The Academy doesn't know what the Best Picture is for

The NBA community is struggling to define who to honor for the Most Valuable Player award every season. Is it the player having the most impressive statistical season? Is it the best player in the league overall? Is it an amorphous measure of who means the most to their team? Or is it some combination of several factors?

Yearly awards are, by their very nature, subjective, but I think it’s healthy to have a discussion about the metrics by which voters decide who to give awards to.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has gone through an evolution of sorts in recent years. Following the 2009 Oscars, to address the growing divide between Best Picture nominees and the movies that people actually saw (and, in turn, to address the plummeting viewership because of that divide) the Academy expanded the number of movies nominated for Best Picture to “up to” ten films.

(There is some convoluted mathematics used to determine nominees since the expansion; just know that as many as ten films can be nominated.)

The hope was that more big blockbuster films, the exceptional ones anyway, would be honored alongside the rank and file critical successes that few people saw. It was a savvy move, and though it rarely played out in subsequent years, it gave audiences hope that that year’s fan favorite might have a chance to win.

The Academy Awards and the organization’s voters have long been accused of being out of touch. The running gag is that the film with the greatest combination of themes involving World War II, the Holocaust, the Greatest Generation, slavery, Britain, patriotism, and items on Hollywood’s Importance Scale was the surefire favorite to win. The Academy had a diversity problem (which was directly affecting not only viewership but also relevance), even causing the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite to catch on. As a result, in 2016, the Academy invited 683 new members, made up of nearly half women and people of color. And though the voting body is still disproportionately white and male, the Academy has made an effort to try to narrow that gap.

These changes, along with more attention being paid to the long history of rampant sexism and racism in the film industry, have allowed us to reassess what these awards are for and the message that the Academy wants to send with the films and creatives that they honor.

So who deserves* to win Best Picture? Is it the film that made the most money? The film that critics lauded the most? The film that captured the collective consciousness and dominated the cultural conversation the most? Is it the most timely film? An amorphous measure of the most impressive artistic achievement? Is it the best picture of that year, or should some consideration be given to which picture might best stand the test of time? Or is it some combination of several factors? Is the Academy capturing what the public feels is of value in that moment in history or are they setting the agenda for what they should value?

I’d argue that no one knows and no one agrees—the Academy voters especially. And that’s a problem for the relevance of the award show in general. Let’s get into some of the details, starting with the first year that the Oscars expanded their Best Picture nominees.

82nd Academy Awards (2010)

Best Picture winner: The Hurt Locker

Best Picture nominees: Avatar, The Blind Side, District 9, An Education, Inglourious Basterds, Precious, A Serious Man, Up, Up in the Air

The first two years of the expanded category had by far the best mix of critically and commercially successful nominees. It had everything: Avatar and Up obliterated the box office; an animated feature and more than one(!) sci-fi film was nominated; there were two war films represented, four if you count intergalactic ones; and you even had your feel-good, stuffy British and contemporary American character dramas.

It was a year that suggested the Academy might not be so out of touch. But despite those movies being nominated, The Hurt Locker winning seemed like a sharp rejection of the idea that a blockbuster is worthy of Best Picture; the film grossed a paltry $17 million domestically. It was a critical darling, however, and was the best reviewed film of the year.

I might take issue with a few notable omissions, specifically the documentary The Cove, which was (anecdotally) one of the most talked about films of the year, and Star Trek, which had much of the commercial success of Avatar but was actually a good movie. While I think most of the movies nominated haven’t aged all that well, I’d say that the Academy did a solid job of at least having a purpose for the film they chose: they wanted to award the tiny war movie from the (female) underdog director as the David to Avatar’s box office Goliath.

83rd Academy Awards (2011)

Best Picture winner: The King's Speech

Best Picture nominees: 127 Hours, Black Swan, The Fighter, Inception, The Kids are All Right, The Social Network, Toy Story 3, True Grit, Winter’s Bone

Another solidly diverse year of nominees. The problem was which one actually won: The King’s Speech took Best Picture over The Social Network, one of the great injustices in Oscar history, and marking the beginning(ish) of an incredible streak of the Academy awarding Best Picture to the wrong film.

Despite the impressive critical praise, The King’s Speech was an intensely mediocre film. It earned a decent box office and was a prestige British war film—a direct hit to the voters’ pleasure center. But it was less about the quality of The King’s Speech (which I stand by as being trash) and more about the film it beat out. The Social Network was written by critical favorite Aaron Sorkin and directed by one of the greatest living directors, David Fincher, about the pervasive social media platform with over one billion users worldwide. It was as timely as timely gets, has aged beautifully, and stands as one of the best films of the decade. It was the perfect storm of filmmaking. Or so I thought.

