ACADEMY AWARDS SELL OUT TO STUDIOS, ADD “POPULAR MOVIE” AWARD, WILL CUT ON-AIR AWARDS IN HALF:
This means the big studio films that are ignored at the Oscars– like Disney, Marvel, Disney, Pixar, etc – will now have a People’s Choice type award. Filmmaking will not be the issue. But now “Mission Impossible” will be in a group with “Black Panther.”
Also, the Oscars will move up to February 9th, two weeks earlier than usual. Which means that the nominating period will be short, short, short. The Grammys won’t be happy– that’s their date– but what the hell. The studios have wanted this for a long time, and the Academy has capitulated.
It’s a cowing to crap.
The on air broadcast beginning in 2020 will also halve the number of awards given on air. This means, like the Emmys and the Grammys, “creative” awards will happen at a different time. No more sound editing on Oscar night, kids. It’s just gonna be stars, stars, stars. How was the movie made? Who cares, really? Find out later.
Well, the end was near. The Oscar ratings keep getting lower and lower. The studios are getting no recognition for their tent pole movies. It’s a very Trumpian philosophy.
It’s also the philosophy of the men who built Hollywood. In the 1998 A&E documentary version of Neal Gabler’s excellent 1989 book, An Empire of their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, the narrator (actor R.H. Thomson) notes that after being unable to break the monopoly that east coast-based Thomas Edison had on moviemaking at the start of the 20th century, the largely Jewish immigrants who created what we now call Hollywood went west, both for the excellent weather that allowed them to film outdoors throughout most of the year, and for the freedom to build, as Gabler dubbed it in his title, “An Empire of their Own,” far from Edison’s (often anti-Semitic) control. Eventually, with 75 percent of the public going to the movies at least once a week between the wars:
Actors became the gods and goddesses of the new American religion. And where there are new gods, there must be new idols. So the studio heads began a movie guild with the lofty title of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It was [MGM’s Louis B.] Mayer’s brilliant idea [in 1929] to create the Oscars, where the movie moguls could honor themselves by giving each other awards. In this way, they went from being a group of immigrant Jews, to award-winning American producers.
Not to mention, as one biographer quoted Mayer, “I found that the best way to handle [filmmakers] was to hang medals all over them. […] If I got them cups and awards they’d kill themselves to produce what I wanted. That’s why the Academy Award was created.”
By the late 1930s, the original Hollywood moguls were producing a far better product than today’s endless retreads of superhero and sci-fi franchises, the vast majority of which print money* for Disney. And what do you know – as Peter Labuza of the Village Voice tweets, “So ABC which is owned by Disney changed the categories for the Oscars by creating a category that creates more Oscars for films by Disney. Cool cool cool.”
Odds-on favorite to win this new popular movie award is of course, Disney’s Black Panther, but Mark Harris, author of Pictures at a Revolution, notes that “It truly is something that in the year Black Panther, a movie made just about entirely by and with black people, grosses $700 million, the Academy’s reaction is, ‘We need to invent something separate…but equal.’”
Unexpectedly. By which I mean, straight of out Michael Graham’s Redneck Nation thesis.
* In seemingly endless forms, from the movies themselves, the Blu-Ray and streaming sales, the soundtracks, the toys, the Disney rides, etc., etc.