No panic. The Oscars weren't cancelled and neither went unnoticed. They've just been postponed for April I think, from the usual date which normally was about now. A good time to write a blog entry I hesitated about for a long time, but I finally decided for it. Long story short - after a lengthy series - 2008-2020 - during which I provided some coverage of the nominations in the time prior to the awards, I decided to stop doing that starting this year. The reason, with all the risks to be misinterpreted, is that I think the level of "political correctness" went a bit too far.
I said it more than once in the introductory entries I wrote when the nominations were announced, that a reason why I chose to allocate some blog space to the Oscars was the statistical correctness, theoretically speaking, by comparison with other awards. In the sense that the votes expressed by AMPAS = the U.S. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for determining the nominations and the awards are considerably in larger numbers as in other cases such as the Golden Globes, or Cannes where the jury is limited to about 10 people. Obviously, any art appreciation has a degree of subjectivity, but again as I said it more than once, more important than the awards were always the movies in the nominations list - a very good opportunity to discover something worth watching that otherwise I might have missed. Actually, I always made my predictions mostly for fun and I rarely commented post-Oscar about the results. This, despite the fact that in the last decade the award winners indicate quite clearly an interference of the sociopolitical factor somewhere where it doesn't have a place to be - in a selection supposedly based on criteria of artistic value, as subjective these might be, but not other criteria.
I'm referring specifically to the "best picture award" where you can already notice lately some unwritten rule that the winning movie is less in line with the critics opinion and more with the speculations on the social media on which production has more elements intersecting with a social issue. Last fall, the AMPAS officially decided to make mandatory in the near future a set of eligibility rules regarding representation and inclusion standards, starting from the nominations phase.
I understand the idea of promoting some criteria to favor the involvement in the cinema industry of some categories maybe less represented until now. But if some of the introduced rules have some sense for that (like paid internships or trainings as part of the production crew, although there's also debatable what an indie movie could do with a limited budget and lots of work done on volunteering basis), other rules are completely absurd. To pretend for a nomination to have at least a lead actor from an underrepresented race/ethnic group, or at least 30% of the secondary cast of the movie to be from two of the underrepresented categories, or the cherry on top - the main subject of the movie to be centered on an underrepresented group, is something that I can't see fit for the criteria of selecting a best picture. Or better said, something that could lead to excluding a possible nomination - because if I quickly make a selection out of the best picture nominations list during last decade: "1917", "Vice", "Dunkirk", "Arrival", "The Revenant", "The Martian", "The Big Short", "Boyhood", "The Theory of Everything", "The Wolf of Wall Street", "Gravity", "Argo", "The Descendants", "127 Hours", "Inception" - I'm not sure how many of these would pass this rule. Indeed, this criteria can be bypassed by complying with others, but the idea itself of excluding a movie from being nominated motivated like that seems so wrong in a context where artistic and subject freedom should prevail that it somehow makes ironical the title of "inclusion standards".
Anyway, there's no surprise for the above, not in a world where guides are published for dismantling racism in the teaching of mathematics, where one of the main suggestions is that objectivity and the idea of a "right solution" for a problem are dangerous notions, and such problems should be practically excluded in favor of some with multiple answers (I'm wondering what results would have had the NASA engineers in the Perseverance team if somebody would have cut all single solution calculations from their math). But well... if we're going towards such a radical trend, I'm gonna also do a step in that direction and give up on my Oscar entries - after all it's not the only solution as a reference for cinema excellence. And I might do this in favor of blogging about the awards in a much less represented movie industry - the Asian one.
I know that "Parasite" took the glory of the latest Academy Awards from "1917" - not that "Parasite" isn't a good movie, but that was not the moment for the Academy to realize that the Asian film has a place in the ranks of best pictures. Let's not ignore the hypocrisy of a singular case that showed up in a year where the desire for being as politically correct as possible reached new heights - "Infernal Affairs" at its time, but still in this century didn't even make the list of Foreign Best Picture, just to raise "The Departed", Scorsese's remake, a couple years later to the highest ranks. Therefore, I'm considering instead of the Oscars, to start blogging about either the nominations for the Hong Kong Film Awards, or for the Grand Bell Awards (South Korea), or for the Asian Film Awards. All these three are awards given in the Asian cinema, where during last years I found the lists of nominations to be a good reference for the movies released there, and I have to say, with a "dangerous objectivity", that what I've managed to watch from these lists is actually on average better than what Hollywood releases lately. Unfortunately, as many productions from Asia, the accessibility is not the best, so we'll see...
To end this, I'm wondering how a Nobel prize for literature would look like if some mandatory condition would be enforced on the percentage of social matters covered in the writings or on the race/ethnicity of the chosen winner. In any case, I will definitely blog about movies that reach the Oscar list, as long as I'm still writing. I'll just leave out the reference to the awards, at least until "the inclusion standards" won't include exclusions anymore :-) Let's try to keep the absurdity within some limits, I say.
Posts
