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Saturday Evening Movie Thread - 3/7/2026

The Oscars

A couple of years ago, I went through all of the Best Picture winners and wrote about the whole experience over the course of about a year. I've been revisiting the whole exercise recently with an eye towards this year's ceremony, and I think I've come away with new thoughts.

Firstly, I think One Battle After Another will win the big award. Why? Well, I still haven't seen it (that'll change if it wins, it's on HBO Max), but it won the Golden Globe, the PGA, and the DGA awards. It's historically unusual for a movie to win that much (the different organizations have a lot of overlapping voters) and lose. I don't really care. I've only seen Frankenstein, F1, Train Dreams, and Sinners from the list of nominees (I'd vote for Frankenstein out of the three I've seen).

However, the point of this is to wonder...why the hell should anyone care?

Cultural Relevance

Is it unusual to hear the message these days that no one cares? Not at all, so I know I'm not the first on that front. However, I think I've come up with some reasons that not many others have considered. The first and foremost is the self-conscious effort by the members of the Academy, several thousand highly respected individuals at the height of power in the world of Hollywood, to separate their premiere awards ceremony from popular taste. And it didn't actually start that recently.

In the beginning, Louis B. Mayer wanted to control the rest of Hollywood not directly under his control at MGM. To help head off the rise of labor unions in Los Angeles, he started the Academy to create something of a clearing house for labor disputes that put the studios at a point of power over talent. He followed that up with the Academy Awards the following year to, as he put it, give out baubles to the talent so they would make the movies he wanted made. MGM made films designed to appeal to the masses. He made middle-brow fare with big stars and lots of entertainment value (and spiraling costs, which would doom the studio no matter its successes in later decades). Long after Mayer lost power in the industry, that ethos largely maintained through huge upheavals in the industry brought on by the downfall of the studio system and the rise of television as a main competitor.

Through the 60s and 70s, the Academy was awarding big money makers that people respected. The vast majority of these films were in the top ten earners of the year. Many of them were top three. However, that changed in the 80s.

The 80s was when Hollywood discovered that franchise/genre filmmaking could be a huge money maker. Genre was always an embarrassing necessity to the studios. Cranking out cheap B-westerns to keep the cash flow positive so they could pay for prestige pictures like The Life of Emile Zola that took longer to make and cost more. However, the 80s, in the wake of the unprecedented successes of Jaws and Star Wars, saw Hollywood find the most reliable revenue stream in theaters in decades: the sequel.

And Hollywood has always hated it. Anything populist in appeal became fodder for franchise filmmaking, and the Academy simply...stopped nominating the biggest money makers as an unspoken rule. Oh, you can find exceptions. Titanic is the big one, but they are very much exceptions. The movies awarded progressively got smaller with smaller returns over time. That dovetailed over the past twenty years or so when the Academy just decided to flip their middle finger at the public, starting with the snubbing of The Dark Knight in 2008 (which wasn't nominated for Best Picture) and extending to today where the only real huge success (there have been smaller successes) was Oppenheimer which feels like an apologia to Christopher Nolan for the Dark Knight snub.

The Academy intentionally told the people, for decades, that their tastes didn't matter when it came to the Academy's biggest annual gala. That the public was good enough to make slop for, but that slop wasn't worthy of praise. No wonder TV ratings are down so much. Seriously, who cares about Nomadland?

An Ideal World


Let's take all of that away, and assume that the Oscars are actually only concerned with awarding the best movie of the year, no matter where it comes from. Should you care? Should you, a peon out in the hinterlands, like me, with no say in major decisions in Hollywood, with no influence beyond our tiny addition to the economic side of the business, with no direct ties to people actually in the industry, care about the Oscars?

No.

No, you should not.

The Oscars are an industry award show. They are the top tier of an industry coming together to celebrate the professional accomplishments of each other. You know who else has an industry award annually? The American Society for Quality, the professional organization for statisticians and industrial engineers. Do you care about who gets their annual fellowship? I kind of care because my father won it twice, but that's it. And the ASQ probably affects our daily lives more than the Academy. Their contributions to industrial processes creates efficiencies that make our lives better. What about the Academy? They entertain us for a couple of hours at a time, at best, and then we're off to live our lives. Should you care about the people who made those and the baubles that they hand to each other?

Absolutely not.

“But, TJM, they are experts and know so much about what makes a good movie. Why should I ignore them?”

Because that's an argument by authority and the Academy is a terrible authority. From the beginning, the entire thing has been about control. Control of the direction of the industry. Mayer did it rather openly. The 50s-70s was an obvious battle between old school studio filmmakers and the emerging New American Cinema (the contrasts between Oliver! and Midnight Cowboy, winning back to back, as well as The French Connection and The Godfather, also winning back to back, are illustrative). The 80s was a real attempt to direct the industry away from the money makers overall. The Academy had residual cultural influence from the decades of them picking from popular movies, which allowed the fiction of their leadership to last for a while. But, the open embrace of politics in the 2010s (really started in the late 2000s) was just accelerating a trend that had already started thirty years early. And that's not even talking about people like Harvey Weinstein mastering the Oscar campaign (begun in 1978 with The Deer Hunter) to win with movies like The English Patient.

