How the Academy Awards slant our views of movies
This has nothing to do with exalting the best films have to offer in a given year—and worse, it’s unfair to a movie like The Artist, which deserves better than to be batted around by oddsmakers or petty little twits like myself who are reacting more to its promotion than its substance. Every year, we let the Weinsteins dictate what is and isn’t important, and every year, from the Toronto Film Festival all the way through December and January, that dictation informs what people watch and what’s deemed “important”—a set of criteria that falls within the narrow parameters of “Oscar-worthiness,” outside of which nothing matters. The horse race takes over: The Tree Of Life is “dead” because it polarized critics and audiences too sharply; Drive is “dead” because it’s a violent genre film; Young Adult is “dead” because the lead character is too “unlikeable”; and on and on and on. We become stakeholders instead of advocates, accepting the calculations of major studios with still more calculation on the other end.
(via: meetmeinmalkovich | coenbrosbeforehos)
