I have never really cared for awards. This isn’t out of bitterness or a personal surplus, rather, I just honestly don’t care. I would much rather be out creating than winning awards for things I’ve created before. The recognition is cool, don’t get me wrong, but most awards serve little to no practical purpose.
I do distinguish between “awards” like as scholarships, grants, etc. and “awards” that are given for having done something everybody liked. One is more of a demonstration of belief in one’s ability to do great things in the future, and the other is a way to make you feel good. What makes me feel good is making new work – pictures, movies and even this column.
It is with this attitude that I turn towards the Oscars. Most of them, frankly, go to the wrong people or movies, and the ones that are given out properly (usually in the Shorts section) tend to go unnoticed. It isn’t that I thought “The King’s Speech” was a bad movie– I quite liked it– but best movie of the year? It’s a ridiculous category, anyway, because so many movies come out in a year that crowning one as lord over the others is flat out pointless.
So, then, what can we say about the Oscars? They happened, I guess. Some people won some awards. James Franco seemed to be on a different planet, leaving Anne Hathaway to do her best to entertain. The funniest part of the show was the holographic reappearance of the late, great Bob Hope– that either says more about the eternal nature of a great comedian or the way in which maybe the Academy should hire some new scriptwriters.
Post-Oscar-win, a movie that everybody had already gone to see, people might go see again. Which is great, and I encourage theatre attendance, but in a world jam-packed with non-studio filmmakers, or even studio-produced films that get no recognition, the Academy does not seem to go very far afield in its hunt for award-worthy cinema.
I’ll grant that some sections, like Best Foreign Film or the short film categories, do tend to feature unusual or unknown movies, but that does not excuse a ceremony of blockbusters. It felt as though they threw in “127 Hours” in an attempt to disarm us, but that too (while being a top-quality production) received massive amounts of publicity.
What do we get from the Oscars, then? We get to see fancy people in fancy clothes, lots of money being thrown around, Hollywood patting itself on the back. What we do not see is an acknowledgement of the craft of filmmaking, the politics of filmmaking or the struggle to go from day one of script writing to the final day of post-production.
We also forget the political nature of the Oscars– in the face of Wisconsin’s union-busting-budget-bill, it is important to remember that all of these pretty people up on stage are dues-paying members of unions. How could the Oscars change this? I think it’s pretty simple: Stop giving out awards.
I want to make movies, but I don’t care about winning little gold statues. The recognition and increased money to make more movies would be nice, of course, but that night in February could be spent location scouting or writing or– God forbid– shooting.
So instead of spending all that money on a ceremony, maybe the Academy should start a fund for filmmakers (like myself, I admit); one that pays for us to go study obscure steel factories in Russia or puts us up in small apartments while we finish the last part of the script. The Academy could be a real Academy, teaching and funding filmmakers, young and old. We would be able to make better movies. That’s all we really want, right?
