The 2024 Academy Awards are About to Change Everything: Part 1
Forget the annual chatter about who was snubbed and who wasn't. The Oscars have always been more about popularity than merit. Their real value is as a barometer of the future.
What’s more fun than predicting the Oscar nominations? Predicting how the press will cover the Oscar nominations. A lot has changed in the era of the Internet, clickbait, streaming and the 24-hour news cycle — but not as much as you’d think. In the old days, before the Academy (of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) decided to make a big streaming production out of the nominations announcement, I’d wake up at about 4:00 am and head down to the Academy’s Beverly Hills headquarters where a heavily-caffeinated press corps was already staked out in the spacious Samuel Goldwyn Theater to broadcast the announcement live for the East Coast network morning shows. If you’d been following the various Oscar precursors — National Board of Review, critics groups, Golden Globes — the nominations were fairly anti-climactic. But that didn’t stop local and national TV bobbleheads and their producers from desperately scouring them for “snubs and surprises.” Drama is about conflict, and since everyone who makes a living with a camera or a keyboard is basically in the drama business (don’t kid yourselves), job number one is to find conflict in the nominations, even if you have to invent it.
Over time, of course, you realize that media sensationalism has a very short shelf life. Does anyone remember who was snubbed in 2016? ABC News led with the shocking revelation that Will Smith, Ridley Scott and Aaron Sorkin failed to secure nominations. For what films? Don’t remember? Neither do they. What about last year’s nominees? Snubs? Surprises? No one remembers because it never mattered in the first place, and life has to go on.
If you’re still stewing that Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie were robbed of nominations for, respectively, directing and starring in Barbie, rest assured they’re not losing sleep. Gerwig still secured a screenplay nomination (with husband Noah Baumbach), Robbie was nominated as producer (of a Best Picture nominee) and with a nearly $1.5 billion global blockbuster behind them… they’ll be fine. Stanley Kubrick won his only Oscar in the visual effects category for 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which wasn’t even nominated for Best Picture. That also turned out fine. So did Orson Welles’ legendary Citizen Kane which lost Best Picture to John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley in 1941 before spending fifty years atop the Sight & Sound poll of the Greatest Films of All Time.
Do the Oscars then have any relevance at all? Or is it just another shiny distraction manufactured by a business whose core business is manufacturing shiny distractions?
Like the entertainment industry itself, there are multiple layers to this conversation. For most people, the Academy Awards are first and foremost a show. Like the Super Bowl, it’s an occasion — an excuse to fire up the grill, order pizza, invite your friends, and drop some simoleons into the pool. For people who work in the entertainment business, it’s entirely about money; Oscar winners can up their rates substantially, and movies of all shapes and sizes can see a significant boost to box office as well as downstream ancillaries. Take 1992’s Merchant Ivory classic Howards End as an example; in five months of limited release, the film earned a very respectable $8 million. Between February of 1993, when it landed nine Academy Award nominations, and April of 1993, after it walked away with three statuettes, its North American box office soared to over $22 million.
Still another infrequently acknowledged layer to the Oscars which compounds year over year as a function of a growing dataset is what the Oscars tell us about the state of the film industry, the state of the world around us and the relationship between the two. Simply put, the Oscars do not tell us what is the “best” anything. They do furnish us a valuable snapshot of what the industry’s elite value among their own at a given point in time. In less transitional moments, such information can seem trivial. In moments like the present — it can be epochal. Deciphering that information, however, requires the kind of deep dive that’s just not possible when you’ve got thirty seconds to scrape the noms for drama before going live on Good Morning America.
That’s why you’re reading this now — and not two weeks ago.
If you want to know where we’re going, look at where we are — and where we’ve been. If I’d run this prognosis two years ago, I might have declared the patient terminal. A year ago? A glimmer of hope. The commercial and critical juggernaut of Barbenheimer, however, has changed everything, culminating in a field of Academy Award nominations which are nothing if not historic, throwing the industry an unexpected post-COVID lifeline when it most needed it — and least expected it.
