A brief history of the Oscar game from the one who was here in the beginning. In 1999, I decided to start a website called Oscarwatch.com. I did this because I’d spent many years writing on a listserve (from 1994) before there was even a working web. We sometimes dabbled in Oscar predicting. I thought it was an intriguing game. Like, why did all of my film snobs hate the Oscars? Why did a movie like Citizen Kane not win? From my perspective, it was the intrigue of cracking the code. What drove the Oscars, and why did they seem so cut off from the film critics?
Back then, there weren’t any other Oscar sites. Websites were just getting started. There were no blogs yet, but my site was more or less a blog. I just did it manually as an HTML site. Gold Derby was around and online at around the same time, I think, and there were a few others, but mine quickly became the most prominent as an Oscars gaming and prediction site.
When I first started, the idea was to avoid wishful thinking and just try to predict how the Oscars might unfold. We also had some humility. We didn’t think we could influence the Oscars. Academy members weren’t exactly using the internet. Tracking them, predicting them was the fun of it because they were unpredictable. My first year was Gladiator vs. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and that was an exciting year.
But there was no version of the Oscars that favored the film critics over the audience. There weren’t that many critics. There were maybe 10 to 20 prominent, influential ones, like Kenneth Turan and Roger Ebert. Their reviews would drop the Thursday before the Friday the movie opened. No one even thought about the Oscars until January or February of the following year.
If a film flopped with audiences, there was very little chance it would still be nominated for the Oscars. It would have to be very good or its director someone of note. But in general, with five Best Picture nominees, movies had to be not just good, but movies that most people had seen and knew.
As the Oscar industry began to grow to include sites like the New York and LA Times having their own Oscar sites, it’s hard to believe it was once that thriving, but it was. Everyone was making money because the internet was now an FYC ad-free-for-all.
The Oscars moved the show from late March to late February, which in turn delayed the whole thing, and films traditionally released at the end of the year (late breakers) never won Best Picture. That has been true since they made the move, around 2003/2004. Once that happened, film festivals became a launching pad, and when Oscar bloggers started attending them, the Oscar race was slowly but surely curated by them.
It was and remains extremely rare for a film to pop up unexpectedly in the Oscar race. We always see them coming, and in fact, we place the players on the chessboard ourselves. But I can say with a fair amount of confidence that it’s never been this bad. That’s for two reasons. The first is the consolidation of power in the awards industry and the sidelining of independent voices.
When I first started, FYC advertising was limited to the trades – the Hollywood Reporter and Variety. That meant their coverage couldn’t really criticize the studios much because they were getting paid so much money and didn’t want to piss them off (all still true, no matter the site, even this one). Unless you’re the New York Times or one of the biggest sites, you are at the mercy of publicists if you are looking to make money.
When Penske Media Eldridge began buying up sites, power began to consolidate, creating a monopoly. They now own The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Gold Derby, Indiewire, Deadline, Rolling Stone, and yes, even the Golden Globes.
To say it’s a snake eating its own tail would be to underestimate the extent of this. Gold Derby itself is a collection of pundits from all over the place who claim to be “experts,” but what they really do is curate the awards. And by the end, there is very little surprise in any of it because they make the awards that they then try to predict, and voters are just not plugged in enough to defy the groupthink.
Now, Matt Neglia’s Next Best Picture is joining forces with the Awards App to shape the predictions even further, or rather, curate them, or rather, place them on the Chessboard. Groupthink starts as early as the beginning of the year, then ramps up. The bloggers form teams in a way, and if the movie they’re supporting wins, it’s like they won. I don’t know, man, it’s weird. Really really weird.
As I’ve written many times before, the Oscars make sense when the audience matters. They make less sense when only the critics and bloggers matter. The Oscar voters themselves are not really part of either the American film industry or Hollywood’s economics, since a large portion of them come from other countries with objectives different from Hollywood’s.
But almost no one seems to care about this except people outside the Hollywood bubble and the blogger world. They just know the Oscars have become a world distant from the one they know, and it doesn’t help that Hollywood, along with much of culture, took a side against the other half of the country and essentially began a Civil War of sorts that said, “you are not welcome.”
They did this by forbidding anyone to even associate with Trump supporters, let alone perform at the America 250 concert or at the Kennedy Center. So those people do not want anything to do with Hollywood anymore, and I don’t blame them. Why would they care if the richest and most famous people in the world are assholes?
