Let me guess. You're probably the kind of person who'd really rather not be reminded how much you do indeed care about the Oscars. Maybe you're like Film Threat publisher Chris Gore, who wrote last year: "I bet in the office pool. I watch them every year. Like many, I complain about the broadcast or the bad musical numbers, but the truth is, I just don't care. The Oscars don't matter to me."
Yeah, right. They matter so little to Gore that Film Threat has been running a "who should win" sort of reader's poll on its home page for weeks. So little that he writes about them at least once, year in and year out.
But maybe you're the kind of person who doesn't even bet in the office pool, much less actually sit through the marathon broadcast. You've thoroughly convinced yourself (and your friends) that you do not care. I'd argue that, like Gore, you're in denial. When the names of the winners are run down on the radio the next morning, you surreptitiously up the volume. While I certainly wouldn't wish one on you, there may be an ulcer in your future.
Or maybe you go the other route entirely. You throw a big fat campy party on Oscar night. You and your friends compete to make the snarkiest remarks about whoever's on the screen and throw the most popcorn when it's Russell Crowe. And you've got the healthier approach by far, but the gist of that party of yours is: None of this really matters. It's not election night, fer chrissakes. It's just good, goofy fun.
Now, don't get me wrong. Oscar night is good, goofy fun, and I'm all for that. And I'm certainly not about to argue that the ceremony itself needs to get all sobered up. The last thing anyone wants to see on Sunday, March 24, is, say, the spectacle of Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon lambasting Black Hawk Down for its racist portrayal of Somalians. That argument does need to be made, but not then and not there.
What will be decided then and there, though, is which movie is going to rake in millions more than the estimated $30 million extra it'll take in just for getting nominated. And what's decided before that is what kind of movie will even get a shot at that double-extra revenue. You take this a few steps back, and it's probably not overstating the case to say that what gets decided in the whole race up to those envelopes helps shape, to a considerable extent, Hollywood's agenda for the coming year or two or more.
Guerrilla Girls' billboard
Well, who cares what Hollywood does, you may well counter, and sure, that's a sentiment that's easy to go along with. But in recent years, more than in recent decades, Hollywood's door has been cracked open slightly wider again to influences from beyond those golden hills in southern California. Most obviously, indies have had such an impact that, for a while there, the "Sundancing of Hollywood" was a phrase that popped up to describe a shift that, though it wasn't nearly as pervasive, bore more than a few similarities to the early and mid-70s, when decrepit studio bosses relinquished at least some of their power to kid directors fresh out of film school and the likes of My Fair Lady gave way to Taxi Driver and other riveting nightmares.
More specifically, there are a lot of Brits nominated this year. Suppose they sweep up awards in every category they're nominated in (not likely, I know, but play along). Then you could bet your bottom dollar that Miramax would pick up distribution rights for an extra British film or two at Cannes this summer. And in your average-sized American town, where no more than one or two "offbeat" movies are showing at a time (doesn't matter on how many screens), that British film would be that one alternative choice in all average-sized American towns from coast to coast.
If all this seems like winding around several corners to exaggerate the influence of Oscar as a programmer of pop culture, an agenda-setter, consider the billboard up at Highland and Melrose in Hollywood throughout the month of March. It looks like an ad for "The Anatomically Correct Oscar," and there's this bloated white guy set next to three blaring stats: "Best Director has never been awarded to a woman"; "94 percent of the Writing awards have gone to men"; and "Only 3 percent of the Acting awards have gone to people of color."
You'd think that, of all the people who don't care about the Oscars, a radical feminist group of performance activists would care the least. But evidently, the Guerrilla Girls care. Some of them are filmmakers themselves. Others are writers, performers and artists. They know how the system works. They know that if, for example, women actors get only a quarter of all starring roles, women actors will not get a shot at proving their box office pull; and so, won't get cast, and round and round it goes. Same with Latinos (only 5 percent of movie roles), Asians (2 percent) and so on.
That's how the silver screen remains a very distorted mirror of the world. Vast swaths of society do not get their stories told, at least not on the scale that white men who think they look like Brad Pitt do.
Considering mainstream movies' impact on global culture as a whole, the politics and economics of the Oscar race simply are not only of interest to industry insiders and gossip-mongers. In an odd, roundabout way, Oscar night is an election night of sorts. For a pop cultural mover-n-shaker wannabe, getting nominated is the rough equivalent of a presidential hopeful getting his soundbite on the evening news, of a CEO getting profiled in The Wall Street Journal, of a band getting on the cover of Spin. Which is why Miramax, for example, spent more on the ad campaign to get In the Bedroom nominated than it spent on the movie itself.
A couple of years ago, I had the cheap thrill of seeing an old high school friend make a brief appearance in the Oscar broadcast. For a split-second, her face was beamed out to a significant slice of the world. That's because her husband actually won one of those things and, when he thanked her, the director was sharp enough to cut to the camera trained on her beaming face.
This year, I jokingly asked if there might be a repeat performance. Jokingly, because I knew that the movie her husband was working on won't be out until this summer. No, she answered, in a tone more serious than I expected. He'd done work that might have qualified, but the corner of the industry he works in had held a "bake off" in sunny LA in January and, well, turns out he was rather literally blocked out. "The bigger houses use their voting blocks to nominate often average or under-average work because it gets them more work," she explained. "It's just business and politics and that's the way it is."
So, do we, the vast, unwashed ticket-buying, video and DVD-renting masses, get any say in all this? At all? The answer's implied in the question, of course.
Tell us how little you care but how you know who's going to win anyway.
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