None of these stars won – so what is the point of the Oscars?

Here are some names: Alfred Hitchcock, Tom Cruise, Glenn Close, Howard Hawks, Richard Burton, Christopher Nolan, Harrison Ford, Marlene Dietrich. And some films: It’s a Wonderful Life, Don’t Look Now, The Shining, The Shawshank Redemption, Heat, and Singin’ in the Rain. What one thread binds these titans and milestones of popular cinema? That’s right: their collective competitive Oscar count is nil.

In other words, the event whose only purpose since 1929 has been to identify the best movies and movie-makers around somehow failed to recognise any of the above. Nor is this a historical problem: the institution’s roughly 9,500 voting members have arguably never looked more out of step with public opinion, judging by both the annual social-media blow-ups over diversity and their recently flagrant lack of interest in the films most widely embraced by ordinary cinema-goers.

Take last year’s Best Picture winner – and don’t worry, I’ll give you a moment to remember what it was. CODA was held up as a breakthrough for technology (distributed by Apple TV+, it was the first streaming victor), representation (its deaf characters were played by deaf actors) and championing new talent (it was only writer-director Sian Heder's second feature). But has anyone so much as thought about it since the 2022 ceremony, let alone watched it? And 12 months on, could any voter look at it alongside its fellow nominees – Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, Denis Villeneuve’s Dune and Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog among them – and honestly say to themselves, “yup, job done, we picked the best of the bunch?”

What’s more, the public have noticed. The ceremony’s viewing figures have been in freefall since – funnily enough – the shift around ten years ago towards more niche nominees. Last year’s edition was watched live by 15.36 million: an audience just over a third of the size of the one that saw 12 Years a Slave win in 2014. And what do we talk about afterwards? Everything that went wrong: envelope mix-ups, dreadful speeches, live on-stage violence.

So in light of all that, what purpose can the Oscars still possibly serve? What is the point of them? That’s the question we put to various people from all across and adjacent to the film industry. And while there was no consensus view, one theme emerged: thanks to both recent socio-political shifts and the effects of the pandemic, the institution has arrived at a tipping point, and its future credibility rests on how it navigates the next sticky few years.

‘Shouldn’t they be making us want to see these films?’

Director, recently multi-Oscar-nominated film

My biggest issue is that recent Oscar and BAFTA ceremonies have all but given up on celebrating the films that get nominated. They pay them lip service sometimes, but usually the show isn’t interested in contextualising the nominees or even showing clips.

Shouldn’t they be making us want to see them? One way of doing that would be to show all of the awards categories live, with their relevant clips and give each winner their moment – and I’m hopeful this year they may actually do it again. To compress those parts into a montage, or even worse, the ad breaks, feels like they’re giving up and making just another entertainment show. This is also a big issue at the Baftas, compounded by the fact that the awards season calendar itself is partly to blame for viewer ennui, since it’s impossible for the audience to root for films which haven’t been released yet. It’s a huge problem that the season can feel hermetically sealed off from the general public. That’s why Everything Everywhere All at Once would make such a refreshing Best Picture winner: it was released last April and May, and found its audience completely independently of the usual campaign mechanisms.

‘To ignore Avengers: Endgame felt like a serious error’

Tim Richards
Founder and CEO, Vue International

If 99 percent of the population love a film, it seems strange for the industry that made it to say that they’re wrong, so the Oscars’ failure to reflect popular taste makes them look out of touch. And I think they’ve finally started to realise that – so while in 2020, to have ignored Avengers: Endgame outside of the visual effects category felt like a serious error to me, this year we have extraordinary commercial films like Avatar and Top Gun: Maverick being nominated for Best Picture, which is unquestionably a good thing. It’s healthy that the concept of excellence is no longer as exclusive as it has been at times in the last couple of decades.

