Death to Oscar Talk

It's barely October and the Oscar prognostica-crap has already begun. Can't we just be civilized and not treat cinema like a sporting event? Yeah, that’s right, I said cinema.

I’m one of the lucky few who makes a living out of moviegoing and movie-writing – and yes, I count them lucky stars every day for the gig. All year I look forward to the exceptionally good stuff that comes down the pike from fall through to winter, and I thrill at the screeners that appear in my mailbox, like Santa doing double-time, and the end-of-the-year screenings where 2 and 3 movies a day are watched in a delicious fever. But that enjoyment is severely dampened by all the awards talk that attends it – and these days, it’s attending it ever earlier, like those goddamned Christmas carols they pipe in at the mall before Halloween has even touched down. 

Actually, “talk” would be fine; what happens on the Internet, on the websites of print publications I respect and blogs I read religiously, is some unholy amalgam of speculation, Vegas-style number-running, and seeming-adults playing a child’s game of phone tag.

You know what? It’s bad enough that the studios watch this shit like a hawk, because their knee-jerk reactions to slow-building movies’ box office or which way the web traffic winds are blowing directly result in a timidness to greenlight future challenging, not easy-to-package adult entertainment. (No, not that kind of adult entertainment.) But for critics and journalists to engage in this kind of color commentary is noxious. It normalizes and codifies a system already mightily infected by celebrity journalism (celebrity obsession) and a day-of reckoning of success determined by numbers and the pollyanna tides of favor.

For fuck’s sake, y’all. We got into this because we love movies. And the idea of loving movies just doesn’t square with this unseemly business of haggling over a movie’s shot at winning awards. I’m not averse to the idea of picking favorites – I vote yearly in the Austin Film Critics Association awards ballot, and I lovingly assemble my own best-of-year list. Because those movies mean something to me, and have nothing to do with a business-end jockeying.  

Who’s front-running for this or that award; who blew their chances by not currying favor; who shot their wad too early out the gate (often by way of the web cabal over-trumpeting them) – what does it even matter? Or rather, why should it matter to us? A movie just is. It’s there for critics to love or to hate, to champion or to take to task, and, ideally, to have a spirited debate over. And isn’t the Internet a marvelous tool for enabling that debate? 

Well, for the most part, an emphatic yes. But when you have to wade through a mountain of awards speculation to get to that kernel, then frankly I’d rather go back to watching movies in a web-free vacuum, nudging instead my seatmate for his or her reaction. I’d rather re-engage with the pleasure of that communal experience than have the enjoyment of my regular web community sullied by all those dumb couch quarterbacks.

Screed over. Now let’s go see a movie.