An article for Artslink...

Money's Made of Miramax
There are currently enough film awards ceremonies to wallpaper Mount Everest, but what’s the point if the best don’t win?

“All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” How sad that Shakespeare never expanded on this idea, as today it seems we’re lucky if actors are players at all. Clothes-horses, models, party-goers, today’s ‘stars’ are just that: replaceable newspaper filler. The whirl of the awards ceremony has overtaken performance in terms of popular interest, as magazines spend a good ten pages assessing the outfits while the results get slotted in somewhere inconspicuous next to Celine Dion.

Media organisations the world over have awards presentations coming out of their ears, rewarding the brightest and best (or most unfeasibly chested) with enough ceremonies to mark each day of their year and well into the next. There are of course the ones with obvious clout that can further the course of the winner’s career immeasurably – the Tonys are tellingly on the same day as the D’Oscars this year – but who decided which ones actually mean something? Wouldn’t it just be easier to give everyone a lollipop and a pat on the back?

This would of course be missing the point entirely: with this many ceremonies, it’s a survival of the fittest in terms of glossing up your product. Heaven forbid it should be enough to be reviewed well, now you have to consolidate that with an Oscar and several ‘lesser’ awards to back it up. Today’s cinema goers are so spoilt for choice that it’s not longer a case of picking something that sounds good but the one with the most decorations. Reviews lie after all – how many people expected ‘Matrix Reloaded’ to be good?

In the case of the Academy Awards, the losers are often leagues better than the winners, but we’ve got quite used to seeing good films overlooked and think of it as just the Academy’s way. For every hit (eg;
(‘American Beauty’) you’ve got a veritable slew of misses or worse: rewarding someone for a performance entirely inferior to their capabilities (Gwyneth Paltrow). This is the tendency, but is that acceptable thinking? Surely the role of awards is to reward the best, not the ones with the most screenings or ad campaigns backing them up (I’m looking at you Miramax).
You can spot an Oscar contender a mile off: a worthy topic, stars putting on weight or losing it and jam-packed with drama - which made up 49% of nominated films between 1927-2001. In short, take a challenging (but not too much) subject and dumb it down for a middle-class middle-aged audience, but make them feel they’ve broadened their horizons by doing so. Not too broad or you’ve got a ‘The Color Purple’ on your hands (11 nominations, no wins). The recent piracy furore has meant screen copies of films on DVD may no longer be made available to Academy members so that unless they live near a damn good cinema, smaller films may not get a shot at all unless picked up by the critics.

The Academy has a phobia of anything remotely innovative touching the principle category winners – ‘The Jazz Singer’ lost out to silent film ‘Wings’ for being too “newfangled” - regarding a nomination to be sufficient reward for the obviously outstanding outsiders but leaving the actual trophy to go to something safe (the first ‘LOTR’ missing out to ‘A Beautiful Mind’ was typical.) With over 5,700 members voting the Academy should be far less predictable – a small board of crusty old WASPs I could understand, but some of the oversights made by this many voters are little short of outrageous. I don’t mean taking the caring beard stance and voting solely for ginger-balding-black-transsexual-one-legged Europeans with a lisp, but some variation on the traditional solidly-marketed Miramax output would be welcome – if it were merited. You could almost hear the Academy bursting with pride at its own broadmindedness when Denzel Washington and Halle Berry won two years ago, but as usual they missed the point entirely: Berry was in a typical Oscar winner’s role (no make-up, courageous, single mother yada yada ) and in an indie film i.e. she wins, we don’t have to nominate it. Forget Denzel, Morgan Freeman should have won years ago.

Despite all this, the Oscars continue to be the last bastion of acceptance for actors everywhere – who can forget Sally Field’s butt-clenching “You like me, right now, you like me!” Well, most of us really, it was 1985 after all but you see my point. Who really gives a crap about the BAFTAS, Césars or Empires when everyone’s gagging for a bite of the apple that counts? The BAFTAS made a cunning bid at importance by situating itself ahead of the Oscars, but the fact remains that their value is not primarily as an award in itself, but as an indication of who might be tearfully thanking God the next month. Even they are taking after the Oscars in the conservative nature of their nominations with all Best Picture nominees this year being blockbusting high budget films, or ‘Lost in Translation’.

It’s a typically naive form of idealism that hopes for quality to be recognised over quantity, but until films get greater exposure and true talent is rewarded, money and Miramax are going to continue keeping the world spinning. That board of WASPs may be slightly bigger than previously thought.