In our business we see the impact support from the Oscars can have all the time: just look at Belfast last year, a black-and-white autobiographical piece about the Troubles which ended up taking £16 million. What the Academy must now be clear with the public on is what they actually count as a film, because for titles that don’t receive meaningful theatrical releases we already have the Emmys and TV Baftas. It should be a celebration of work, big and small, with an authentic big-screen presence.

‘Rewarding films nobody’s seen doesn’t make the Oscars irrelevant’

Cameron McCracken
Producer, Slumdog Millionaire, The Queen, Selma, Philomena; managing director Pathe UK

If you’re a studio or cash-rich streamer, an Oscar is still something nice to have – it’s glossy and glamorous; a Kitemark of quality. But when you’re making independent films, it’s so much more than just prestige. We don’t have the marketing resources to ensure our films get in front of as many eyes as possible, so to have them talked about in awards season is critical to them finding their audience.

Have the Oscars’ relevance changed in recent years? No, but their impact has, largely due to the pandemic. The audience for my films is mostly 45 and older, and since they haven’t yet entirely returned to cinemas, being in the Oscar conversation is important to persuade people that yes, these are cultural events, worth watching as communal experiences.

But I reject the criticism they’ve made themselves irrelevant by rewarding films nobody’s seen. We might wish that a film like Tár could make $200 million at the US box office, but it was never going to happen. What’s important is that thanks to being in the Oscar mix, it found a far bigger audience than it otherwise might have.

‘Singin’ in the Rain didn’t win a single Oscar - that says it all’

Samira Ahmed
Broadcaster; presenter, Front Row

The only thing I tell people they need to know about the Oscars is that Singin’ in the Rain didn’t win a single one. Though we talk about them going through different phases, they get things wrong with extraordinary consistency: their most highly acclaimed films are often looked back on with embarrassment just a few years later, as if the industry somehow fell for a ruse. At the 1999 ceremony the Italian Holocaust comedy Life is Beautiful was a phenomenon, and of course also made an enormous amount of money, but it’s now widely regarded as sentimental. So it’s not as if the Oscars are any more pointless now than they ever were – though it now feels that every other film awards ceremony is trying to be the Oscars, which makes them feel less special. When truly great films are recognised in the longer term, that process has little if anything to do with awards.

‘As soon as a film gets even one nomination, it finds a larger audience’

Awards strategist, major studio

For the industry, the only way to look at it is this: do they still get more people to watch what we make, which is the whole point of our business? And they do. As soon as you get even one nomination attached to a film, it immediately finds a larger audience. Have the voters recently become too focused on films that only a small group of people care about? Absolutely. So if Top Gun: Maverick wins this year, that would be great for Hollywood, for the Academy, for the audience. But should Marvel expect to be nominated purely because they’re popular? No, because clearly the quality isn’t there. It’s about striking a balance without dumbing down – it really has to feel like the best of the best, and it’s crucial the industry rises to that challenge.

And regardless of the recent controversies, for the filmmakers I deal with, they still matter enormously. The only thing remotely comparable to an Oscar nomination in terms of a prestigious career high is being programmed in competition at Cannes. And I love that they keep us talking about certain films and filmmakers for quite a long time: in a culture with a notoriously short attention span, that’s a pretty awesome thing to still be able to achieve.

‘I wouldn’t want to watch it if it were on at tea time, never mind 2am’

Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode 
Presenters, Kermode & Mayo’s Take

Kermode: Here’s the thing: if you genuinely thought Driving Miss Daisy was the best thing cinema had to offer in 1989, you’d simply give up on cinema as an art form. So what the Oscars have historically been useful for – and I say this as someone who thinks all film awards ceremonies are essentially ridiculous – is showing what sort of films the industry collectively dislikes the least.

Mayo: You might say Green Book was a more recent example.

Kermode: Which was very much the Driving Miss Daisy of its year.

Mayo: “This time, the racist’s in the front.”