The Academy that year wasn’t awarding the most critically praised film (that was The Social Network), or the most commercially successful in the U.S. (that was Toy Story 3). It wasn’t the film that was the most inventive or most talked about (that was Inception). It wasn’t the most socially aware (that was The Kids are All Right). It wasn’t even the indie darling (that was Winter’s Bone, among others). It was the most dull choice they could have made and was possibly the beneficiary of the convoluted weighted voting system. Sadly, it wouldn’t be the last.

84th Academy Awards (2012)

Best Picture winner: The Artist

Best Picture nominees: The Descendants, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, The Help, Hugo, Midnight in Paris, Moneyball, The Tree of Life, War Horse

2011 was an odd year for film. The Artist won, extending the joke about the Academy always honoring the films about The Wonder of Film™, the most prominent item on Hollywood’s Importance Scale. There wasn’t really a film that stood out so much that it made The Artist’s win look irreconcilable, but it’s a silly pick nonetheless. It was a silent black and white romantic comedy from France. (I’ll give you a moment.)

It wasn’t much of a year for prestige box office successes, unfortunately. The top three grossing films that year were sequels in the Harry Potter, Transformers, Twilight, Hangover, and Pirates of the Caribbean franchises. A few critically acclaimed movies had modest box office showings, like The Descendants, Hugo, and Moneyball, but none of them broke through into the cultural conversation. The film that did that, while reviewing well and crushing it at the box office, wasn’t even nominated: Bridesmaids.

For me, that was the theme from that year: films that I enjoyed the most not getting nominated. Films like Beginners, Fast Five, and Warrior are ones that I still come back to. I’m not entirely sure what it was that the Academy was trying to say by awarding The Artist, and I find it hard to believe that that many voters even watched the screener for it. The Wonder of Film™, presumably, won by default.

85th Academy Awards (2013)

Best Picture winner: Argo

Best Picture nominees: Amour, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Django Unchained, Les Misérables, Life of Pi, Lincoln, Silver Linings Playbook, Zero Dark Thirty

Basically a repeat of the previous year. The movie about movies wins! That's the power of The Wonder of Film™.

Argo was good, not great. Another movie about U.S. intervention overseas, Zero Dark Thirty, was wildly popular with moviegoers but was problematic then and is even more so now. Among a strange roster of nominees, the one that might have aged the best is Lincoln, a behind-closed-doors debate film about white men solving slavery. Again, not great.

You can see the lack of a frontrunner that year in the winners of the six major categories: Argo (Best Picture), Ang Lee for Life of Pi (Best Director), Jennifer Lawrence for Silver Linings Playbook (Best Actress), Daniel Day-Lewis for Lincoln (Best Actor), Anne Hathaway for Les Misérables (Best Supporting Actress), and Christoph Waltz for Django Unchained (Best Supporting Actor). No one film really stood out from the others.

And it was yet another year of exceptional films missing the cut entirely. Neither The Master (the actual best film of the year, and another disgraceful snubbing), Moonrise Kingdom (maybe Wes Anderson’s best film), nor Skyfall (a critical success, commercial juggernaut, and the best James Bond film—fight me) were nominated for Best Picture.

Although I think that many more voters watched Argo than did The Artist the year before, the message was sadly the same with the 2013 Best Picture winner: that movie are great and can change the world, and in the case of Argo, can literally resolve international conflicts.

86th Academy Awards (2014)

Best Picture winner: 12 Years a Slave

Best Picture nominees: American Hustle, Captain Phillips, Dallas Buyer’s Club, Gravity, Her, Nebraska, Philomena, The Wolf of Wall Street

12 Years a Slave is an exceptional, important film and was the best reviewed movie of 2013. Impressively, one of the best films about America’s history of slavery was directed by a Londoner, Steve McQueen. Aside from the importance of the film, and the historic achievement of the film’s supreme talented director, 12 Years a Slave more or less could have come out at any point in recent years. The message the Academy sent with this win is, I think, less about that specific movie in that specific year and more about the hugely impactful shift toward recognizing films featuring black casts and crews.

That isn’t to take anything away from the film itself. It’s terrific, and I’d argue that it’s better than every other Best Picture winner on this list. It even did well at the box office when you add up worldwide ticket sales. But 12 Years a Slave is still a period film—from a period long before even the aged Academy voters have a childhood fondness. It tells a unique story about a dark time in the country, one we’ve seen many times before (for good reason), but does it tell us anything about the country we live in now? Will the viewing of the movie become richer as its message becomes more and more relevant? I’m sure you could find some parallels, but the story is looking back rather than portending our future.

