Author Topic: Oscars 2018: anybody give a crap?  (Read 11166 times)

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Offline kimmy

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Re: Oscars 2018: anybody give a crap?
« on: February 13, 2018, 10:20:11 am »
Personally, I think it's now both and leaning more to the latter every year. I hated that they expanded the Best Picture nominees. DVDs and Blu-Rays advertise nominations to drive sales and I feel like production studios pressured the Academy into expanding, so that they could market their films that way.

I responded as I did in the last comment because you seemed to be decrying "art house" films. I think it's important that the Academy stand to recognize artistic excellence in the face of capitalistic film-making enterprise. It would be an incredible blow to culture for artistic endeavours to be subsumed by capitalist drives.

I don't have anything against arthouse films, I just question the increasing focus on these movies at the Oscars. It didn't used to be that way.  It used to be that Best Picture nominees were well-made major releases that audiences actually watched. We already have the Palme d'Or and the Sundance Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival as a celebration of these smaller independent movies.


Will they do that? Less and less so as members of the investment film-making class become a greater proportion of the Academy judges.

I believe a move in the opposite direction is actually underway. They've implemented changes to turf a lot of people who are no longer active in filmmaking from the voters list, while adding new and active filmakers and performers to the list.

Unfortunately, the public won't stop it because artistic does not always mean popular, as we can see from the billions raked in by dross like Transformers.

I'd certainly never advocate for Transformers getting an academy award.  But the academy seems to have serious blinders in terms of where they're willing to see quality. The previous example-- Bridesmaids would never get a nomination, but something like Extremely Loud And Very Close gets a nomination even though it's a flaming piece of garbage, and mostly because it checks a suitable number of Oscar-Bait boxes that academy voters look for.  A comedy won't get recognized no matter how well made, but if something is pretentious enough and "serious" enough then it'll get consideration regardless of whether it's actually any good.

 -k
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