When news got out last week that the Academy were making a new award category for “Achievements In Popular Films”, most people, including us, assumed it was because the Academy didn’t want to sully their pure, beautiful awards with peanut-gallery filth like The Avengers.
It turns out that not only may that not be true, we may actually have someone more deserving to blame. Speaking to Vanity Fair, an anonymous member of the Academy has said that the new award has more to do with fixing a decades-old problem with the Oscars, that can be traced back to mega-producer and alleged rapist Harvey Weinstein.
For context: in 1999, the Harvey Weinstein-produced Shakespeare In Love won the Best Picture Oscar, beating out the favourite for the award, Steven Speilberg’s big-budget WWII drama Saving Private Ryan.
Where the latter film invested heavily in its production, resulting in commercial success, Weinstein instead invested in political-style campaigning for votes among Academy members.
As the source puts it, Weinstein’s win set a precedent for the years following.
“When you look at the best-picture nominees [now], they are all a bunch of movies that no one saw. In a way, this goes back to one of the many things that is the legacy of Harvey Weinstein… He created a type of movie which is not a well-known film by the general public, but gerrymanders the different voting blocks perfectly so they would win the Oscar for many years.”
According to the source, this is a problem the Oscars have been trying to fix for years, hoping to return to the days when good quality films had significant production budgets and were as high-profile as any other blockbuster fare.
Or as the source puts it, “Studios that used to make movies like The Godfather and The Bridge on the River Kwai, and they don’t do that anymore, and that’s bad for the ecology of cinema.” Which is a pretty valid point, to be honest.
The anonymous source does make sense, despite being “anonymous”.
The Academy member does admit that it is all an experiment, and – like the time they expanded the Best Picture nomination to ten awards after Batman got snubbed – could very well blow up in their faces.
But frankly, if it means one less thing that Harvey Weinstein has ruined, then I’m all for it.