What’s the Point of the Oscars?

By Nick George

Published May, 2021

The structure of this year’s Academy Awards was weird right from the start. Steven Soderbergh, famed director of films like Ocean’s Eleven and, perhaps more ironically, Contagion—a 2011 film that captures a global pandemic story very similar to the one we’ve all been fighting through—‘directed’ the Oscars this time around. Given the state of the world, the event was always going to be different, especially with the film landscape over the past year having been a far cry from the norm. For several of the movies that won, people had only seen them on streaming services or through digital renting, given the difficulties of traveling to a theater in 2020. Whereas the Academy would have been hard-pressed to consider non-theatrical releases in years past, this time around it was the only realistic option. Another big change was the venue. Since 2002, the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles has been home to the Oscars, but this year that title switched to Union Station, to stop the awards ceremony from becoming a super spreader event. The timing was also off, the ceremony having been pushed back two months to accommodate all the film delays. This meant that movies released in the first two months of 2021 were eligible to win at the 2021 Oscars, marking the first time since 1934 that films released in two calendar years were eligible for a win. So the style was different, the venue was new, and the timing was off; from the beginning, the 93rd Academy Awards were sure to be a very different story from what was expected.

And they were. The Oscars had numerous notable changes from the traditional event, some of them good and some of them not so good. What has everyone talking, though, are the ways in which the Academy chose to pay respect to the actors, crew, and other members of the film industry who passed away during 2020. One of the early bits of criticism was with the annual In Memoriam segment. Edited to the tempo of the Stevie Wonder song “As,” the section went by very quickly. Many people cited this as seeming disrespectful to the lost icons it was supposed to be paying respects to. The segment ended on Chadwick Boseman, a fairly young actor famous for his roles as Jackie Robinson and Black Panther, who tragically died last year after a four-year battle with colon cancer. Boseman had been posthumously nominated for Best Actor with his role as Levee Green in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and there was a growing expectation among audiences that he would receive the award. Boseman’s family had been invited to attend the event, and would accept the Oscar on his behalf should he win the award. In another change from the norm, the ceremony ended on the Best Actor category instead of the typical Best Picture, which “which” refers to Best Picture award here Anthony Hopkins ended up taking home for his role in The Father. Hopkins, eighty-three years old and currently based in Wales, was unable to attend the event and had been denied the ability to give a virtual acceptance speech. This meant that the award’s presenter, Joaquin Phoenix—last year’s Best Actor winner and notably socially awkward when it comes to these types of events—quickly accepted it on Hopkins’ behalf and ended the night.

This whole ordeal became the main point of criticism for this year’s awards ceremony, not because Boseman lost, but because of the way the night seemed to be building to that conclusion. The order change in the categories may have been a tragic but heart-warming moment if the last award had gone to Boseman, a representative tribute to not only him but also to all the great people who died too soon in 2020. Instead, the night ended with a winner who could not even be present at the ceremony, and the whole momentum of the event had been thrown off by the category changes, all leading to an anticlimactic conclusion. There were also multiple tributes to Boseman leading up to the event that added to the expectation of his posthumous win. Having seen The Father, I think Hopkins absolutely deserved the win for what was an extraordinarily compelling and unique performance, and that seems to be the popular consensus. The problem lies not with who took home the gold, but how the Academy’s structuring of the event led to a strange and jarring conclusion.

All this drama and the continuously-declining ratings of the Academy Awards have added to the growing conversation about whether ceremonies like this need to continue at all. Events highlighting celebrity achievements are not exactly at the forefront of the public consciousness these days. While there were definitely some wholesome qualities to the down-to-Earth nature of this year’s Oscars, the event as a whole now seems a little disorganized in hindsight. Do we really need to dedicate time and money to these kinds of achievements? Last year, I wrote an article on the diversity problems that had plagued the Academy Awards for decades. As our society begins to push more and more for the representation of different cultural perspectives in film, both in front of and behind the camera, the Oscars have had to make a greater effort to reflect this shift. In recent years, more films made by and about people of color have been nominated than in the previous eight decades. The same goes for films created by and starring women. Last year, Parasite, a South Korean movie, won Best Picture, breaking new ground for an award that had always gone to typical Hollywood American films. This year, Chloe Zhao became the first woman of color to win Best Director, and her win is only the second time that a woman has taken home that award. Zhao’s film Nomadland also went on to win Best Picture. For Minari, Yuh-Jung Youn became the first person from South Korea to win Best Supporting Actress and is only the second Asian actress to win the award. Mia Neal and Jamika Wilson became the first black women to win the Oscar for Best Make-Up and Hairstyling. The work is far from over, and it is a battle every year to ensure that different perspectives are appropriately considered, but the 2021 Oscars have proven that the work still continues. The push for diversity will always matter.

Despite all the issues with the Academy themselves, the disorganization of this year’s event, and the steadily-dropping ratings as ABC refuses to stream the event to a generation that simply does not have television, these award ceremonies still matter. Film is a transformative medium where we have the opportunity to immortalize unique cultural perspectives on the world, and the Academy Awards give us the opportunity to recognize the filmmakers and performers who have kept this art medium alive for well over a century. Even with all the politics, questionable decisions, and changes that DO absolutely need to be made, it is still vital that we continue to appreciate movies and the people that make them happen, no matter how crazy the world gets.