Rag on the Oscars if you want, but most of these arguments don’t make any sense. The OP said the Golden Globes are much more in touch with audiences.
Star Wars didn’t win the Golden Globe either.
Dances with Wolves*** won Best Picture (drama) in the Golden Globes too. So did Forrest Gump.
The Last Emperor won. So did The Artist (best picture - comedy).
I don’t see that the Golden Globes have any better track record than the Oscars.
I completely agree with this, and would add that Annie Hall was very different from other films at the time, even for Woody Allen - it managed to combine that whole breaking-the-fourth-wall+slapstick approach of his earlier movies with a storyline that was affecting. Great stuff.
I’ll also point out that Smokey and the Bandit was #4 in box office that year. Where is the justice???
At least they are not as bad as the Grammy Awards.
The Oscars are the awards that Hollywood gives to itself. Everything about them has to be viewed through that lens.
Best picture? Wouldn’t you think that in some years - really, many, many years - the best of the year would be made in some other country? Having an argument over whether the best picture of the year is a popular Hollywood blockbuster or a smaller Hollywood art picture just shows how crazy the argument is.
Only a handful of foreign-made pictures have even been nominated. Has any film not made in the English language ever won? Memory says no. The Artist was French - and it was filmed in Hollywood and the few dialog scenes were in English and it was distributed by standard Hollywood heavyweights and billed as a Weinstein Company release. How much more insider Hollywood do you get than Harvey Weinstein?
So out of touch with whom? Themselves? No. And themselves is the only selves that matter. What the hell does the public have to do with an industry trade show?
Basically, this. The Oscars were never really in touch to begin with. It’s a big circle jerk for the movie industry, and the award ceremony itself has been little more than a fashion show for the actresses since before I was born.
Objectively speaking Star Wars is not a very good movie except for the groundbreaking special effects. It’s a good kid’s movie, I admit.
I wonder how much of the box office numbers quoted by JohnT are affected by late releases. It seems to me that this trend of releasing Oscar contenders late in the year started about 15 years ago, but I could be wrong.
The last time I check (it was several years ago), the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences only had some 6,000 voting members. There are more members, of course, but only 6,000 +/- actually eligible to vote for the catagories.
Wendell Wagner and Exapno Mapcase describe the situation very well.
Just to pick nits, but they did give Hitch the Thalberg Award.
Which, sadly, is a bust of the man and not a Gold Statuette like the other Honorary awards (including the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian). So while he did get an award from the Academy, he never even got a special Oscar (he was nominated 5 times & even had a film win Best Picture: Rebecca).
And a film of his, Rebecca, won Best Picture.
This is very old, I posted this before BTW:
My Favorite example comes from the Alternate Oscars [Danny Peary] book that pointed at the issues from the 1932-1933 Oscars.
The best picture was won then by Cavalcade… you do remember that one huh?
It won over:
*A farewell to arms, 42nd Street, I’m a fugitive from a Chain Gang, The Private life of Henry VII *
Ten movies were nominated then, still there was no room to include:
Duck Soup (!), Dinner at Eight, Queen Christina, Trouble in Paradise, The Mummy, The Invisible Man and…
I can just see Oscar winners, saying what they really think just after winning:
"My payment for being in a movie just became one million dollars!"
“I’d like to thank my press agent for taking out those big ads in the newspapers and trade journals to get me the publicity…and my studio for applying pressure to the members of the Academy contracted to them to vote for me…and…”
First, a few Mea Culpas:
I did forget LOTR: Return of the King. And I apologize for saying the Oscars were from the MPAA, rather than the AMPSA. Serves me right for taking a short-cut and relying on my memory, rather than fact-checking. Like the Chinese say: “the palest ink is better than the finest memory.”
This is the point I was trying to create debate over, and could have made a bit clearer. When I refer to Oscar “success”, I was referring to the “Big Five” (picture, director, actor, actress and screenplay/screenwriter). Rightly or wrongly, Oscar “success” in the minds of the media, and by at least some level of proxy, the general public, is determined by winning any one of “the big five”. Let’s face it: those are the only ones that get significant play in the headlines once the award shows (either the Oscars or the Golden Globes) are over. I know not everyone listens to the “nattering nabobs of the 500 channel universe of crap” - and certainly not the denizens of this message board 
- but if it plays in Peoria, it’ll play in Pomona…or perhaps even Peking.