Kermode: Having said that, the fact they seem to be trying to get their house in order is a good thing. Here’s how my position has changed: while I used to find the whole exercise absurd, I now think that – much like critics – they don’t matter at all, beyond the fact that they can draw attention to smaller films that would otherwise be overlooked.

Mayo: My difficulty with this question is it’s very difficult to express vehement indifference. Yes, the results are sometimes quite interesting, often more so for who isn’t picked than is, but as for the ceremony itself, I just can’t be doing with it – I wouldn’t want to watch it if it were on at tea time, never mind 2am. But as a letter to the podcast this week pointed out, every industry has its own awards, so there’s no reason to expect film to be any different.

‘For our film, the Oscars couldn’t have mattered more’

Cleona Ní Chrualaoi
Producer, The Quiet Girl (best international feature nominee)

Do the Oscars still matter? For our film, they couldn’t have mattered more. We’ve been touring with The Quiet Girl since it premiered at Berlin last February, but it was only when we were selected as Ireland’s entry in Best International Feature that things became crazy. We were picked up for distribution in all sorts of countries we’d have struggled to be noticed by otherwise. And the response in the United States has been amazing: we’ve been doing sold-out Q&A screenings in 400-seater cinemas, which for a film like ours is no sure thing. Of course, for the careers of everybody involved, it’s been hugely beneficial. But the encouragement and motivation it’s given to others working in the industry in Ireland has also been a huge, important additional boost.

‘The financial returns alone make it more than worthwhile’

Awards strategist, independent distributor

There were 301 films eligible for this year’s ceremony, and we work on the assumption that almost no voters are going to watch more than a core group of 25. So the crucial part for us is getting our films onto that list. And once you do so, the financial returns alone make it more than worthwhile, whether it actually goes on to win anything or not.

With one of our titles this year, every time an Oscar-related piece of news dropped about it, we saw a bump in ticket sales, online rentals, or DVD purchases. But what we’ve found in recent years is the nominations themselves are no longer enough: you have to build a story around them where watching the film makes people feel a genuine connection to its success. Just having one of the cast take the fifth spot in one of the acting categories won’t cut it.

‘As a kid, I used to be spellbound by the glitz and the glamour. Recently, I have started to feel like that again’

Edith Bowman
Broadcaster; presenter of Soundtracking podcast

One of the Oscars’ biggest issues at the moment is that the Academy seems to have forgotten how important the ceremony still is when it comes to shaping how the world feels about the business it represents. So last year, when they didn’t meaningfully respond to the Will Smith slap, and he was up on the stage collecting his prize a few minutes later, it left a sour taste that went far beyond the incident itself. And I think a lot of us still want to be swept up in it – when I watched the Oscars as a kid I was spellbound by the glitz and glamour, and who ended up winning seemed to matter a lot less than who was there. As the range of nominees has broadened in the last few years, I’ve started feeling like that again, because claiming to reveal who objectively gave the best performance out of Cate Blanchett and Michelle Yeoh is obviously daft.

‘A three to four-hour pageant of people in tuxedos thanking their agents is just not where the culture is’

Richard Rushfield
Editorial director of Hollywood newsletter The Ankler

First of all, it’s time to accept this is a legacy tradition. Unless something dramatically changes, a three to four-hour pageant of people in tuxedos thanking their agents is just not where the culture is for anyone under 50. However, in the meantime, it remains the event that launches 1,000 memes, headlines and red-carpet photos every year, so it’s still a chance to send a message about The Power of Movies.  Within that, it projects an image of Hollywood as the world's capital of glamour and giant-scale storytelling. But from an industry perspective, The Oscars play a hugely important role.  Hollywood is fuelled very much by the money of billionaires who decide one day that what they and their companies should be doing is making movies. And when they have that thought, the image they see is themselves accepting an Academy Award before an audience of the world's most beautiful people. And that is why it is crucial for this industry that the Oscar show goes on.

The Academy Awards will be shown live on Sky Showcase and NOW TV from midnight on Monday