If looking forward is important to how a Best Picture ages over time (I admit that it might not be), then the movie that should have been awarded is Her. It’s beautiful and heartbreaking in ways that are very different than 12 Years a Slave. It takes our insecurities, our desires, and our eternal search for love, connection, and meaning, and reflects back what those might look like in five, ten, twenty years. I can’t help but think Her will be a movie I think about a decade from now much more than 12 Years a Slave.

Side-note: I don’t think a single movie from 2014 was talked about more than Frozen. It was everywhere. Whether you had children or not, you couldn’t miss it. But if you did have children, Frozen was probably a constant part of your life for the better part of the year. Disney couldn’t even get a token nomination for the ubiquitous hit? Come on.

87th Academy Awards (2015)

Best Picture winner: Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

Best Picture nominees: American Sniper, Boyhood, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Imitation Game, Selma, The Theory of Everything, Whiplash

The most frustrating of all the years on the list for me personally, I was never going to be happy with the 2015 nominees. Boyhood was a concept movie without the acting to support its inventiveness. The Grand Budapest Hotel inexplicably became the casual fan’s favorite Wes Anderson film. The Imitation Game was a British war film about a genius living with a secret, but its story felt sloppy. Not to be outdone, The Theory of Everything was a British historical drama about a genius living with a disability, but it too was a mess. (Both films were created in a laboratory with the specific purpose of winning accolades from old white men.) American Sniper was a propaganda film masquerading as patriotism, which is usually Michael Bay’s wheelhouse, and earned the highest domestic box office in a year with roughly a million superhero movies.

And then there was the eventual Best Picture winner, Birdman. Oh, Birdman. Here’s a secret: Movie actors lust after the authenticity that theatre actors exude—hence The Purity of Theatre™, which exists in the god-tier of acting self-importance and rests daintily atop Hollywood’s Importance Scale. (The only thing more arrogant than award-seeking performances are performances done for the love of the craft.) Birdman is an ode to theatre, and is a shining example of style of substance, more impressive than good.

Selma, on the other hand, was a very special film, and there were a handful of movies with unique perspectives and interesting stories that were snubbed, like Snowpiercer, Dear White People, Gone Girl, and The Babadook, but the film that was a true revelation was Whiplash. The perfect marriage of music and cinema, Whiplash was a film about the intersection between artistry and obsession. It was a wholly original achievement that should have won Best Picture, but instead the Academy wanted to remind audiences that acting is magical.

88th Academy Awards (2016)

Best Picture winner: Spotlight

Best Picture nominee: The Big Short, Bridge of Spies, Brooklyn, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Martian, The Revenant, Room

The third and final item** on Hollywood’s Importance Scale, just below film and theatre, is The Righteousness of Journalism™. While acting looks to capture truths, journalists look to uncover truth—a gross and totally straight-faced way that I imagine Hollywood equates both pursuits. Spotlight hit at the right time to honor a movie about reporting, coming at a time when there was an all-out war on facts and the general public’s distrust of news media had hit (I assume) an all-time high. It was timely adjacent, and that was good enough for Academy voters.

But Mad Max: Fury Road was the film that deserved Best Picture above all others. It’s the perfect Hollywood movie. George Miller took his good-but-not-great action franchise and completely reinvented it for the modern era. What he ended up with was a technical marvel, a critical favorite, a massive crowd-pleaser, and even an unexpectedly progressive piece of feminist entertainment. People were in awe of Fury Road. It was watched and re-watched, meme-ified, and buzzed about more than any other film of 2015. It will be remembered long after Spotlight has been forgotten and its effect on the industry and on the artform will be exponentially greater.

(I should confess that I rode hardest for Creed, and still do, but I can’t be even remotely objective when it comes to Michael B. Jordan, Ryan Coogler, or mano a mano sports movies.)

89th Academy Awards (2017)

Best Picture winner: Moonlight

Best Picture nominees: Arrival, Fences, Hacksaw Ridge, Hell or High Water, Hidden Figures, La La Land, Lion, Manchester by the Sea

It’s too soon to say if Moonlight will be remembered years from now. I will say, it’s a substantial achievement in terms of its story, characters, cast, and filmmakers. And considering that I got swept up in the backlash against the problematically icky La La Land (an historically rare loss for The Wonder of Film™), I was more than happy for Moonlight to win, even if it wasn’t my favorite of the year. And the fact that an intimate film like that could upset a fan favorite musical starring two Hollywood A-listers is a feat that only grows more monumental the further we get from the ridiculous award show mix-up.

