The ‘outstanding achievement in popular film’ Oscar

johnny_ultimate

There’s a new Oscar category on the way...

https://twitter.com/theacademy/status/1027213530842517504?s=21

I’d usually post something longer here, but feel this is one worth opening to the floor first...

A desperate move to reclaim relevancy? A sensible move to make the awards more accessible and populist? Need more details?

*insert Adam Sandler joke here*

megaten

Seems ridiculous. Wasn't expanding the number of entries for best film meant to achieve the same thing?

pixelburp

What does "outstanding achievement in popular film" even mean? It sounds so ambiguous as to be meaningless.

Achievement in what? Box-office takings? Most cocaine snorted? Fewest sexual assaults? Best onscreen fart joke?

Sad Professor

Other changes: Tech awards will be presented during the commercial breaks, and the ceremony is being moved to early February which may screw up the strategy of late December token releases.

The new category seems like a good idea IMO. The mid budget prestige film is dead. The films that win Oscars now tend to be scrappy little indie movies. This new category may result in prestige-esque blockbusters - Nolan type movies which was the original impetus behind expanding the Best Pictures entries.

Sad Professor

Ha!

https://twitter.com/AnnoDracula/status/1027228993299341312

brevity

It's seems like it's an award for the good blockbuster movies.

The cynic in me is wondering is Disney involved.

megaten

brevity wrote: »

It's seems like it's an award for the good blockbuster movies.

The cynic in me is wondering is Disney involved.

Would Disney not be opposed? Best Animation was basically created to prevent them from winning best picture.

brevity

megaten wrote: »

Would Disney not be opposed? Best Animation was basically created to prevent them from winning best picture.

I'm guessing that their Star Wars movies and Marvel movies would be included in this category.

S.M.B.

AKA The Mission Impossible Award.

Harry Palmr

Given the BP now goes to a film which will turnover about 50m dollars at the US box office this smacks of desperation - tapping into the Peoples Choice Awards market.

Sad Professor

S.M.B. wrote: »

AKA The Mission Impossible Award.

More like Black Panther.

Arghus

Sounds like a right fudge to try to get more people tuning in. Surely copious box office returns should count as reward enough.

Rjd2

This is bollocks personified. They could quite easily now and then include the blockbusters which at times are just as good as the critical darlings which **** all people tune in to see.

If a virtue signalling turd like A Shape Of Water wins this year, why would it be so awful that Black Panther a superior film that people actually seen won the main event next year?

Agent Coulson

Should it not be a #Award.

p to the e

Why no "achievement in not-so popular film" award?

My first cynical thoughts are that this is an attempt to ensure Black Panther gets an award and that America really is a funny place.

My second more rational thought is that this is just clever marketing to get people talking about the Oscars and they will eventually rescind. We'll wait and see.

Frank O. Pinion

...but there's nothing currently preventing Best Nominees to also be "popular films". Why award something that made a billion dollars, if it's actually a crap film? Why not just have a "Special Presentation: Disney Film of The Year" award.

GavRedKing

Ryan Reynolds Deadpool 2, baby legs.

:pac:

correction

A desperate attempt to save viewership, which won't even work.

If anything it will only serve to kill off what little prestige the Oscars still have.

Cookie_Monster

Rjd2 wrote: »

This is bollocks personified.

isn't that the oscars full stop?

johnny_ultimate

Sad Professor wrote: »

The films that win Oscars now tend to be scrappy little indie movies.

Not sure I’d agree with that. Moonlight is the only genuinely ‘scrappy’ winner in quite some time. Almost everything else in recent years would fit pretty snugly into the $15-20 million bracket - granted, maybe not as high as a prestige film used to command, but certainly mid-tier efforts with substantial financial backing behind them. If anything, Moonlight was a significant - and welcome! - suggestion that maybe small films can prevail against heavier hitters. As someone noted on Twitter, the worst part of the announcement seems to be that the Academy potentially saw Moonlight’s victory as a ‘bad thing’ rather than a good thing.

It is true, of course, that blockbusters are in a pretty hopeless spot when it comes to the Oscars. Most of the time that’s fine - Marvel films rarely boast much to write home about in terms of ‘film art’ or whatnot. It is a shame and rather absurd when films like Fury Road or Dunkirk feel like scrappy awards underdogs even when they’re clearly superior films to some of the films nominated alongside them. But potentially relegating them to the ‘popular’ category feels like a consolation prize, and arguably will make it even harder for the rare exceptional blockbuster titles to get a look-in in the ‘serious’ categories.

I’m generally siding with the ‘bad idea’ side on this one - seems like a flawed effort to solve a few problems - pending how it works in execution. The worst case scenario would see it as a further celebration of corporate medicority or worse. But hey, the Oscars aren’t exactly the barometer of the variety of great cinema out there anyway *shrugs*

correction

Doesn't the voting work whereby everyone selects one film they think should win and that's why we never end up getting 10 films nominated? If that is the case I would suggest a move to a points system where everyone has to pick 5 movies with their top pick getting the most points and all the points from all the voters being added up and leading to the top 10 voted for films getting nominated.

