[COLUMN] The Oscars Haven't Abandoned the Mainstream; The Mainstream Abandoned Them | by Darren Mooney

Even in the midst of the Los Angeles fires, last week’s Academy Award nominations sparked a familiar debate about the role of the Oscars in mainstream American life.

It has become a common refrain in recent years to protest that the Academy has lost touch with mainstream movie-goers, that the voting body has grown esoteric in its tastes and its attitudes. Certainly, the past few years have seen an increase in the nomination of non-American films. Parasite won the Best Picture Oscar in 2020. Last year’s nominees included The Zone of Interest and Anatomy of a Fall. This year’s nominees include The Substance, I’m Still Here and Emilia Pérez.

What do these movies mean to mainstream cinema goers? How do they connect to Middle America? The total box office gross of Anora is $35m. Although The Brutalist will undoubtedly see a massive bump from its nominations, it is currently sitting at under $12m global gross. The “middle” class of nominees hasn’t fared much better. James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, has earned $67m. Edward Berger’s Conclave tapped out at $82m.

It is, naturally, easy to overstate this problem. Indeed, many of these soul-searching think pieces tend to gloss over the nomination of genuine blockbusters like Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two or Jon M. Chu’s Wicked, which earned $714m and $717m respectively. Indeed, Wicked is seen as a viable contender for the actual award, having picked up a few high-profile prizes during the run-up

Just last year, the Best Picture Oscar went to Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. That epic earned $976m and was the third-highest grossing movie of the year. The highest-grossing movie of the year, Barbie, was also a major contender. One of the highlights of the Oscar ceremony was Ryan Gosling performing I’m Just Ken in the Dolby Theatre. The year before that, the Best Picture race included the two highest-grossing films of the year: Avatar: The Way of Water and Top Gun: Maverick.

When all of these factors are taken together, it becomes harder to accept the argument frequently advanced by critics that the Oscars are inherently biased against mainstream popcorn fare, that they are reluctant to nominate or even award popular films. It exposes the ruthless cynicism of decisions like the infamously terrible plan to create a “Best Popular Movie” award. It also underscores the reality that the Oscars didn’t abandon mainstream cinema. Mainstream cinema abandoned them.

The Academy has always had a soft spot for big, populist, crowd pleasing fare. During the 1970s, it was not uncommon for the highest-grossing movie of the year to secure a Best Picture nomination: Love Story, The Godfather, The Exorcist, Jaws, Rocky, Star Wars, Kramer vs. Kramer. Often, the Best Picture winner was in the end-of-year top ten: Patton, The French Connection, The Godfather, The Sting, The Godfather: Part II, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Rocky, Kramer vs. Kramer.

It's worth stressing that these movies were all populist and accessible. None of these movies were arthouse films. They were big, crowd pleasing movies that played well to large audiences. The Godfather was adapted from a pulpy and lurid paperback. The Exorcist features a scene in which a character vomits pea soup. Jaws and Star Wars invented (and remain the gold standard for) the modern blockbuster. Even The Sting is a remarkably light caper movie.

These nominations became somewhat less common during the 1980s, because the kinds of movies that Hollywood was making and pushing towards audiences began to shift towards sequels and action movies. Still, whenever a suitably well-made film connected with audiences, the Oscars weren’t afraid to recognize it: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Ghost, Avatar and Black Panther all secured nominations. Titanic and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King both won.

The issue is not that the Academy is afraid to nominate such films, it’s that the studios have proven themselves increasingly less interested in making those sorts of movies and in selling them to audiences. Just before that I’m Just Ken performance, John Mulaney introduced the Best Sound Oscar with a long riff on Field of Dreams, and that film feels strangely applicable to the Academy’s situation. To paraphrase: if you make it, they will award it; if you don’t make it, they can’t award it.

In this year’s Best Picture lineup, The Brutalist is an example of a quirky independent film, but it is of a piece with many of those highest-grossing films of the 1970s, like The Godfather. However, no major studio would make it. It was “a new Great American Masterpiece™”, that had to be filmed in Hungary. The Substance is a gnarly body horror famously rejected by Universal, but it’s also one of the few horror movies to be nominated for Best Picture since The Exorcist.

