The Film Academy And Its Oscars Manage To Feed On Their Own Mistakes
26.01.2023 - 19:19
/ deadline.com
Well, the mostly predictable Oscar nominations arrived on Tuesday morning with no disasters or truly egregious missteps. Even the snubs were fairly routine: No female directors, though women won the directing award in the past two years; James Cameron and Joseph Kosinski, both with Best Picture nominees, were left out too.
Which normalcy is too bad. And I mean that in the nicest possible way.
It’s a weird but undeniable fact of Hollywood life that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and its pet awards ceremony feed on their own mistakes. Let things go well or follow an expected path, and the Oscars turn into a yawn. But screw something up, and suddenly it’s the Greatest Show On Earth all over again– back on the pedestal, just waiting to be knocked off by the howling crowd.
Errors are an asset. Gaffes are gold. The Academy is never so interesting as when it is just, plain, obviously wrong.
This is not a casual mechanism. By and large, average people don’t spend three hours gawking at celebrities in order to admire or be instructed by their betters. Rather, they want to see idols leveled–embarrassed, caught out behaving badly, dressing in poor taste, or ranting like Joaquin Phoenix at a West Texas barbeque. It’s human nature. Pieties and proper judgment are boring. Pratfalls are fun, especially when they catch the glamor crowd taking itself too seriously.
Perhaps the best-behaved Oscar show in recent memory was the Hugh Jackman ceremony of 2009. It was a beautiful show, like a cozy evening in Hollywood’s parlor, with relatively gentle humor, and a warm-hearted picture, Slumdog Millionaire, in the winner’s circle. What more could you want? (Academy officials actually asked Jackman back this year, but got a