If everyone has to pick 5 films it's highly likely the deserving blockbusters will be nominated, although I'm not sure that's their intention.

two wheels good

Just heard Neil Jordon in an RTE interview suggesting the new category was an effort to award oscars to blockbusters and super-hero films.

p to the e

two wheels good wrote: »

Just heard Neil Jordan in an RTE interview suggesting the new category was an effort to award oscars to blockbusters and super-hero films.

kerplun k

Great move, I cant wait. this will inject some much needed energy into the The Academy Awards.

And the Oscar goes too...Bumblebee

This is the first win and oscar nomination for Michael Bay

**Michael Bay walks up to collect the awards from Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and Jason Statham and begins his long winded speech, but halfway throught a man comes over and wispers somthing into Michael Bays ear.

Michael Bay speaks
Wait, there's a mistake, AQUAMAN, you guys won Popular Film....This is not a joke, AQUAMAN has won Popular Film.

Riskymove

two wheels good wrote: »

Just heard Neil Jordon in an RTE interview suggesting the new category was an effort to award oscars to blockbusters and super-hero films.

it strikes me as pretty condescending really

"Best Popular but Crap Film"

two wheels good

p to the e wrote: »

.. snip ..

You do know who Neil Jordan is, don't you? (Apologies for previous mis-spelling.)

valoren

I think a better move would be a category called 'Academy Legacy Award'.

Where 5 movies released within the past 5 years get voted on. It would be labelled a legacy award but it would in reality be an award for a film that achieves a cult status among audiences. The negative connotations of cult are removed with legacy. The rub here being that films aren't contained to one calendar year, they are there to be enjoyed in the years ahead. You get to have the perpetually ignored comedies, blockbusters et al getting their due credit.

We all see movies that get released and are ignored by audiences and misunderstood by critics.
This category would give such films a second chance so to speak and recognize the films that finally find their audience. We all know Hollywood loves a comeback story.

There ought to be a hand wave approach to the actual quality of the film making as well. A movie-going world where something like 'The Room' is an Academy Award winning movie is a world I'd like to live in.

valoren

The problem with the Oscars is that there is now a saturation of award ceremonies.

The Academy Awards arrive at the tail end of the award season where the majority of the industry awards have already been awarded e.g. there is a high probability that the best editing Oscar will go to the editor(s) who have already won the ACE award. Effectively it is the same voting block of editors voting again. Same goes for the major awards such as the DGA, SAG and PGA awards, the winners of which typically win the Oscar.

What this means is that we can foretell with a high accuracy who will be taking home the Oscars due to the litany of these ceremonies and thus the suspense is nullified completely with very few surprise winners. This is due course leads to an ever increasing disinterest with viewers. For example, who wants to watch an interpretive dance routine between categories we all but know who wins.

The Golden Globes is the fore runner for the award season. It's a great watch, informal, errudite and seems to be what the Oscars of golden era Hollywood used to be i.e. a piss up. If the Oscars wish to regain it's audience it needs to be the leading ceremony, not the last. To achieve that perhaps a Thanksgiving Day cut off for release dates could become a pre-requisite for a nomination with the ceremony held in mid January to get a jump on the industry awards. Who might win would be completely unknown. If anything those subsequent awards would either serve as a confirmation of the Oscar win or a correction within the industry itself.

Sleepy

I'd have thought the best way to improve the Best Picture Oscar would be to put movies into weight-classes based on their budgets or similar so having a "Best Indie (sub $10m budget)", "Best Middle-weight $10m - $99m", "Best Blockbuster $100m+"

dublinman1990

The academy could say here that the viewership numbers for last years ceremony have continuously dropped in the ratings partly because people are streaming TV online in the U.S. It is not known how many people are streaming the ceremony when it's broadcast in the U.S. because streaming figures are not included for main linear TV viewership. The potential streaming viewership for The Oscars there is very much unknown because that potential viewership could watch something else via Netflix, Amazon Prime or other streaming services to pass their time. The ceremony could than become lost in a sea of shows on the internet because there is a much bigger chance that this stuff become largely ignored by the viewing public because people have other reasons to watch or do something else in their spare time.

pixelburp

Well that didn't last:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/academy-postponing-new-popular-oscar-category-1140423

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is postponing the introduction of the new “popular” Oscar category it had intended to introduce at its upcoming 91st Academy Awards on Feb. 24.
...
The announcement explained that implementing the new award nine months into the year "created challenges for films that have already been released." The Academy did not provide any timeline for when further details about the new award might be decided.

Sounds like fluff for a reaction they weren't expecting / hoping for,