I dare them to rename “Best Picture” to “Best Unpopular Film”. 
I doubt that the award is going to go to “message” films. Instead, it’s going to go to the big popcorn films, many of which don’t really have messages.
Possibly, possibly. but let’s not underestimate the Academy’s ability to make a mess of it whichever way they choose to go.
How long before the assorted wits and wags on the internet start calling it the Affirmative Action Oscar?
It used to be that the Best Picture (BP) Oscar would go to one of the most popular films of the year and it was very rare for the BP winner to not be a top-10 movie. I put together a spreadsheet with all the BP nominees and their grosses from 1980-onward and the findings were interesting:
… From 1980-2003 (inclusive) there was only one year where the BP winner (BPW) was not in the top-20 grossing films of the year: 1987 (Last Emperor).
… in that 23 year period, 6 of the BP winners were among the top 3 earners and 4 of them were the #1 film of the year.
… From 2004 onward, not a single BPW has come from a top-10 film, and only 3 of those years has a BPW been among the top-20 grossing films of the year.
… ranking BO grosses among the BP nominees, it was a rare year where the #1 or #2 grossing film among those nominees didn’t win… and even up to today, the lowest grossing film of the BP nominees has never won BP.
The availability of DVD’s and, later, streaming, has made the smaller films more viable candidates. While this is great for small films, the fact is that people tend to like Oscar winners to be films they’ve actually seen. Titanic was a massive year for Oscar ratings, for example. When The Artist won… eh, not so much.
Spreadsheet below. The “charts” tab has some interesting (to us geeks) visualizations, and yes, this needs updating.
Anyway, to sum up, I support this move. I wish the American film goer would see better quality movies but as long as we go to MCU films to the exclusion of other fare, that’s not going to happen.
Is this the real motive? Is the Academy creating an award that can be given to shitty-but-popular MCU and so on, and “best picture” can go to something good?
Getting comic book movies nominated for BP was the motive behind going from 5 BP nominees to 10 back in 2009. It didn’t work, obviously.
That last article is pretty funny because it says…
Funny, because there was no problem getting mainstream popular movies nominated, and winning, prior to 2005. The following films… were both the biggest film of the year* as well as BP winners:
Wings
It Happened One Night
Mutiny on the Bounty
Gone With The Wind
Mrs Miniver
Going My Way
The Greatest Show on Earth
The Bridge on the River Kwai
Ben Hur
West Side Story
Lawrence of Arabia
The Sound of Music
The Godfather
The Sting
Rocky
Kramer vs Kramer**
Rain Man
Forrest Gump
Titanic
LOTR: ROTK
… and none since.
*Might be cheating but I am excluding Disney animated films from the list of “biggest film of the year” because (a) there was no chance in hell of them being nominated and (b) multiple re-releases makes calculating BO grosses a beyatch for those years not covered by BO Mojo.
**1979 was the 52nd anniversary of the Oscars. In that time, 16 of the BP winners were the biggest film of the year, close to 31% of all BP’s. 37 ceremonies since, 4 BO winners, for a 11% success rate for the BO champ. In the past 14 years, none of the winners were also the BO champ, easily the longest such streak.
Citation for pre-1980 BO winners:
The real motive - the only motive - is to get more people to watch the broadcast.
It will be an annual contest to see which comic book man was most popular each year, which would, they hope, bring in more viewers.
It’s a transparent attempt at gaining more dollars. They will manufacture suspense, when all we really need to do to determine which movies are the most popular is to refer to the box office revenue.
mmm
OK, since I agree with you exactly, it makes me wonder…
Why does the Best Picture award exist? If it’s for popularity, it’s irrelevant because the revenue is published. If it’s for high quality regardless of popularity, it’s relevant to a much smaller group.
I have a feeling that we’re having this discussion because you used to be sure that movies were popular with just about everyone in the US, AND you could count on a large proportion of the audience to have seen most or all of the movies that had been made that year, AND (this is the big one) you used to know that there was nothing else they could have been watching, except for: locally produced live shows, network TV, and Broadway.
I think movies have outgrown the Oscars (too many movies for even a huge movie fan to have seen all of them, too many kinds of movies, movies made everywhere), plus entertainment has outgrown the movies (the internet, five hundred million TV channels, the internet, the internet), plus entertainment has outgrown the Oscars (the ceremony is no longer anywhere CLOSE to a national celebration of what everyone has watched, but it tries to pretend that it still is).
The Academy Awards is a niche production now, not really relevant in its current form to the public at large, but the organizers are continuing to pretend they don’t know that. (Probably because what would really be good and relevant is a much smaller show with no single best picture. The “boring awards” for best third guy from the left in a crowd scene and best explanation of DNA to a non-scientific audience and so on are actually the ONLY relevant part of the show, IMO.)
I don’t agree that superhero movies are all bad. They are a different type of movie aimed at younger people , mostly. Not everyone likes Woody Allen type art movies so Hollywood makes different types for different groups, a good business plan.
on second thought they are not doing the new oscar next year and may never do it.