In the decade that I’ve been writing about the Oscars, I’ve made a fundamental assumption about their meaning that is, perhaps, not entirely justified by the terms under which they’re awarded. I’ve long felt that what distinguishes the Academy Awards from the honors bestowed at other ceremonies, such as the Golden Globes, is the participation of Hollywood itself: the notion that the Oscars represent the American film industry’s idealized image of itself, the work that it collectively chooses to put forth as the best that it has to offer. On the basis of this notion, the Oscars have an element of interest and significance that extends far beyond the ballyhoo and the choices, however misguided.
When the Academy was founded, in 1927, its purpose wasn’t to give awards but to mediate disputes, and thereby preclude the formation of unions in the film industry. The awards were an afterthought—the first ones were announced in 1929. The Academy’s founding thirty-six members were all employed and active in the film business at the time (and its ranks soon expanded to two hundred and thirty). Of course, the business was different then. It was a new industry, too new to count many retirees at all. Also, it wasn’t, for the most part, a freelance industry but one in which artists and other staff tended to be under contract. In the intervening years, the studio system collapsed; most actors, directors, and technicians now work freelance, from film to film, thus leaving in doubt the notion of present-tense employment. (Those who are between projects are still working—but what of those who are “between projects”?) In the interest of diversifying its membership, the Academy has grown by nearly fifty per cent in the past three years; it now has approximately nine thousand members, of whom thirty-two per cent are female and sixteen per cent are people of color.
As reported by Kristopher Tapley, in Variety, the Academy initially treated membership as a lifetime tenure, but it changed its bylaws in 1970, to reserve voting for people who were working in the field. Yet the Academy hardly enforced any such rules, and, in 2016, when it announced plans to do so, and thereby put long-nonworking members on an inactive list, the outcry was extreme, with one long-inactive member ludicrously likening the proposal to a Nazi euthanasia program. Soon thereafter, the Academy drastically backtracked, explicitly restoring the notion of lifetime voting privileges for many members and excluding retirement as grounds for non-voting status.
The Academy is wrong. Enforcing an inactive list, and doing so stringently, is exactly what the Academy ought to do. No member should ever lose membership on the basis of inactivity—but voting should be limited to those who have worked in the business in some significant capacity in the past five years. I don’t believe that the quality of the nominations and the awards will improve by the sheer fact of excluding the votes of members who are not working. The point is not to diminish the ranks of older voters; relatively younger ones would be affected, too. I have no reason to suspect that these people—whether older or younger—have worse taste or narrower perspectives than do those who are active in the film industry. Busy people of any age have no monopoly on sound judgment. However, winnowing the votes to center the Oscars on those who are currently in the field, rather than including the voices of those who merely at some time in the past worked on movies, would restore to the Academy its primordial significance: the current-day industry’s image of itself. At the very least, Hollywood—the Hollywood of today—will have to own up to its awards, face up to its judgments, and not hand-wave away the selection of such movies as “Green Book” and “1917” on the grounds of weird rules.
With a reduction of votes to a voting body of members presently or very recently working, the Academy will appear not merely symbolically representative of the industry but literally so. That’s where the limit on voting would have an effect—a psychological one—on those who are currently working. Would the Academy’s more exemplary role influence these voters’ choices? I should hope so. Currently, with many nonworking members exerting influence over the results, the nominations and awards are decided by people who have little personal stake in the outcome.
Who more than movie people, or artists at large, are alert to the effect that their ideas, their statements, their judgments have on those who pay attention to them? There’s something assertive, declarative, polemical about awards; they’re criticism in action. Votes by those removed from the state of the art and the business are the equivalent of social-media judgments flung from behind a mask of anonymity. At the moment, the Oscars reflect the Academy, but the Academy reflects nothing but its august name; plausible deniability and the shunning of responsibility are built into the current system. Paradoxically, counting only votes from members with a stake in the image of the industry put forth by the industry would cast onto the Oscars the sharp light of accountability, would be, in effect, a truth-in-awards program. It would be a severe test, rendering the Academy and its prizes an instant relevance—neither more nor less than that of Hollywood itself.
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January 16, 2020 at 06:49AM
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