Let’s break it down and read the chai leaves.
How We Got Here
First a bit of history — and this piece will have a lot of it — because the message of this year’s nominees, and why Oppenheimer and Barbie have changed everything, is impossible to discern without context. We need to understand how we got here.
The inaugural awards presentation in 1929 was a fifteen-minute interlude during a private dinner at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, ostensibly to celebrate achievements in 1927/1928. As originally conceived by MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer, the idea of a movie “academy” was never meant to be anything but a thinly-veiled hedge against unionization. Like Columbus before him, Mayer missed his destination by a hemisphere but landed upon something else vastly more significant. As it turned out, audiences and artists both loved the idea of an annual awards competition and by 1934, the basic categories, ceremony format and nickname “Oscar” were locked in. Knock-offs and copycats soon followed — e.g. Tonys, Emmys, Grammys, Golden Globes — but Oscar was there first, which bestowed on the industry a veneer of respectability and cultural prestige which its hardscrabble founders desperately craved. However brutal, debauched, tawdry, dull or malevolent the happenings behind studio gates, for one shining night each year the business could wash it all away in an alluring orgy of glamour, elegance, fashion and gracious speechmaking centered on the iconic image of Cedric Gibbons’ magnificent statuette.1 Hollywood could not have written the script any better — it was a perfect communion between art and commerce which allowed the unwashed moviegoing masses to feel as if they were somehow party to something highbrow while giving studio moguls the deep satisfaction of upstaging the East Coast elites who had once dismissed the entire endeavor as just another low-class carny operation. If you’ve seen The Gilded Age, you have some appreciation for the dynamic.
That communion (between art and commerce) would prove remarkably resilient over time, withstanding nearly every cultural and technological onslaught that threatened it for more than forty years, including radio and television. That’s not to say the most successful films always won Oscars nor that the most awarded films were always box office hits — but there was enough overlap, consistently, straight through to about 2003, to suggest that the business had well and truly mastered the symbiotic relationship between prestige and profits. To this day, the high point of 1965 remains unmatched, when the year’s top two films — The Sound of Music and Doctor Zhivago — both joined the list of the top ten all-time box office champs and went on to land ten Oscar nominations and five wins apiece, with The Sound of Music capturing Best Picture.
While that kind of communion grew less frequent in the 1980s, thanks to the proliferation of cable television and home video, in years when it did happen it typically centered on some kind of post-Star Wars box office phenomenon which only added to the overall mystique. The Oscar telecast had drawn upwards of 30 million and 40 million viewers since it first aired in 1953, but when more than 50 million tuned in to the 1983 telecast to see newly-crowned box office champ E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial lose in almost every category to Gandhi, it was a clear sign that the telecast had to be something spectacular unto itself. That benchmark would stand for another fifteen years until the 1998 telecast when over 57 million saw another newly-crowed box office champion — Titanic — make history by equalling Ben-Hur’s forty-year-old record of eleven Oscars.
In just a few short years, however, trouble was brewing. When a still-respectable 33 million saw Miramax’s Chicago win Best Picture in March of 2003, it marked the smallest audience for an Oscar telecast since the 1960s and a shocking 20% drop from the previous year. Panic temporarily subsided in 2004 when the audience soared back over 40 million to see the triumphant final chapter of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Return of the King, achieve two historic milestones — equalling Ben-Hur’s and Titanic’s 11-Oscar haul by capturing literally every category in which it was nominated, the first and (to date) only time that feat has been achieved by a double-digit nominee.2 By 2008, however, the audience once again dropped to 32 million and, despite a brief recovery in 2014 when 43 million watched 12 Years a Slave win Best Picture, the era of reliable 40+ million audiences came to a crashing end. In 2018, the audience plummeted to an all-time low of 26 million, finally dropping below 20 million in pandemic-crippled 2021, where it has since remained.
