Top 10 Reasons to Not Trust the Oscars
Ah yes, the Academy Awards (more commonly referred to as the Oscars), an award show where the members of the Academy get together and award the films they consider the best in their areas, and boy do we love to make fun of them?I stopped trusting them a long time ago, and here are the reasons why.
While there haven't been many breakout mainstream hits this year in 2017, I feel like the Oscars aren't doing their best to scope out the best of the best for the Animated Feature Film category. I can see Coco pretty much having it in the bag, with only a few nominations that are either great or not so much.
Five nominations are the maximum the Oscars can take up, but so far this year, the only ones I feel deserve to be nominated based on the submissions are Coco, A Silent Voice, Mary and the Witch's Flower, The Breadwinner, and Sword Art Online: The Movie - Ordinal Scale. In This Corner of the World could probably be a contender as well, but when you've got other choices like Despicable Me 3, The Boss Baby, The Emoji Movie, The Star, and other mediocre to otherwise bad animated movies, it's sad to see there aren't many standouts this year.
Blockbuster movies get severely overlooked for serious awards. There's a general bias that those movies are just dumb entertainment, but that's really underselling them. Some are really high-quality movies, the most recent example being Captain America: Civil War. I also thought Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 should've gotten a Best Picture nomination (seriously, how did Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close get nominated over it?).
Also, some of the acting in these movies would deserve a nomination if the Academy weren't so against them, such as Robert Downey Jr. for Captain America: Civil War or James McAvoy for X-Men: Days of Future Past.
This was brought to light after the 86th Academy Awards in 2014, when 12 Years a Slave won Best Picture. Two Academy members admitted that they voted for 12 Years a Slave to win Best Picture without even seeing the movie. They didn't see the movie, thinking it would be too "upsetting," but voted for it anyway because of the film's "social relevance."
What kind of example does that set for the Academy and filmmakers in general? You don't have to see the films you vote for, you shouldn't watch a film that's upsetting (even though that's what it was going for), and if you make a movie that's socially relevant, then your movie will get voted for, regardless of the actual quality of the movie.
This, to me, was the red flag, the tell-tale sign that the Academy cannot be trusted.
This is when the Best Original Screenplay category has movies that are based on something else. For example, last year saw Spotlight win the category despite being based on true events. Other examples include movies like The Queen, Zero Dark Thirty, and The King's Speech, just to name a few. How are these "Original" Screenplays if they're based around true-life stories?
If the Academy wants Hollywood to make more original movies, they need to be more strict about what constitutes an original movie. In my opinion, any movie based on true stories and events belongs in the Best Adapted Screenplay category.
Categories such as Best Film Editing and Best Makeup and Hairstyling are seen as lesser categories by the Academy. Particularly in the latter category, there are usually slim pickings because the Academy doesn't know what to vote for. They tend to hand out those awards to whoever bothers to show up.
Why else would putting dirt on Anne Hathaway be considered better than all the full-body makeup, dwarves, and wizards that The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey had?
With a few exceptions, the year's most memorable movie song often never ends up winning and sometimes gets ignored entirely. I thought New Divide should've been nominated for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and the heartfelt song See You Again from Furious 7 wasn't even nominated, even though the last winner was a mediocre Bond theme.
Out of all the songs that have won over the years, only a select few really have that staying power, whereas the others soon become an afterthought.
Agreed. I thought "New Divide" should have both been nominated and won that year. It would have been so awesome to see the band perform and accept the Best Song Oscar too.
Come on, many of her nominations were not deserved. For example, "Julie & Julia" - while Amy Adams is what makes the film worthwhile, she wasn't even nominated. Her wins are also not always deserved. "The Iron Lady" is a prime example. Who really cares about her Margaret Thatcher performance, and who will find this movie a masterpiece in the future?
Her nominations are becoming less believable and sometimes even ridiculous. Is Hollywood really thinking that movie fans are idiots? This also proves that this actress is overrated.
I'm sure you're no stranger to the recent controversies, such as the #OscarsSoWhite campaign, where Black people complained that they didn't get enough recognition for awards. It's incidents like this where the Academy feels the need to vote for certain movies, not because of actual quality but because of some political agenda to push.
Regardless of the color of your skin, Oscar nominations have to be earned through hard work and talent, not just given out to fill some quota for the sake of diversity. I think great Black actors more than deserve a nomination, but just make sure it's for the movie and not a political agenda.
It seems that the movies that get nominated coincidentally come out in November or December.
Another form of voting that some members of the Academy have admitted to doing is spiteful voting. For example, "I'm not going to vote for Leonardo DiCaprio for The Wolf of Wall Street because his character was unlikeable," or "I'm voting Mad Max: Fury Road for Best Makeup and Hairstyling because I don't want The Revenant to win." That line of reasoning is really quite petty.
I didn't like Les Misérables from 2012, but I didn't see any of the other supporting actresses in contention, so I wouldn't vote for one of them just so Anne Hathaway doesn't win for Les Misérables (even though she admittedly deserved it).
When a movie has a "politically correct message," you can bet that it's going to be considered an "Oscar-worthy" film. We all know that plenty of movies, which were never mentioned at the Oscars as if they never existed, are a thousand times better than some Oscar-winning movies.
It seems that originality isn't a plus point at the Oscars. Only when you have a "safe" and most of the time "boring" movie, do you actually have a chance to be nominated and maybe even win.
We all know the kind of Oscar-baity movies that are safe, by-the-numbers true-life stories, or movies that seem more content on winning Oscars than actually having a compelling story or characters, usually get the most attention. Films with original stories are lucky to even get one Oscar.
In more recent years, there have been anomalies, but they're the exception rather than the rule.
I think superhero movies like the Captain America sequels, Spider-Man 2, Guardians of the Galaxy, X2: X-Men United, Iron Man (2008), and The Dark Knight deserved better from the Oscars! I hope Logan, at least, gets nominated.
We all remember how Your Name wasn't nominated for last year's Oscars despite its success and praise, right? It isn't just animation in general that's underrepresented. A lot of foreign language animated features, especially Japanese animated features, are overshadowed by Western animated movies.
The only anime movie to win an Oscar was Spirited Away. No other anime movie has done so since then. It's really depressing, I tell you.
Amy Adams, Robert Downey Jr., Scarlett Johansson, Sylvester Stallone, Chris Pratt, Jim Carrey, Pete Postlethwaite, Ewan McGregor, Idris Elba, Alan Rickman, Hugh Jackman, Jeff Goldblum, Zoe Saldana... But that's just a quarter! There are other actors and actresses that deserve Oscars, but they act as if the only one that exists is Meryl Streep!
Actually, it would hurt that person's feelings if I listed actors and actresses who I personally think don't deserve Oscars. But, for example, why did Gwyneth Paltrow deserve an Oscar? I haven't seen Shakespeare in Love, but I have seen some clips, and I see nothing special about Paltrow's performance, to be honest.
This is when bigwigs like Harvey Weinstein start campaigning the crap out of movies to secure key nominations and wins for films from his studio. Not that he's the only one guilty of doing this.