The Spectacle


But what about the ceremony itself. Is that worth watching? Well, that's a joke question, right? One reason ratings have cratered is that the show is boring. Which is weird since you have the premiere entertainers of the premiere entertainment industry showing the world that they don't know how to put on a show.

But I think the problem is the format itself. There is literally no drama on display for three hours. Say what you want about the politicization of sports, but the actual show on display is filled with the drama of physical feats. What is the drama inherent in the Oscars?

It's the reveal of the choice. Except, that's not drama. The drama itself is the choice. Those choices were made privately by Academy voters as they cast their ballots. They were when PricewaterhouseCoopers counts the ballots. It's not when someone opens an envelope. That's manufactured tension that lasts for mere seconds. Think of reality television like Survivor. The end of every episode is just a vote that lasts for 5-10 minutes, keeping people riveted to their sets because we are actually seeing the drama play out. It's not great drama, but it's something as we watch the people discuss their choices, go off to write down a name, and then Jeff Probst brings the ballots out one at a time. In contrast, The Oscars has movie stars stiffly deliver badly written dialogue, we get a metaphorical drumroll as they open an envelope, and then they reveal the result of drama. It's brief, manufactured tension, and in between are dresses and tuxedos.

It's honestly a bad show, and it always has been. It helped that the glamour of older Hollywood was more pristine in its presentation due to tighter control of PR agents who kept the biggest stars aloof from most day to day concerns. Outside of the movies themselves, the Oscars were one of the only places to actually see many of the biggest stars of the day. Now, they're just easier to see outside of those venues, so the Oscars is less special. (Also, I would argue that it was the glamour that attracted people, of which the stars were representative, not the stars themselves. I have a long held-antipathy to the very idea of the star system, finding most interpretations of it to be deeply flawed.)

Should You Watch?


I'm not your supervisor, but I'm certainly not going to. I'll probably keep up a blog post on my phone that updates with the winners and refresh every half an hour or so as I watch something else because I have a basic curiosity about the affair.

You see, the list of Best Picture winners is actually...a really good list of movies. Does each individual movie represent the best of the year? I don't...really care. There are a handful of bad movies, but there are a lot of good and a whole lot of great films honored. That list of films is not a bad thing to go through in an ongoing education of film (mostly American) history. But it's no more authoritative than my own lists or the AFI's lists or the BFI's lists or the lists you made about your favorite movies. The presence on this list of Best Picture winners does not make them better. Their absence on the list does not make them worse.

The key though is that the Academy is a nest of snakes who are actually using the industry awards show to jockey for power over the direction of the industry as a whole (you know...the stated point of the whole thing from the beginning), an effort that makes no sense anymore since the winners tend to be tiny movies that can't affect audience tastes anymore since few people see them. I mean, seriously, Anora is so sexually explicit that it will never reach a wide audience (it made $21 million at the US box office, a profit for the $5 million budgeted film). It's also really good, by the way.

Anyway, I love the medium, but I cannot be bothered with the people who make the movies giving each other baubles. It's a minor curiosity, and I am tired of thinking about it.

Movies of Today

Opening in Theaters:

The Bride

Hoppers

Movies I Saw This Fortnight:

The Mystery of the Mary Celeste (Rating 1.5/4) Full Review "However, the script is way too thin, the directing doesn't give enough time to really build anything, most importantly a dangerous tone or mood, and the resolution feels like just another disconnected piece to end a series of disconnected pieces." [YouTube]

Death in High Heels (Rating 2/4) Full Review "Still, this is probably the best of the pack so far. That's not saying a whole lot, but it's a more intentional package from the pre-war films." [YouTube]

Dick Barton: Special Agent (Rating 2/4) Full Review "Still, Hammer has to start making something outright good at some point, right? Maybe when they hire Christopher Lee." [Library]

The Dark Road (Rating 1/4) Full Review "At least it's short at less than 70 minutes, but that 70 minutes is largely just dull." [Library]

The Adventures of PC 49 (Rating 3/4) Full Review "It's a bit of a hidden gem. It won't change the world, but it'll entertain for about 60 minutes." [YouTube]

Dick Barton Strikes Back (Rating 2.5/4) Full Review "Still, he does his best, and he can't quite save it. It's close, but not there. Oh well, it was a modest entertainment for a time. I have to appreciate that as it comes." [Library]

The Man in Black (Rating 2/4) Full Review "That being said, this is…mediocre but passable. It's not good, but it's not outright bad either. It's just milquetoast and not really worth much thought." [YouTube]

Room to Let (Rating 2/4) Full Review "I'm disappointed that my difficult trek to discover this movie didn't yield something more fruitful and entertaining, but really I shouldn't be surprised that all I got was milquetoast Hammer out of it." [Personal Collection]

Contact

Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.
I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.

Please check out my videos from the last couple of weeks, mostly Oscar focused:

History of the Oscars Part One
History of the Oscars Part Two
History of the Oscars Part Three
Stanley Kubrick: The Definitive Ranking
Stanley Kubrick: The Directors Series
My next thread will be on 3/28 and it will discuss a disappointing series of sequels.