Do award shows confer legitimacy, or are they just political tools? Do they reflect the will of the masses or broadcast the view of the super elite? Our writers go head-to-head on whether award shows are just another excuse for a red carpet or whether they bestow the honors a film deserves.
Though they may seem harmless, film awards like the Oscars or BAFTA are detrimental for filmmakers and ultimately detract from creative expression. These events take the focus away from the artistic merits of film and instead give credence to the politics and empty entertainment Hollywood has come to symbolize. Blow-out awards shows cater not only to film — pop music and sports have the Grammys and ESPYs, respectively; this aligns the Oscars more closely with consumer media than artistic vision.
Three years ago, Oscar host Jon Stewart mentioned that he had just awarded rap group Three 6 Mafia an Oscar, while director Martin Scorsese had received none. The next year, Scorsese won his first Oscar ever for the film The Departed. While The Departed was admittedly a good film, it was released in a year that saw the creation of films like Pan’s Labyrinth. Had Stewart not publicly embarrassed the Oscar committee, perhaps they would have felt less inclined to give Scorsese the award. Another example is that of Morgan Freeman, who had to wait ages before he received his first Oscar in 2005 for Best Supporting Actor in Million Dollar Baby. While people uttered the inevitable “his time had come,” how many of the Academy’s decisions are based on whether people truly deserve the award in a given year, and how many are the results of closed-door politics?
While an awards show should highlight the depth and seriousness of a genre, it is instead an homage to the empty consumer product Americans have come to expect from primetime TV.
— Matt Deitch
Moviemaking is usually considered an art. But making movies is also a business, where it’s more about the bottom line than delivering lines. Studios simply rely on safe methods of making money: providing sizable investments on big-name actors and special-effects that won’t be remembered for much more than selling millions of tickets between Memorial Day and Labor Day.
The cycle would result in a year-round parade of bland movies, except for one thing: the people who make these films are also interested in garnering awards. While money isn’t that hard to make, stature comes from statuettes, and most of the highly-grossing action movies don’t get mentioned in conversations about Oscars or Globes.
The films that come out during awards season are special. Actors sign on to movies for a fraction of the salaries they usually demand, writers blow up relationships and psyches (in lieu of buildings) in their scripts and studio execs approve riskier films instead of the money machines that dominate the summer season. The creative gambles, rather than the color-by-numbers revenue cashcows, are the ones that get remembered and subsequently nominated come February.
—William Baskin-Gerwitz
