Similarly with the Golden Globes, you can only pick from what is in front of you. The Oscar Nominations for the 2023 Academy Awards have released today and they are expectedly bland and unlikely to draw any major interest from the general public.
Maybe I’m being too harsh against the Academy, but they really missed the boat with these nominations.
Yes, there are some great shoutouts such as All Quiet on the Western Front, Top Gun: Maverick, and Everything Everywhere All at Once (EEAAO) getting Best Picture, Best Screenplay, some Best Actor/Actress nods, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, etc. nominations, Ana de Armas getting nominated for Best Actress for Blonde, Ke Huy Quan for Best Supporting Actor in EEAAO, Puss In Boots: The Last Wish and Guillmaro Del Torro’s Pinocchio getting Best Animated Feature nods, and The Batman getting Visual Effects and Sound nominations.
However, for every The Batman, Top Gun: Maverick, Ana de Armas, Puss In Boots: The Last Wish, All Quiet on the Western Front, etc. nominations, there’s fifteen nominations for movies and performances no one has heard about before the announcement release.
Not to call out too many nominees, but did anyone actually see Triangle of Sadness (Best Picture nominee), Women Talking (Best Picture Nominee), Tar (Best Picture Nominee), Andrea Riseborough (Best Actress nominee) in To Leslie, Paul Mescal (Best Actor nominee) in Aftersun, or Bill Nighy (Best Actor nominee) in Living (Best Picture nominee) prior to this year’s award season? I don’t think so.
In fact, I know so as of all the movies and performances I listed, only Triangle of Sadness broke a box office tally of $10M dollars, and that’s almost exclusively from the International Box Office as the movie is made by a Swedish director and film studio.
Women Talking didn’t crack the $1M threshold, Tar only made $6.3M despite having Cate Blanchett as the leading actress, Aftersun didn’t get to $3M, Living just managed to scrape $6M, and To Leslie didn’t even get $100k from the box office. Yes, you read that right, a Best Actress nominee starred in a movie that didn’t even receive $100k from theaters across the entire United States.
Obviously, you can’t place the value of a movie, actor, director, produce, actress, etc. from just the box office alone as many all-time classics weren’t hits when they first came out either. Nevertheless, there needs to be some cultural accomplishment (i.e.: a lot of people actually watching and liking the movie) for it to be considered by the Academy Awards, or else you get dud and boring completions and small viewership like we’ve seen these past few years.
Why would the general public, for whom these movies are made, want to watch an award show for movies and performances that they either never saw or didn’t like? Isn’t the purpose of a movie to impact the entertainment culture and industry in a profound, meaningful way that the general public mostly adores? I thought so.
Movies and performances should be rewarded for being fantastic on the grandest of stages (i.e.: being widely popular amongst the masses), not for being niche and small-scale.
Such thinking is like saying William Henry Harrison (8th US President and US general during the War of 1812) was a better general than Napoleon (who needs no introduction) because he never lost a battle, even though the only “major” battle he ever fought was against 1,700 British and Native American soldiers in one of the smallest wars of the Napoleonic Age.
There’s just no comparison, just like how Woman Talking, To Leslie, and movies like it can’t be compared to movies like Top Gun: Maverick.
Now, I will say that the Oscars nominations are the best of all the award shows this season as it gave recognition to great movies and performances like Top Gun: Maverick, Ana de Armas’ Marylin Monroe in Blonde, Puss In Boots: The Last Wish, The Batman (which should have been nominated for Best Picture), All Quiet On The Western Front, Everything Everywhere All At Once, and Guillermo Del Torro’s Pinocchio, but there’s a 5% chance all of these deserving nominees win.
Well, actually 0% as Puss In Boots and Pinocchio are in the same category, but you know what I mean.
The Best Picture is probably going to be Women Talking, the Best Actress will be Andrea Riseborough for her To Leslie performance, and Tar will win 7-8 Oscars. Like almost every year since 2015ish, the Academy Awards will once again award nominees that don’t represent the general public’s likes and interests.
I really hope I’m wrong, but I don’t think I will be.
Images Source: Featured Image: (Wikimedia Creative Commons License/Author: Amdrewcs81) (Amdrewcs81, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)
