#Mehtoo movement

Awards season this year already a drag

The Nothingburger Awards Season is upon us. If the Golden Globes non-ceremony was any indication, this year’s Oscar race is promising to be as shapeless as water.

Chastened and spurned, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association dramatically curtailed a celebration that had become known as a boozy, boisterous alternative to the more snooty Oscars. This year, no live Globes party was thrown. Winners were announced over social media, to largely indifferent audiences and wary artists.

But the muted vibe of this year’s Globes and its rapid decline in relevance reflects the widening gap between opinionated audiences and their gatekeepers. The HFPA’S acknowledgment of its waning relevance resulted in the Globes looking like what the Oscars used to be, and might benefit from becoming again.

In 1929, the first Academy Awards honours were bestowed at a private dinner, the ceremony taking only 15 minutes. The Oscars weren’t televised until the 1950s — the annual show became must-see TV, a pageant of glitz and self-congratulation, but also a larger cultural conversation everyone could share.

Since their inception, the Oscars have been a marketing vehicle for the movie industry, especially as a way for studios to wrap themselves in the mantle of art, political seriousness and moral uplift. The whole point of the Academy Awards was to turn movies no one had seen into box office juggernauts: witness such Oscar-made hits as Slumdog Millionaire, The King’s Speech and The Imitation Game. This year, “the little movies that could” include the Netflix movies The Power of the Dog and The Lost Daughter, Belfast and Steven Spielberg’s own West Side Story.

That last movie embodies the topsy-turvy film culture of the 2020s. There was a time when a lavish, entertaining remake of a cherished American classic, directed by one of our most revered cinematic storytellers, would have been a slamdunk, with audiences and award-givers alike. Instead, West Side Story languished when first released, its core audience of older filmgoers still chary of venturing into theatres. When it won the Golden Globe for best comedy or musical, the news barely made a ripple.

As pilloried as last year’s Oscars telecast was for its clunky combination of in-person and remote staging, the largely obscure movies that dominated its slate of nominees and its notoriously underwhelming ending, the show’s producers did some things right. The pre-party before the ceremony, held in a courtyard outside Los Angeles’s retro-elegant Union Station, felt like a relaxed, genuinely spontaneous alternative to the red carpet, giving viewers a peek into a glamorous, exclusive party. Once Regina King made her triumphant strut into the station to begin the awards, however, the proceedings easily could have been kept private, with winners’ speeches being beamed over social media, their reactions captured immediately afterward, and everyone spared the indignity of Glenn Close dancing to Da Butt.

As welcome as an even more pared-down ceremony would be, it seems the Oscars will be returning to form: The March 27 show will have again a host (to be named later), a tradition that’s been eschewed in recent years, making the event feel rudderless and haphazard. Will the audience tune in? Possibly, if Spider-man: No Way Home — a massive theatrical hit even in the midst of the pandemic pause — manages to be nominated for best picture. If it doesn’t, the trio of actors at its centre could easily swing into hosting duties. They might have a chance at succeeding where the Oscars have failed, by dint of evolving viewing habits, institutional inertia and the movies themselves: They might be able to make us care again.

A MARKETING VEHICLE FOR THE MOVIE INDUSTRY.