The shows are just fan service at its glitziest finest
Maybe my love of Oscars drama is old school, but reading gossip amid fashion spreads in service of a popularity contest is good entertainment.
By Ani Bundel
The Academy Awards will finally bring the 2020 movie year to a close Sunday night — far later in the year than ever before — and the drama of who will win is the most unpredictable in years.
Unfortunately, without the usual “awards season” to accompany the parade of awards shows that ends with the Oscars, it’s not nearly as dramatic or fun as it should be.
What, you might ask, is “awards season”? It’s everything designed to influence the voters, besides the film festivals and special screenings. It’s the gossip we all consume: the flattering (or not so flattering) articles on the people behind the films in trade magazines, the sudden “shocking” exposés that drop at strategic voting times that might just undermine a front-runner in the eyes of Academy voters, and the perfect quotes in interviews, like “Parasite” director Bong Joon Ho negging Oscars voters by informing them their little show is just a local celebration until they handed him a statue.
It’s also the red-carpet pictures from the nominated films’ worldwide premieres, the fashion spreads in well-timed magazine issues, the cover stories where a nominee hoping to get over that Oscar hump bares all (or at least some) for an adoring public and hopefully some soft-hearted voters.
It’s everything that everyone in Hollywood does to make sure the Academy voters know you want that statue without being too obvious about how much you want it. In short, it is the real performance of an actor’s lifetime.
And, because of the pandemic, there was far too little of it this year.
It won’t last: An avalanche of films held back during the pandemic will arrive this fall, competing for Academy votes in the most cutthroat competition the film business may ever see. It’ll kick the preseason into overdrive — and I’m all here for the gossip mills to start churning again. I breathlessly await the return of the behind-the-scenes tell-alls, the gorgeous gowns and the cattiest quotes. The Oscars may never award itself best drama, but I certainly do.
The worst part is that this should have been the most interesting Oscar race in decades. With many of the usual suspects waiting out the pandemic to return to screens, a very different slate of actors, directors and films wound up nominated than anyone would have predicted last February and led to the most historically diverse slates of nominees in several categories. Moreover, everything is up in the air this year, which would normally be an opportunity for an entirely new set of A-listers to duke it out for their big chance at glory.
But sadly, there are no red carpets, and there are Zoom calls instead of press conferences. It’s hard to see how this won’t be (yet again) the lowest-rated Oscars in history.
It could be that I’m in the minority in my love for the Oscar-adjacent drama. The so-called problem of how much politicking for the Oscar is too much has been one Hollywood has outwardly struggled with for decades. In the last 20 years, it’s given rise to the publicly pervasive view that the performances to get Oscars often outweigh the ones for which the Oscars are awarded.
And so, ever since Harvey Weinstein waged a campaign so successful for “Shakespeare in Love” in 1999 that it beat out Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” for best picture at the Academy Awards, there have been movements to shorten the “awards season” to limit campaigning.
The current season begins with the Venice and Toronto film festivals at the end of August and ends with Oscar gold. In between, there are various other festivals and awards, including the Golden Globes, the Screen Actors Guild Awards, the BAFTAs and the film critics associations, some of which are considered bellwethers and others of which are not. All told, when the Oscars were scheduled for April, it meant seven-plus months of campaigning for a nomination and then a win.
In 2003, the first move was made to shorten that schedule by moving the Oscars to the end of February; a more recent effort put last year’s Oscars in the second weekend of February. That left but a single weekend between the Oscars and a suddenly very packed January, as every group giving out awards rushed to get their ceremonies in before they became irrelevant.
That the shortest awards season ever was then followed by this year’s most extended and least traditional is the stuff great dramas are normally made of. Hollywood wanted the campaigning and schmoozefests to stop? The pandemic provided.
But the sudden quiet showed how much fans actually played a role. Like the WWE attempting to perform in a silent stadium, awards-bait movies without all the gossip, magazine spreads and interviews about anything-but-the-movie that normally accompany their rollouts to get us interested turn out to be nothing more than a very erudite two hours of entertainment.
There’s been a little. (Did you know best director nominee Emerald Fennell turned 18 once?) But it wasn’t quite enough. We want a little meaningless drama with our dramas — and almost every year, the Oscars provides.
Ani Bundel is a cultural critic who has been writing regularly since 2010. Her work can also be found at Elite Daily and WETA’s Telly Visions where she also co-hosts “Telly Visions: The Podcast.” Follow her on Twitter at @anibundel.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
