The Academy Game: How Awards Season Politiking Obscures Proper Recognition

Before I get started with this new award season editorial, I want to shout out Anthony Pizzo for this choice of headline, because I was struggling with how to label this editorial and the title was perfect! 

This discussion of the politics behind award season nonsense will mostly focus on the Oscars, but we can apply this to every award group, show, or guild that gives films awards. Every time we get a countdown or a reveal of the nominees, there is always a big blow-up debate all across the internet, and I’m sure through voting bodies and parties about what the Oscars nominate and let win. It doesn’t help that The Academy Awards proclaim that they are all about awarding the best and most important movies of every year. 

Okay, so let’s talk about those two aspects that the Academy holds up highly, “the best” and “the most important.” How do you even begin to define those, because loving a movie in itself is an entirely subjective experience. I know some terminally online weirdos love to say that there is objectivity in the criticism of art, but there isn’t. One movie could work for you on a deep emotional level. An example of this would be Robot Dreams; I was moved by the fascinating journey that I watched about the different kinds of friendships that come and go through one’s life. Another film might not vibe with you on any level. For instance, I came out of watching The Bubble with the impression that its director doesn’t like making movies anymore and decided to waste everyone’s time because he’s that pathetic of an artist.

So how do you, as a voting body, define the best movies of the year? Much of the time, most folks’ favorite films don’t line up with what the Oscar-voting body chooses. Can you honestly say someone’s top 10 favorite films of the year have ever fully 1:1 lined up to what the Oscars nominated for Best Picture? Maybe you have a few of the Best Picture nominees in your top 10, but you know that normal folks and I even bet the Oscar voters don’t always line up. With how subjective art is, how do you properly define the best? Even in many categories, being the best in that category doesn’t mean you have to be the best movie of the year, but you have the best sound, VFX, or hair and makeup.

The acting categories can be a hot mess, where your movie could be one of the worst-reviewed films of the year, but if the voters love your performance, it doesn’t matter. For example, despite its critically negative reception, Ana de Armas was nominated for Best Actress for Blonde. Wait a minute, if the Oscars are supposed to be about awarding the best movies, then if the movie wasn’t well-received, why does it deserve an award over films considered better? Do we need to go back to the VFX Oscar controversy about Suicide Squad (2016) winning over Star Trek Beyond? What about how Shark Tales was nominated for Best Animated Feature, but was and is considered one of the worst movies of that year? Why didn’t the voters pick something better that year like Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence? Heck, I’d take The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie over Shark Tale. Or what about the infamous Best Picture nomination of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, despite being one of that year’s worst films? If you want to award and uplift the “best” movies of the year, then maybe there needs to be a barrier to what qualifies as “the best movies” of the year, since it goes against the goal of the Oscars to award or nominate movies that are considered bad because they got picked for a single or maybe multiple categories. To be clear, I get how these other categories work, but it is amusing, from a certain perspective, how the title of “best” could mean so little, if we aren’t sticking to the idea of what the Academy is supposed to be about. So, looking for the best movie in a world of subjective viewpoints and experiences doesn’t quite work. At the end of the day, you end up hoping everyone votes enough for a handful of films and they get a lot of the award focus. 

What about finding the “most important movies?” This also gets dicey, because how do voting bodies for awards even begin to define the most important movies of the year? How many films come out in a year, and that isn’t just including the ones getting theatrically released? A lot! It’s a lot. Many movies come out every year, and the ones that cause a big enough splash to shake the industry can be counted on one hand. Every month we get a deluge of movies of varying genres and quality and you wouldn’t consider every month to have a game-changing banger. It’s not every day we get a Jaws, an Oppenheimer/Barbie-style release that Hollywood will take the wrong lessons from (where they should let dramas get released during the entire year and not just the last quarter or simply let directors/creatives cook), or a Get Out that transforms the landscape of film and horror. How many times do we get a fan-favorite banger making waves like Mad Max: Fury Road breaking into the world? Or even The LEGO Movie completely catching the entire world off guard? 

Let’s be real, no matter how good or bad a movie is, no matter how well loved, hated, or becoming fan-favorites every year gives us, many of them will simply be a drop in the bucket. They won’t leave an impression outside of “Oh, that was pretty good” or “Well, that sure was something called a movie.” What about the films that make splashes across multiple festivals? Do they represent the most important movies of the year? Do they break away from the festival love train and become beloved via casual audiences? Not really. How many films throughout the years have had big waves through festivals only to fizzle out either due to the distributor screwing up or public interest not being there for it? But is it an important film because it’s popular? If that were the case, then superhero movies and more casual filmgoing experiences that rake in a lot of cash would be considered important. That is essentially everything folks hate about award shows that give out popularity awards or awards for being a box office hit. What if the film died and caused permanent damage to a studio or the studio itself shut down because of it? That would mean a film like Cutthroat Island or Mars Needs Moms would be deemed important due to how they did immense damage to the studios that made/released them. That’s not the kind of important movie that you want to be giving awards to, but it does count as important. 

This doesn’t even put into the equation that most movies that get awards tend to only be chosen from the batch of films released during September–December with maybe a film getting lucky in a late January release date. Heck, unless you are a voter, you won’t get to see a majority of these award-nominated movies until, at the earliest, December or at the latest, a month or two before the Academy Awards happen. Even with a more hopefully diverse voting body, it still ends up with the same situation as it always does. Nothing getting released before at the latest, August, will not get nominated unless it breaks through the cultural zeitgeist beforehand like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, or more recent examples like Top Gun Maverick and Everything Everywhere All At Once. So, again, how do they define a film being important when the films that normally get nominated aren’t all 100% important or industry-changing? 

But really, a lot of this probably wouldn’t be up to debate if the FYC or For Your Consideration Campaigns didn’t skew what the voting body focused on and rooted for. It’s been an open secret that studios spend upwards of $10 million on campaigns to have voters pick their movies, and will even give you special gifts and opportunities like meeting celebrities themselves. We know about the infamous history of how the Weinsteins got Shakespeare in Love to Best Picture over Saving Private Ryan. In 2022 there was the underground pseudo-FYC campaign that resulted in a controversial Best Actress nomination for Andrea Riseborough in To Leslie. So with how invasive Hollywood is within its own voting body, and the fact that places like the Golden Globes take full-on bribes as part of their own identity, how much of what are the best or most important films are the choice of the voting body, and not because Hollywood is spending millions on itself to play inside baseball with what they deem as the best movies? Were the voters going to vote for these films anyway, or were they persuaded by marketing execs to pick them? It’s hard to take or fully accept what the results are with the voting body of the Oscars. After all, we also know the open secret about how bad the voting body is with not watching everything submitted or doing something as asinine as letting their kids pick the animated feature noms, because the voters come off like they hate movies. The problems with the voting body could be its own article. 

While most of the time the films that do get nominated at the Academy Awards are pretty good, it does make you wonder how different things would be if there was a way more concrete answer as to what the Academy Awards merits as the best or most important movie of each year. There’s a lot of manipulation by the industry that chooses what is the “best” and “most important,” rather than letting voters pick on their own accord. It would take a lot of work that will probably not happen, because it would mean restructuring an entire industry and doing something like not allowing FYC Campaign shenanigans to happen. It won’t, since you know that there are probably a lot of things the industry would rather you not know about and where the money is going, but it would be a nice idea, right? An actual award show that is about the best movies of the year chosen by real people and not executives and multi-million dollar advertising campaigns. If films like Fury Road, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and Shape of Water can make splashes and shake up the formula of what is considered awards-worthy, then maybe we can see the voters continue to shake things up in the near future.