The 2024 Academy Awards are About to Change Everything: Part 2
After twenty years of corporate efforts to separate cinematic art from commerce, the Oscars have flipped the script.
In Part 1, I explored the history of the Academy Awards and using the Oscars as a tool for benchmarking the “communion between art and commerce,” which Hollywood corporatization severed over several decades of “The Great Break-up.”
The critical and commercial success of Barbie and Oppenheimer represents a generational opportunity for creatives to reverse that break-up, to seize on the lessons of the past and the present and wrest back power. In Part 2, I furnish some thoughts as to how that process might transpire.
The Great Make-Up
When nominations were announced the morning of Tuesday, January 23, 2024, everyone expected Barbie and Oppenheimer to dominate the conversation, precisely as they had since both opened to record-breaking box office on July 21, 2023. The clever portmanteau Barbenheimer had been in the pop culture vernacular for months prior, fueling hype and adding to the anticipation. The suggestion that this symbiosis was somehow driving the popularity of the two films beyond what they would have achieved individually was soon disproved by data showing them reaching fundamentally different audiences. It was the Hollywood version of Larry Bird v. Magic Johnson, Cristiano Ronaldo v. Lionel Messi, Chris Evert v. Martina Navratilova and a thousand other legendary sports rivalries where the inertia of hype is too often confused with the innate greatness of the participants. Each has its own loyal fanbase and neither necessarily needs the other — but it’s nice to have them around at the same time. As expected, Oppenheimer landed a leading 13 nominations (one shy of the record held by All About Eve, Titanic and La La Land) while box office champion Barbie came in fourth (after Poor Things and Killers of the Flower Moon) with a respectable total of 8.