Neil Calloway claims that the Academy Awards are more important than you might think…
Tonight is the 89th Academy Awards, the industry prize giving ceremony that everyone knows as the Oscars (for obscure reasons – nobody is quite sure why they’re called that, with competing origin stories for the nickname). I would argue it’s the most important event of the year.
I don’t mean the most important event in the film industry, I mean the most important event in the calendar. Obviously, bigger things happen, but they aren’t annual events. Elections only come every four or five years, the World Cup and Olympics is only ever four years. You might argue that the Super Bowl is bigger, but how many people outside the US care? Who won it this year? It probably takes you longer to remember that than how many Oscars certain films have won. No shop sells little fake Grammy Awards, but you can pick up an ersatz Oscar at every souvenir kiosk on the planet. You think Leonardo DiCaprio cared about his Golden Globes win for The Wolf of Wall Street after he won an Oscar for The Revenant?
The Oscars give a unique snapshot of Western culture, politics and morals at the time they are given out. It’s easy (and fun) to look back and think “Why did that film win Best Picture?” when seemingly better films were overlooked. The Oscars aren’t about giving a gong to a film that will be remembered by history, they’re about projecting to the world how America sees itself at that given moment in time, or about what Hollywood wants people to think of it at that point in history. Braveheart is a now seen as a laughably bad film (and it works even worse as a history lesson), but it won five awards. It doesn’t matter – those arguments are for the pub and for late night discussions with anonymous blokes online. Like it or not, its wins are set in stone.
The Academy Awards are not like the Olympics, where medals can be rescinded and awarded to other people if it turns out the winner took performance enhancing drugs. It may be incomprehensible that someone was given an Oscar (or that another actor missed out), but at the time it made perfect sense; in a town that loves stories each ceremony has its own narrative that works at the time. Acceptance speeches become part of popular culture, to be mocked and parodied forever; they become part of an actor’s persona; the one who cried when she won, the one who was a bit over the top, the one who made a political statement when they won that made them look a bit silly (we’ll get plenty of that this year).
The Oscars are a bit of fluff, an industry awards ceremony gone wild, but they also tell us more about the world and the times we live in than you might think.
Neil Calloway is a pub quiz extraordinaire and Top Gun obsessive. Check back here every Sunday for future instalments.
Originally published February 26, 2017. Updated April 16, 2018.
