I reluctantly have to agree with James Cameron, who recently said that there is “definitely a bias” at the Academy against blockbusters and in favour of prestige dramas that don’t make a lot of money. The website Box Office Mojo backs him up starkly: the highest-earning Oscar nominees of 2016 only lurch into view at numbers 23 (Hidden Figures), 24 (La La Land) and 29 (Arrival), with the rest thinly spread out between 65 (Fences) and 97 (Lion).
Out there in the multiplexes, Marvel does battle with DC Entertainment, while at the Oscars, Moonlight faces off against Manchester By The Sea. The two contests never have anything to do with one another. Once in a while, a phenomenon like Cameron’s Titanic will hit the double, slaying them in the stalls and lighting a fire under the ageing voter base of the Academy, then romping off with multiple awards including best picture.
But what if a baseline of commercial success were required to earn a best picture nomination? How would things shake out if we adhered to that particularly Trumpian taxonomy of raw commercial performance above all else? At the top of the list, the billion-dollar big guns: franchises, superhero movies, animated kid-flicks and single-serving comedies – the whole high-calorie/low nutritional monoculture diet the studios would prefer us to subsist on, like docile teenage boys easily distracted by big bangs and shiny objects. If the target figure for Oscar consideration was $100m domestic gross and above, only Hidden Figures and La La Land would still make the running, and they’d be duking it out with Rogue One (over half a billion) and Finding Dory (nearly half), Captain America: Civil War ($408m) and The Secret Life Of Pets ($368m). Many big hits drew terrible or middling reviews (paging Suicide Squad and Jason Bourne), proving again that we out-of-touch, eat-your-greens critics are irrelevant, and that Academy voters who listen to us are idiots.
Well, someone has to speak up for the snobs, so it may as well be me. Why don’t we just award best picture to the most expensive movie of the year, no matter if it bombed? The happiest movie? Only sequels numbering VII and above? An all-remakes slate? Kung Fu Panda 3 for the win? These have about as much validity – ie none at all – as the blockbuster idea. When blockbuster movies transcend their CGI, green-screen origins and pack a punch to the heart or the mind, by all means vote away for them. Until then, relax, big boys, you already have all the money; you can’t have all the prizes, too.
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