How to account for such a historic collapse by one of the nation’s most storied institutions has become a favorite industry pastime — and the culprits are legion. Everything from Netflix and Amazon to superhero movies to Academy administration to lackluster hosts to overly politicized acceptance speeches to reported friction between the Academy and longtime network partner ABC has been offered up on the altar of blame. The truth is it’s probably a bit of all those things as well as the most obvious, which is that in the era of social media and a proliferating, Internet-driven mass media, competition for eyes and ears has never been greater, forcing the Oscars — and others — to resort to previously unheard-of tactics just to capture and hold our attention. Whether it was Ellen DeGeneres’ twin 2014 hosting stunts — a viral Twitter selfie and pizza delivery for the audience — or Jimmy Kimmel raining candy on the audience in 2017, it has been clear for more than a decade that this is not your grandparents’ Oscars. It’s enough to make once scandalous moments like David Niven’s brilliantly ad-libbed quip after a streaker interrupted the 1974 Best Picture presentation (“Isn't it fascinating to think that probably the only laugh that man will ever get in his life is by stripping off his clothes and showing his shortcomings?") and Rob Lowe’s jaw-dropping dance number with Snow White during the widely-derided opening to the Allan Carr-produced 1989 telecast almost feel nostalgic. By the time we get to the pandemic-induced desperation of the 2021 telecast at Union Station in Los Angeles and the humiliating spectacle of Glenn Close demonstrating “Da Butt” or (saving the best for last), 2022’s all-time low, now known simply as “The Slap,” you could be forgiven for thinking it merciful to simply take Oscar out behind the barn and shoot him.
Not so fast, though. Sometimes when a dog won’t hunt, it says more about the hunter than the dog. So let’s pull back and take a second look at what was really going on these past two decades.
The Great Break-Up
Lost amid the 2004 euphoria of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King conquering nearly every Oscar record in sight was a macro-analysis of how the business had changed. Had anyone bothered to run the numbers, it would have been clear that 2004 was more “last hurrah” than “new beginning,” the culmination of more than four decades of corporate realignment. It would be all downhill from there.
Without getting too far into the weeds, Hollywood’s basic business structure has evolved in fits and starts from the very beginning. What was once a hegemonic industry dominated by the immigrant Jewish moguls who built it, began to deteriorate in 1948 with the landmark Supreme Court antitrust case, United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., which yielded the consent decree that forced the studios to divest themselves of their theater chains, thereby ending the vertically integrated monopolies with which they had controlled the entire production-to-exhibition pipeline for decades. Following Olivia de Havilland’s equally landmark 1943 lawsuit challenging Warner Bros. contract practices, the Paramount case brought to a close the fabled “studio system” and the aggregated power with which the moguls had constructed it. By the late ‘50s, all the original moguls apart from Jack Warner had either died or retired3, opening the door to multinationals hungry to add Hollywood studios to their portfolios. Much of the business fell into a period of chaos and flux: the dismantling of once-great RKO by Howard Hughes, the acquisition of United Artists by Transamerica, the messy takeover of Universal Studios by super-agent Lew Wasserman’s MCA (which triggered a lawsuit by the United States Dept. of Justice), the momentous acquisition of Paramount by Gulf+Western’s imperious Charles Bluhdorn (brilliantly played by Burn Gorman in the Paramount+ limited series The Offer) and billionaire Kirk Kerkorian’s ruthless acquisition and dismantling of MGM.