They’re pissed because Paramount Plus has found a workaround. Call it the Elon Musk Fuck You money as a way around the ideological monopoly, and honestly, it might save Hollywood from itself. I can’t believe Hollywood is so afraid of the activists and the scolds, but they are. They won’t really get back to being successful until they end their stupid ten-year temper tantrum over the half of the country that voted for Trump.
Do I think that will happen? No. I think culture will have to be built around them, and if movies are good enough, the Oscars won’t be able to deny them, like Project Hail Mary. So it’s my hope that culture keeps building around them and yes, that means AI.
Jodie Foster recently said that she thought F1 was made with AI. She said:
“I don’t say this disparagingly — how could I? This movie went on to make millions of dollars. But I look at a movie like ‘F1’ and I’m like, ‘F1’ was made by AI,” she said with a laugh at the Colorado event. “Wasn’t it? I mean, the structure was exactly the structure that you would learn in school. The actors say the lines exactly the way it would be written if a computer was writing exactly what would be the right thing for that time. And they were able to dominate the technology to make something big and beautiful and potentially where a lot of the information comes from other places.”
Then, later she says:
“The big question is, is it going to replace actors and writers?” asked Lynton. “We do replace people,” Foster replied, explaining how studios save money on crowd scenes by replicating background actors. “We’re getting rid of a lot of jobs and hopefully, things like unions will be able to come in and say, you can use my actor 20 times, but you’re going to pay him 20 times. And I think that’s fair.”
Not to sound like a broken record, but if you want to compete with AI, you have to be more human than the machine, and you can’t do that if your entire industry has become a terrified community of conformists. If you can’t even stand people voting for the “wrong” person or having different political views than you, how can you possibly compete with an AI that has no such prejudice?
The rules in Hollywood are way too many. Cancel culture, like the blacklists, still rages on. So how can anyone, least of all those of us who were canceled, have any sympathy for any of them?
But yes, this is the end of an era, and much of that has to do with what has happened to Hollywood over the past ten years. It brings me no joy to say it. I wish they would all snap out of it, but they never have. With the Oscars heading into their 100th year, we might just be living through the end of it. The niche industry it already is will sink further into obscurity, like the Tonys, with only the most invested fans tuning in.
At the moment, there is still prestige and honor in winning an Oscar and as long as that is true, the game will survive. But it really should be less about how the bloggers and critics curate it and more about whether or not the film or performance is a high achievement.
Curry Barker’s film Obsession has become a box-office sensation for the simple reason that people had to see it to find out what all the fuss was about. It is a disturbing film, unlike any other I’ve ever seen. It doesn’t follow the horror movie tropes, and it doesn’t make any sort of overt point about feminism or “toxic masculinity.” It is just sad and weird and scary and disturbing and violent. It is a one of a kind, and that is exciting.
Does it make it into the Oscar race? Maybe. It’s possible but it depends on how the year plays out. It will go down as one of the greatest success stories in film history. But to be honest, this is what Hollywood used to be like way back in the day when artists were as daring and not so specific about the “kind” of people they invited in.
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is set to screen in a week or so and then open in theaters. It will make a lot of money and be in line for all the Oscars. That seems like a sure bet. Now, I’m about to head into groupthink land and offer up my (totally useless) predictions.
Best Picture
Project Hail Mary
The Odyssey
Fjord
Wild Horse Nine
The Adventures of Cliff Booth
Dune Part III
La Bola Negra
Digger
Obsession
The Debut
Director
Lord & Miller, Project Hail Mary
David Fincher, The Adventures of Cliff Booth
Martin McDonagh, Wild Horse 9
Christian Mungiu, Fjord
The Javiers, La Bola Negra
Actor
Ryan Gosling, Project Hail Mary
Tom Cruise, Digger
Sebastian Stan, Fjord
John Malkovich, Wild Horse Nine
Brad Pitt, The Adventures of Cliff Booth
Actress
Julianne Moore, The Debut
Renate Reinsve, Fjord
Michelle Williams, A Place in Hell
Sandra Huller, Fatherland
Inde Navarrette, Obsession
Supporting Actress
Sandra Huller, Project Hail Mary
Anne Hathaway, The Odyssey
Penelope Cruz, La Bola Negra
Lupita Nyong’o, The Odyssey
Parker Posey, Wild Horse Nine
Supporting Actor
Paul Giamatti, The Debut
Jeremy Strong, The Social Reckoning
Sam Rockwell, Wild Horse Nine
Edward Norton, The Invite
Guitarricadelafuente, La Bola Negra
Have a very happy 4th to all who celebrate!
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