The Academy continues its trend of picking Best Film winners that are incomprehensible to mainstream audiences.
Check out the chart from the New York Times to see the disturbing trend. The last time the box office king also took the best picture award was “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” in 2003.
That year 2003 is the demarcation point where the Academy completely went off the reservation. From 1980 to 2003, only one Best Picture winner was not in the top 20 box-office grossing films of the year. That was 1987 when a good, but slow film “The Last Emperor” clocked in as the 27th highest box office draw for the year.
The coup de grace was 2009. “Avatar” smashed box office records and radically broke special-effects ground. The Cameron-hating Academy gave him the middle finger salute by awarding the obscure and boring “The Hurt Locker” the Best Picture award. “The Hurt Locker”, notably directed by Cameron’s ex-wife, failed to crack the top 100 that year.
This year’s winner “The Shape of Water” barely crossed the top 50. Sadly, this is a better showing than other recent winners including “Moonlight”, “Spotlight”, “Birdman”, “12 Years a Slave”, and “The Artist”.
The Academy is signaling to the average movie-goers that we are too unsophisticated and simple-minded to know what is good. The public is picking up on this disdain. The Oscars dropped to its lowest ratings ever with only 26.5 million viewers and a 20% drop in viewership from last year’s telecast.
To be sure, the trend of live viewership also took a hit for the SuperBowl and the Winter Olympics. The Weinstein scandal and the painful-to-watch, holier-than-thou, sanctimonious speeches also caused viewers to tune out. The Academy needs to get back to respecting the people who love movies. You don’t see the NFL deciding to let the cellar-dwelling Cleveland Browns play in the SuperBowl just to be ironic. The Oscars are living in a bizarro world where commercial success is Academy Award Kryptonite. It wasn’t always that way.
Should this be the new definition?
Best-Picture Oscar-winner
(n) an impossibly artistic film, utterly unwatchable, voted by a pompous group of elite, so-called movie critics, who despise their uncouth ticket-buying customers.
Yogi Berra famously said, “nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.” The Oscars are disproving this aphorism. For the Ocsars, “nobody goes there anymore, it’s too empty.”