Many of the key figures from this Wild West period were of predictably dubious character and scandals naturally followed. The 1977 embezzlement affair involving Columbia Pictures president David Begelman spawned a book — Indecent Exposure: A True Story of Hollywood and Wall Street — while the even seedier saga of fugitive 20th Century Fox co-owner Marc Rich led directly to that studio’s eventual 1985 acquisition by Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp from Rich’s partner, Marvin Davis. Together with Coca-Cola’s acquisition of Columbia Pictures three years earlier in 1982, the NewsCorp purchase completed the corporatization of the legacy studios and closed the books on the era of chaos. In its place arrived a new era of corporate discipline and accountability. That meant more oversight and less free-wheeling tolerance of artistic indulgence. The vaunted communion between art and commerce didn’t fit the new spreadsheets, and that was soon reflected in Academy Award nominees and winners as well.
Some studios retreated from Oscar-caliber fare more rapidly than others, but all began to retreat. When The Last Emperor won Best Picture in 1987, it marked a historic moment for Columbia Pictures, a record twelfth Best Picture, equalling the record previously set by United Artists. To this day, all twelve statuettes can be seen in the lobby of the Thalberg building on the Culver City lot. It’s a spectacular display — until you realize that since Sony’s acquisition of Columbia Pictures two years later in 1989, it has failed to add any more. Around the same time, upstart independent studio Orion was happily filling a void the studios were vacating, winning four Best Picture awards between 1984 and 1991. With Orion’s untimely demise shortly after, other independents jumped into the fray, most famously Bob and Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax Films which was soon scooped up by Disney just in time to capture its first two Best Picture winners inside of three years — The English Patient in 1996 and, in one of the most epic upsets in Oscar history, Shakespeare in Love in 1998.
It’s important to note here what a major disruption in Oscar culture this represented. Six Best Picture winners in fifteen years had gone to independents rather than legacy studios. True, Miramax was now a Disney subsidiary, but it was still the Weinsteins’ private playground and, in the minds of filmgoers and artists, a decidedly un-studio brand. The bifurcation of “important movies” with Miramax branding and “commercial movies” with Disney branding was a clear message to artists and audiences that art and commerce were now officially separated, if not yet legally divorced. Prior to Orion’s first Best Picture with Amadeus in 1984, legacy studios had won thirty-five straight Best Pictures going all the way back to 1949. The only prior Best Pictures that might have qualified as “independent” were Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet in 1948, produced and released by J. Arthur Rank; Samuel Goldwyn’s The Best Years of Our Lives in 1946; and David O. Selznick’s back-to-back 1939 and 1940 winners, Gone with the Wind and Rebecca. Calling Selznick and Goldwyn “independent,” however, is still something of a stretch — both were bred from the studio system and operated parallel and adjacent to it. That leaves Hamlet as the only real outsider Best Picture winner from the Oscars’ first fifty-six years. That six of the next fifteen would be won by companies that literally did not exist prior to 1978 and 1979 speaks to how quickly things were changing.
Other studios — and their corporate owners — were clearly paying attention to the Disney/Miramax arrangement, too. Indies were thriving in the ‘90s with companies like Polygram, Gramercy, USA Films and October Films all finding success in the prestige space the studios were vacating. Disney had proved that you didn’t actually need to vacate the space — you simply needed to own your own specialty division to keep a toe in it. In point of fact, it was Sony who established the first actual studio specialty division in 1992, the year before the Miramax acquisition, when it hired the former Orion Classics team of Michael Barker, Marcie Bloom and Tom Bernard to set up Sony Pictures Classics. But Miramax’s successes earned the Sony Classics team a longer leash and bigger checkbook of their own. Within just a few short years, 20th Century Fox had Fox Searchlight, Universal had Universal Focus, Paramount had Paramount Classics and Warner Bros. inherited Fine Line Features via its acquisitions of New Line Cinema and Turner Broadcasting. Between 2002 and 2005 Warner Bros. added Warner Independent Pictures and Picturehouse, and Universal christened Focus from the remnants of a half dozen other companies, including Universal Focus, Gramercy, Polygram and USA Films.
