It's time to kill the Oscars

The Oscars are bad for art and culture.

It wasn’t just Will Smith storming the stage to hit Chris Rock that turned me off the Oscars. It was everything. For years the show has been little more than a spectacle — an opportunity to gawk at gorgeous gowns and snicker at faux-pas. If the Oscars have survived this long, it’s due to our collective need to log on and meme the hell out of Hollywood’s big night. As audiences continue to drop for the past decade, the show has done its best to stay relevant by shifting voting demographics (a positive change) and removing awards from the telecast (a bad move). That hit a critical mass last night.

Last night’s decisions to “speed up” or contemporize the show reflected an audience hungry for blood. The mean-spirited jokes, the lack of respect for technical categories, the song-and-dance in Memorium were all meant to appease but, more importantly, mirror back the way we’ve started to engage with film as a whole. It’s easy to blame producers or executives. Indeed, they’re not exactly innocent, and the show quickly turned into an ugly synthesis of online and offline worlds, a series of memes and empty gestures, all of which amount to nothing.

Those shocked by both the violence and the sour taste of last night should rethink the Oscars. The show feels like it’s changed, but it’s more likely that the veil has only fallen. It doesn’t exist to reward excellence. It exists to uphold old power structures and to reflect how the Hollywood elites want to be perceived. Any lip service to “good” politics or diversity has been done within an incredibly conservative class structure. If the Oscars have changed, it’s only been because they’ve been forced to, and let’s be honest — they’ve only done the bare minimum.

I admire the tireless activists who have worked to bring attention to the startling lack of diversity at the Oscars, which reflect much larger class, gender and race problems at the heart of the dream-making machine. They’re not wrong to target a highly publicized event to draw attention to inequalities and abuses within the film industry. They’re not wrong to try to use the show as an opportunity to fight for social improvements. I doubt many of them imagined that overnight the Academy would shift 180 and become a radical organization representing the workers’ rights and dismantling white supremacy overnight. Their work is admirable, and I believe it has tangible results. It seems clear though, the Oscars are incapable of substantial change.

Last night, the Academy Awards showcased the cynicism and mean-spiritedness that have poisoned our relationship with the cinema. The issue last night was that the overwhelming message was, “we hate art, and we have no respect for the people who make it.” Watching how people have engaged with art and cinema over the past decade or so, it’s hard to blame the producers for leaning this way. While cinema has forever been a heavily commodified art, increasingly the way we talk and engage with it (particularly online) has left me colder than it ever has.

Last night was a bit of a wake-up call. Memes can be fun, but ironically, the shift towards engaging with art and artists leaves me cold. Years ago, it hit me that the Oscars were little more than a self-congratulatory party. I still dove in to have some fun. Now, I feel that was a mistake. Unwittingly, our collective flippancy has devalued art on a mass scale. Disney has done its best to kill any creativity, and the rest of us have done the work to downplay and tear down any films operating outside that Matrix.

However, the answer isn’t restoring the Oscars to their formal glory. Those among us wringing hands over the implication of the slap, or the poor jokes, or the terrible In Memorium tribute, seem to be too wrapped up in restoring the night to what it was, as if the Oscars has not willingly rewarded abusers and racists in its very recent past. The show last night was much of the same, this time, the veil pulled back. The Oscars don’t belong anymore, and they’re an outdated and old-fashioned way of celebrating the industry and its artists. Any illusions that they ever served that purpose should be dead now.

We need to go back to the beginning and start something new.

Are the Oscars worth saving? No. ■

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