That year’s list of nominees, more than in even recent years, featured movies that few people saw. Huge box office hits like Captain America: Civil War, Zootopia, Moana, and The Jungle Book largely won over critics but were snubbed from the Best Picture category. La La Land did well in theaters, but the wave of hot takes killed its momentum. Of the nominees, the picture that hit that sweet spot was Hidden Figures. If the Academy wanted to praise the artistry and significance of the more indie Moonlight, however, I can understand that. I just wonder why they seem to only be half-committed to that approach year to year.

90th Academy Awards (2018)

Best Picture winner: The Shape of Water

Best Picture nominees: Call Me by Your Name, Darkest Hour, Dunkirk, Get Out, Lady Bird, Phantom Thread, The Post, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Last Sunday’s Academy Awards was the catalyst for this conversation. Of the nominees, Dunkirk earned the most from domestic ticket sales. Five of the nominees reviewed better than The Shape of Water. And without question, the film that was shown to have the most potent statement on contemporary society, the film that audiences couldn’t stop talking about (I’d say, most would consider the best moviegoing experience), and the “most important” film of the year (if that can be quantified) was Get Out.

To try to give an explanation as to why Get Out didn’t win would be to denigrate The Shape of Water more than it deserves and would require me to speculate too recklessly about the racial politics at play in the minds of the (still largely white male) Academy voters. And that’s not what this conversation is really about.

So I’ll ask a different question: By awarding The Shape of Water, what was the Academy trying to say is important and worthy of the most prestigious award in the industry? The fact that The Shape of Water is a low-key promoter of The Wonder of Film™ could be a contributor, but that feels reductive. I’ll go into further detail in a future article about how the Academy is perpetually guilty of awarding the wrong individual, as a way to make up for overlooking their best work, and this is certainly an example of that after Pan’s Labyrinth was criminally snubbed from even receiving a Best Picture nomination at the 2007 Oscars. Did they want to praise the film’s creativity? Its artistry? Its fantastical world? Its uplifting story? As Eddie Losoya suggests in his beautiful examination of the film, is it that The Shape of Water was rooted in the love for the Old Hollywood tradition and aesthetic but whose characters longed to see people (and amphibious demi-gods) who looked more like them on screen?

To be honest, I don’t know. And that might be the problem when you look at the (even recent) history of winners.

If the Academy doesn’t want to use Best Picture to honor the film that got the most butts in seats or performed the best with critics or dominated the cultural conversation or felt the most vital or even some combination of all of those factors, then I’m not sure what the Academy Award for Best Picture is for. The last two years would suggest that the Academy wants to use the award to highlight the best films that portray the diverse and varied stories of the human experience, which is a beautiful thing to see in an industry that has fostered a limited viewpoint for far too long, but applying that perspective to the motivations of the voting body going forward assumes too much and risks minimizing representation and inclusivity to a series of checkboxes.

There doesn’t seem to be a consistent grading rubric for Best Picture. That’s fine—reducing art to a defined metric is a fool’s errand anyway. But even still, the Academy has a strong affinity for certain themes and concepts, and breaking from those tried and true appeals to voters has been one of the greatest challenges for the Academy Awards. The Shape of Water is the most recent example of this.

An even more pessimistic reading would be that the voters are the industry’s gatekeepers, and by giving The Shape of Water the award for Best Picture, they are saying that for this kind of movie and for these people involved, it was their time to be recognized.

No, I don’t care for that reading. How about the optimistic one? That it could simply be that they chose the film that made them feel the best about humanity, the one that gave them that special, life-affirming feeling that art is so well suited to deliver.

Or maybe it’s all in service of adding to the larger conversation about film, what gets people talking, whether in support of or in opposition to. But while the takes on Twitter and Facebook would make it seem like the conversation is as loud and rabid as ever, the TV ratings for this year’s ceremony suffered an all-time low, following a sharp downward trend.

I worry that unless the Academy can define what it wants its award show to be, to say, and to represent, the Best Picture category, along with the others, will only prove its relevance by how consistently “wrong” it is.

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* I realize the absurdity of arguing who deserves an award, especially one designed by the industry for, as far as I could tell, two reasons: (a) to stroke their own egos in the most masturbatory black tie gala ever created and (b) to give an artificial boost to the box offices of a handful of selected films, which works toward the overall health of the industry as a whole. But let’s surrender the cynicism and play along with the thought experiment anyway.

** Historically, there have been four levels, but the fourth—The Heroism of a White Man Winning a War for Indigenous Peoples™—is mercifully going out of style.

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