By 2005, the divorce was final. The legacy studios were officially out of the business of bestowing their brands on prestige films. Blockbusters and tentpoles delivered better numbers for shareholders and Wall Street. Audiences and artists were no longer invited to the same party. It was wide release blockbusters for the masses and limited release Oscar bait through specialty divisions for the artists (and, to a lesser degree, the critics). The arrangement also helped keep a lid on budgets and marketing — win/win. For better or worse, the Academy Awards now belonged to the specialty divisions — and artists, for the most part, were okay with it as long as the films got made and reached their intended audiences.
Then the other shoe dropped.
The studio experiment begun in the 1990s, of bifurcating art films and commercial films, with separate branding for each, was unceremoniously abandoned beginning in 2005 when Warner shuttered Fine Line Features. By the end of the year, the Weinsteins were on their way out at Disney, leaving Miramax little more than a shell in their wake. By 2008, Picturehouse, New Line, Warner Independent and Paramount Classics also closed up shop. Only Sony Classics, Fox Searchlight and Focus were left standing.
Prior to that moment, even with the rise of the independents and specialty divisions, the major studios (including newly formed DreamWorks SKG) had never given up more than two consecutive Best Pictures to an indie. From 2006 to 2012, Academy voters sent the studios a message which most pundits have yet to acknowledge, handing out six of seven Best Pictures to indies, including five straight from 2008 to 2012. Beginning with Crash, in 2005, fifteen of the past eighteen Best Picture winners have been indies.
Once you’ve seen it — you cannot unsee the clear correlation between collapsing Oscar ratings, indie Oscar dominance and the growing resistance on the part of major studios to ever again return to the halcyon days of “communion between art and commerce.” Since 2003, a stunning eleven of nineteen Best Picture nominee fields contained not a single nominee from the top ten grossing films of the year. What makes that fact all the more shocking is that six of those years are from the “up to ten” nominees era begun in 2009 as a direct response to the fact that nominees from 2004 through 2008 featured not a single top ten box office performer — something which had previously happened only twice, in 1947 and 1984. Adding more nominees, however, only made the problem worse as Oscar voters simply expanded an already elite field to include more elite fare. The studios were unwilling to make better movies — and Oscar voters were unwilling to lower their standards.
It’s that Great Break-up, twenty years in the making, which serves to give context to the miraculous moment of Barbie and Oppenheimer. The truth is that the communion between art and commerce never went away — it’s literally the foundation of the entire business. It was misdirected corporate meddling that tried to fix what wasn’t broken in the first place, and artists and audiences paid the price. Not that we should expect the studios or their corporate overlords to change their ways overnight — but Barbenheimer has forced a reckoning many of us thought impossible in the short term. Flummoxed by economic headwinds they can’t seem to figure out, legacy studios and establishment newcomers like Netflix, Apple Studios and Amazon MGM Studios suddenly seem increasingly open to the kind of outside-the-box creative thinking which hasn’t had a home in Hollywood for decades. It’s a window we should all relish and exploit before it starts to close.
In Part 2, “The Great Make-up” and how the movie industry seizes on the past and the present to construct a better future.
While the official design of the “Oscar” statuette is attributed to legendary production designer Cedric Gibbons, who first sketched it on a napkin, it was renowned Los Angeles artist George Stanley who sculpted the design of the statuette itself, using Mexican filmmaker/actor Emilio Fernandez as his model — a recommendation of Mexican-born actress Dolores del Rio, whom Gibbons would marry two years later. Gibbons himself would go on to win a record eleven Oscars out of thirty-nine nominations while Stanley gained notoriety creating some of Los Angeles’ most enduring and iconic public art, including the famous Muse of Music at the Hollywood Bowl and the Isaac Newton relief on the Astronomer’s Monument at the Griffith Observatory.
The closest previous achievements were 1958’s Gigi and 1987’s The Last Emperor, both of which went 9 for 9 and won Best Picture.
Warner would log another decade as the longest-serving original mogul, just long enough to finally win an Oscar outright for producing 1964 Best Picture winner My Fair Lady.