Admittedly, over the long history of the Oscars a significant number of winners of any of the “big five”(picture, director, actor, actress and screenplay/screenwriter), have been commercial successes as well. But it does seem like there has become more of a disconnect between the two over the past few years. I’m sure someone will point out the fallacy in this point, but here goes - it seems that in the past few years, many of the commercially successful films haven’t even gotten nominated for any of the “big five”. Now, I agree that many don’t deserve it (there’s no way I would argue that “Transformers” or “Fast and Furious” should be nominated for any of these). But I think back to a film like Jaws…highly successful commercially, and garnered a Best Picture nomination.
When I refer to the Globes as being more “in touch” with the general public, the statement is predicated on one observation:
The Globes are, of course, handed out by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. According to the HFPA’s website, it’s membership is represents some 55 countries and a combined readership of 250 million. These are reporters working the “entertainment beat”, primarily in Hollywood (my characterization, not the HFPA’s). Whereas, according to it’s website, The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences represent some 6000 artists and professionals “within the motion picture industry” (the AMPAS’ characterization).
So, on one hand, you have an award handed out by industry “insiders”; on the other, people from “the outside” who report on the industry for the general public. (I put “the outside” in quotes because you can argue about how “outside” an organization reporters who work “the beat” on that organization really are.)
I will acknowledge a point that someone is bound to bring up: the Globes are voted on by 90 members of the HFPA vs. perhaps the several hundred that vote from AMPSA (though stories of members handing off their ballots to their kids, maids, gardeners, etc. to fill out are rife). But I think the point still stands: one is voted by “insiders”, one is voted by “observers”.
Bup is quite right about Star Wars…and Jaws falls in the same category. But with the exception of The Artist, all of these are films from quite a number of years ago. The Globes were actually established in 1950. But as the HFPA website points out, and I think with some validity, “(a)s the international box office has dramatically expanded in recent years, so has the Globes’ prestige increased. The awards now have the distinction of being one of the three most-watched award shows on television”(along with the Oscars and the Emmys).
And one final point of agreement with other posters: at the end of the day, the final arbiter of how “successful” a picture is depends on how many butts you put in the seats, or in recent years, how many DVDs get put in the machines as well. It’s the bottom line on the P&L statement that determines success in any industry. An Oscar win, or even a nomination in one of the “big five”, can mean millions to the bottom line. To that end, millions are spent trying to promote pictures and theirs stars to members of the Academy to garner a nomination.
But something else to think about: accept for the sake of argument the premise that the Academy has moved away from the “mainstream” in recent years. Has this been by accident, or given how much the cachet of an Oscar win or nomination can add to a film - has the Academy been deliberately moving away from nominating “box office boffo” films in order to promote the lesser Indie films that garner many of today’s nominations in order to preserve jobs in the industry?
And finally, Star Wars may not have won any of the “big five”, but it did win seven Oscars and was nominated for another four - certainly a laudable achievement given the number of pictures released in any given year that never garnered ANY sort of nomination, let alone a win. “Winning” is a relative term.
Annie Hall is a much better film than Star Wars doe
The argument continues (as it always does) as if the Oscars are supposed to be some unbiased third-party judgment of quality, and the choices are thus inexplicable.
It is the community that makes the films that votes, and absolutely no one should be surprised that the voting is biased, political and reinforcing of what that community thinks movies should be.
cdnirish, your argument might work better if anyone at all were recognizing blockbuster movies. Who is? There are things called the People’s Choice Awards and MTV’s video awards and suchlike. But no serious body pays any attention to them.
Look at the Golden Globes. From 2000 onward, the only blockbusters to win are the third Lord of the Rings and Avatar. (The Hangover made a lot of money but wasn’t a blockbuster.) In fact, the two LotR sequels are the only sequels to get nominated. That’s true for both the drama and comedy categories. Literally not one superhero or sci/fi or blow-'em-up action movie has been nominated since 2000. Or ever.
So if the Golden Globes ignores blockbusters in exactly the same way as the Oscars, how can it be more in touch or representative or outsiderish or anything?
It’s fairly well known that the Golden Globes voters barely watch what they nominate and are extremely prone to being swayed by schmoozing.
You and eyebrows of doom are talking about just one category and that is “best picture.” Try correlating money to things like best supporting actor or best director.
That’s because the OP we were replying to was specifically about Best Picture winners.
But the title is all-encompassing.