Audrey Fox
Since 1929, the Academy Awards have handed out trophies that celebrate the best achievements in film for any given year. Oscar pundits spend months predicting which of the stars will take home the top awards, changing their careers forever (for better or worse). But for a long time, the Academy Awards weren’t just about that year’s films – they were an opportunity to celebrate the history of cinema. Between in-memoriam segments, lifetime achievement awards, and historical movie montages, this awards show served as a mini-film school, especially for young audiences just getting a taste of what the movies had to offer.
As a kid growing up in a rural, conservative town that regarded anything vaguely “California” with utmost suspicion, watching the Oscars was about as close as I was going to get to Hollywood. I was excited to see what films were going to win each year, of course, but my investment in that aspect of the show was mere curiosity – I hadn’t seen a lot of the films that were nominated, since arthouse cinema was fairly limited on the ground for a middle schooler with no access to a car. What often drew me in was the awards show’s celebration of Hollywood’s long legacy in film, which it seemed to take special pains to highlight year after year. I drank in the montages, which gave me a beginner’s list of films offering a more thorough grounding in the classics. I felt a sense of pride when I recognized long-dead starlets and films from decades past, as though I had begun to initiate myself in a community that may not have known I existed, but I was desperate to be a part of. The stirring applause and standing ovations for each year’s lifetime achievement award winner captured something special and contradictory about Hollywood — as much as it was and is obsessed with youth and the pursuit of the next big thing, it nonetheless has these rare moments where it earnestly honors its past.
Or at least, it did.
In recent years, the Academy Awards have experienced something of an identity crisis. Staring down declining ratings and a sense of lost relevancy, the awards show has contorted itself into pretzels trying to reclaim its former glory. And, predictably, every decision of the Oscar powers-that-be-takes them further away from what made the awards show so special in the first place. To fix the Oscars, they declare, it has to be stripped of all sentimentality. Sacrifices have to be made — and it just so happens that the thing most frequently on the chopping block is the soul of cinema itself.
One of the biggest issues in the eyes of Oscar producers? The show’s runtime, which has long had a tendency to become bloated. Presumably, if they could find a way to tighten up the show, audiences would come back to the live broadcast. And to be fair, any Oscar telecast has a few set pieces that could easily be excised from the program without anyone missing them. But the problem is that instead of cutting, for example, a recurring bit where Neil Patrick Harris has his Oscar predictions locked away in a briefcase, they show their priorities by instead choosing to rush through the heart of the telecast. Awards that don’t make the cut as the most prestigious are sidelined, while lifetime achievement awards that can serve as an introduction to a prominent artist’s body of work have been removed from the telecast entirely with the creation of the Governors Awards in 2009. The lovingly developed film montages that showcase the magic of cinema, effectively acting as a primer for new generations of film fans — who could, ironically, grow the Oscars viewership in years to come — are kept to a bare minimum. They need to save airtime for misguided bits with celebrities shooting hot dog cannons into a crowd of unsuspecting theatergoers.
And perhaps most cynically of all, the Oscars telecast has taken to heart the criticism that the Academy Awards exist only as a self-congratulatory event for rich celebrities to pat each other on the back and, as usual, over-corrected. Their solution, it would seem, is to go out of their way to assure the viewing public that they don’t actually think movies are all that great. They hire hosts and writing teams that are openly derisive of the nominees, with the common punchline of how ridiculous it would be for them to deign to watch their films. The intention is clear — to stave off criticism by making themselves in on the joke. But if the Academy doesn’t seem interested in celebrating cinema, why should anyone else?
People aren’t just born with an appreciation for the art of film — it has to be nurtured. For a long time, the Oscars telecast, glamorous and seemingly inaccessible to everyday audiences, served as a gateway to the world of Hollywood. The reverence it had for its legacy — surprisingly, in a town that often seems determined to demolish its past — didn’t just celebrate the chosen few winners, but inculcated in audiences a fascination with the movies. And for young viewers whose interactions with the telecast are often their introduction to cinema, it passes along its passion for the art form. The Academy may be desperate to recover audiences lost to streaming and apathy, but it should be careful not to risk losing that appreciation for the art it claims to celebrate along the way.
