Everybody’s office Oscar pool organizer was thrown into a panic yesterday when it was reported that the Academy Awards will feature ten films as nominees for Best Picture rather than five. All those movies? How will they fit ? We might have to run a double-sided ballot next year. Think of the toner wasted! This expansion of the category is a return to the format that was popular during the “Golden Years” of Hollywood, back a half century ago. As the NY Times remarks:
“This year “The Dark Knight,” a critically acclaimed blockbuster fantasy, did not make the final list of nominees that included “Frost/Nixon,” “Milk,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” “The Reader” and the eventual winner, “Slumdog Millionaire.”
None of those films were as widely seen as “The Dark Knight” or the animated “Wall-E,” another favorite that was snubbed by the best-picture category, adding heat to a debate about whether the Oscar voters had drifted too far from the moviegoing public.
In essence, this is an attempt to honor the films that attract the widest audiences (and consequently the widest possible TV audience for the Oscars). But do those films need an award? Are they somehow “better” because they were more popular? Is the point of an award to be populist or to reward quality? Aren’t awards, by their very nature, elitist? I wonder how much of this shift is a response to the way we now view criticism. With the decline in influence of newspaper movie critics and the rise of aggregating sites like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, perhaps the Academy was responding to the notion that the public has a great say in what a “good movie” is. I’m not sure I agree with this idea, but it’s interesting nonetheless.
I gave up on the Academy Awards years ago, in 1994, to be exact. That was the year that Forrest Gump beat Pulp Fiction, Quiz Show and The Shawshank Redemption, three vastly superior movies, for Best Picture. They’re like a lot of other awards: sometimes they get it right, and sometimes Crash wins. But this move by the Academy got me thinking about how expanding the field could really enhance the value of the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and especially The Pulitzer Prize (which doesn’t even make its nominees public until after the award is given). Here’s my thinking on this: according to the Times piece, there were roughly 300 movies produced that were in contention for last year’s Oscars, meaning that under the old system 1 in 60 was nominated for the prize and under the new system, that ratio changes to 1 in 30.
But the number of novels published every year is far, far greater than the number of movies produced (for pretty obvious reasons). According to a recent study by Bowker, there were over 47000 works of fiction published in 2008 (and that was an 11% drop from 2007). There were five books nominated for the National Book Award in fiction. One might be tempted to say that this means that something in the order of 1 in 9400 are nominated for the prize. But this isn’t exactly true, as the National Book Awards don’t cull from the full pool of fiction. Out of that ocean of stories, only 271 works of fiction were submitted by publishers for consideration. So the ratio of considered books to nominated is actually roughly what it was for the Academy Awards before the Best Picture expansion.
The Academy Awards are expanding to become “more relevant,” and while that might dilute the value of a Best Picture nomination, it will likely raise the casual moviegoer’s interest in the award and the ceremony itself. Would expanding the field for these prominent literary awards do the same? I’m not arguing, necessarily, that it would be any more or less helpful in finding “the best book,” as those types of distinctions are inherently subjective. Rather, having a broader field would give more readers a horse in the race, and at this point, it seems to me that anything that gets people interested in reading and in books is a good thing. The argument the Academy is using to justify its expansion to a field of ten is that now more comedies and more animated films will get a shot at the big prize. Would the same happen in books? If we expanded the field, might we see the best of sci-fi, mystery and thriller nominated along the usual “literary” novels? Would that be such a bad thing? Perhaps, in this instance, the publishing industry should take a cue from Hollywood. Just don’t nominate the novelization of Transformers 2.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Hm. Like you, I’m not sure whether enlarging the field of nominees would result in the selection of “better” books, because, like you said, that’s so darn subjective anyway. I’m pretty anti-snobbery when it comes to book — in fact, I just wrote a comment on the Book Maven blog railing against Sonya Chung for being elitist. And I think it would be good to broaden the field of nominees, because I think more choices means the process will be more fair and more interesting. I also believe that genre or even crossover novels are often discriminated against (probably because the people who pick the awardees don’t often read genre fiction).
But. I don’t think that gaining a wider audience, by itself, should be a criterion for the big book awards. From what I understand, there’s more pressure than ever in the publishing industry (heck, in every kind of media) for books to be commercially viable. The big book awards seem to be among the last strongholds against that pressure.
I’m pretty sure people have gotten hysterical about the death of “high culture” dozens of times in the past, and they’ve always turned out to be wrong. Good art still gets made, and good books are still written, despite commercial pressures. Nor are quality and commercial viability necessarily mutually exclusive.
But I don’t think it’s overreacting to say that the book awards are one of the few arenas in which books that are brilliant, but perhaps more challenging than what the wider public likes to read, are paid attention to and rewarded. If even the Pulitzer Committee gives in to the pressure to be more “accessible,” then I worry that a domino effect will begin and we’ll end up in a world where no one’s motivated to write anything unique or difficult, because not only will it not make them rich, it won’t even be recognized as good art, since all the arbiters of “good art” will long have sold out.
It’s one in the morning, and I’m not making much sense. But I really want to see what other readers have to say about this!!
Hear hear. I’d love to see a wider scope of writers being recognized. Also, I think the National Book Award should change the actual award itself to a tiny little golden statue of a person walking down the street, reading a book.
I do like that tiny gold statue idea.
The Academy is just trying to increase stalling ad revenue. But of course advertising $ is down, welcome to the real world and everyone elses’ lives. Lowering the quality of the product is no way to increase revenues. The decision is just going to devalue the Academy’s award currency. This video explains the situation better
http://www.newsy.com/videos/658 .
If this is how the entertainment industry is going to cope with low ad revenue, it’s the beginning of the end.