they are instead of what they've been coopted to become. Bad shark, no chum.
My proposed solution to the above is to let nonworkers be members of the Academy if that's what the Academy wants, but restrict both nomination and voting to past award nominees in a given category and members of the relevant branch(es) active within the preceding quarter of a century. And I'd hold the nominations in April (after DVD releases for all eligible films, with no more of this "release in NY and LA just before the calendar flips because only the beautiful people matter" bullshit), voting in early May, and the awards ceremony the first weekend after Memorial Day (traditionally a "slower" new-release weekend).
Just to shut them up, I'd give the nonworking branches their Outstanding Achievement in Publicity Campaign award, too. If only for the fun of watching the logrolling and hairpulling. I'd then tell those branches to STFU for the rest of the bloody year because they're already getting more than they deserve: It's their job to market what other people make, not predetermine what and how it gets made. No more Creech Brown paint, please; it was decent camouflage in Oklahoma, but not so much in Europe (or, for that matter, most of the rest of the US).