To be clear, none of this is to suggest that The Substance or The Brutalist would have been the biggest movies of the year had they been distributed by Universal or Warner Bros. However, it’s also impossible to imagine a world in which the modern equivalent of The Godfather or The Exorcist could power their way to the top of the global box office from a minor studio like MUBI or A24. There are just too many hurdles in place.

Indeed, the delineation between “popular” films and “awards contenders” often seems to originate within studios themselves. When studios produce awards contenders, they are often managed by specialty divisions like Searchlight at Disney or Focus Features at Universal, creating a clear sense that studios believe in a difference between a mass-market film and a potential awards darling. This affects the marketing, the release strategy, the branding. That is all communicated to audiences.

Nearly two decades ago, James Mangold’s Walk the Line, a musical biopic of Johnny Cash starring Joaquin Phoenix, was a major awards contender and earned $187m. This year, it really feels like Mangold’s A Complete Unknown has had to pick a lane, grossing roughly a third of what Walk the Line did while star Timotheé Chalamet pushes himself as one of the two Best Actor frontrunners. Audiences didn’t create this division; studios did.

Indeed, studios often seem actively contemptuous of the possibility of awards candidates finding audiences. Disney inherited awards-friendly films like The Last Duel and West Side Story through their purchase of Fox, and just dumped those two films into theatres at catastrophic moments with no real marketing muscle behind them, because the studio was much more focused on its surefire box office hits and the franchises that it inherited.

Studios have little interest in making room at the box office for anything but their big franchise films. Disney is famous for imposing notoriously onerous restrictions on theatres that want to show their films, which means that during the traditional awards corridor multiplex screens are often allocated to movies like Mufasa: The Lion King. This tends to force anything that exists outside this framework to the margins of the arthouse and specialty cinema, making them harder to see and discover.

That said, when a major studio commits to producing a crowd pleaser with that level of skill and craft, it is often recognized. With the backing of Universal, Oppenheimer grossed nearly a billion dollars as a three-hour non-linear partially-black-and-white biopic of a scientist. This year, Warner Bros. was able to power Dune: Part Two to over $700m, a film that feels very much like a spiritual successor to those early artisanal and auteur-driven smashes like The Godfather or The Exorcist.

As much as fans might get bent out of shape by the refusal of the Academy to nominate blockbusters like Avengers: Endgame or Spider-Man: No Way Home, the truth is that those films lack the sort of artistry and ambition that marks the kinds of crowd pleasers the Academy does willingly and enthusiastically recognize. There’s a reason that Black Panther is the only Marvel Studios film with a Best Picture nomination. It was not only better made, but it was meaningfully important.

The studios can and occasionally even do make the sorts of movies that can be both worthy of awards recognition and appealing to audiences. Greta Gerwig’s Barbie was a sheer confection of a movie, but it demonstrated a level of craft and wit absent from most modern blockbusters. There is no reason that Disney’s franchise arms can’t be as ambitious in scale and scope as James Cameron’s Avatar movies, aside from the decision to prioritize a well-oiled machine over artistry.

To be clear, there is nothing wrong with this choice. It just comes with a cost. That cost is that most modern blockbusters and spectacles simply aren’t good enough or noteworthy enough to be counted among the best films of the year. They are largely and increasingly functional works designed to familiar specifications, which leaves relatively little room for the sort of artistry that merits recognition within the framework of an awards show voted upon by artists.

This is ultimately the reason why these modern blockbusters don’t get nominated as frequently. There is a world of difference between an artisanal blockbuster like Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, Christopher Nolan’s Inception or Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and so much modern franchise fare like Shawn Levy’s Deadpool & Wolverine or Louis Leterrier’s Fast X. That’s not to say that those films can’t be enjoyable, but they simply aren’t as well crafted.

The movie moguls of the 1970s might have been ruthless businessmen, but many of them seemed to genuinely love movies, not seeing them as “content.” David Zaslav might have bought the house that belonged to Robert Evans, the legendary producer who shepherded The Godfather to screen, but that doesn’t give him good taste. Indeed, given the way that he quotes Jerry Maguire and praises The Flash, one might wonder if Zaslav has even seen a movie.

There is a tendency to look on the failure of the Academy Awards to more consistently nominate big blockbusters as a failure on the part of the institution, but the truth is more complicated. It is perhaps best understood as a reflection of the “enshittification” of the modern Hollywood blockbuster film. To borrow a quote from another Hollywood institution, perhaps it’s the pictures that got small.