Now in its 98th year, The Academy Awards, commonly known as the Oscars, is widely regarded as the industry’s most prestigious awards ceremony, and of all the awards presented on the night, the Best Picture remains the most coveted. Among its esteemed winners are Casablanca, Schindler’s List, and The Godfather – films whose cultural impact and legacy have endured decades after their release.
However, a large proportion of the winners have not stood the test of time in the same way, feeling more like products of their moment instead of defining cinematic achievements. In hindsight, many of these movies feel as if their win reflects industry sentiment, political climate, or safe consensus instead of bold filmmaking and genuine greatness. This raises the question: is the Best Picture category broken and, if so, how can it be fixed?
The Academy Voting Is Bias
Winners are chosen by a vote of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, a body of industry professionals intended to reflect the collective judgment of the film community. Historically, though, voters for the Best Picture award have tended to favor prestige dramas, particularly those based on acclaimed works of literature or issue-driven movies that center on racism, politics, injustice or historical reckoning, over genres like comedy, horror, action, and animated movies. Remarkably, only this year has it become an official requirement for voters to have even viewed all nominated films before casting their votes! As a result, far fewer movies of these genres find themselves winning the award, even when the genre is more culturally dominant and the movie is more technically groundbreaking.
We’ve seen Spotlight win over Mad Max: Fury Road, The Hurt Locker over Avatar, and Terms of Endearment over E.T., not to mention the countless classic genre movies that failed to even receive a nomination, like The Matrix, Back to the Future, Psycho, The Shining, Spirited Away, and Toy Story. Even within the favored ‘drama’ genre, there appears to often be a bias towards the ‘safe’ option – the kind of tasteful, middle-of-the-road choice that offends no one, challenges little, and quietly fades from cultural conversation while bolder films endure. Examples of this include Shakespeare in Love winning over Saving Private Ryan, The Greatest Show on Earth over High Noon, Crash over Brokeback Mountain, and Forrest Gump over Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption, with each choice feeling like the ‘safe’ consensus pick over the more culturally seismic choice.
Changes Have Been Made to the Best Picture Category
The Academy has not been entirely oblivious to its flaws. Since its inception, the category has evolved and undergone a handful of changes, but none have addressed the fundamental issues. At the 1st Academy Awards ceremony held in 1929, there were two categories of awards that were each considered the top award of the night: Outstanding Picture and Unique and Artistic Picture. Each award was intended to honor different and equally important aspects of superior filmmaking. The categories were then merged for the following year under the Academy Award for Outstanding Picture title, which later became the Best Picture award we know it as now, marking the Academy’s long-standing struggle to define ‘best picture,’ sowing the seeds of the category’s almost century-long identity crisis.
In response to the backlash over critically acclaimed hits like The Dark Knight and WALL-E being left out of the Best Picture race in 2009, it expanded the number of nominations from 5 to 10 in 2010. While the move was positioned as an attempt to combat public criticism of snubbing popular movies, and honor a wider range of films, including commercial blockbusters, the cynics among us might view it as being a strategic attempt to increase public interest and TV ratings for the Oscar ceremony by including more recognizable, mainstream movies.
In fact, it has arguably diluted the associated prestige surrounding the award, while very little has changed in terms of genre bias when it comes to the winners, making it feel more like a hollow gesture than a genuine attempt to fix the category. While the academy’s decision to introduce the new inclusion and diversity standards in 2020 was an overdue necessity needed to address representation on screen and behind the camera, it still doesn’t mend the deeper, structural issue – the Best Picture itself still lacks a clearly defined purpose or voting standard.
What Is the Solution for Best Picture?
Arguably, the first, and most important, step to ‘fixing’ the broken Best Picture category is for the academy to formally define what is meant by ‘best’ picture, whether that’s artistic innovation, cultural impact, popularity, or technical excellence — so it reflects a clear purpose rather than the subjective mood of its voting body. By providing a clear definition of what ‘best picture’ means, something that has never been done before, the logic behind each win, theoretically, becomes transparent, leaving no room to hide behind vague criteria when the Academy makes poor or overly safe choices. In other words, the winner should tick all the boxes outlined in the definition or criteria to justify its win.
Next, it needs to fix its voting system. This is especially important if we’re to finally see the end of ‘safe’ choice wins. As it stands, the academy operates a preferential ballot for Best Picture, a system reintroduced in 2010 after it was scrapped in 1945. Under this voting system, voters rank the nominees, and if no film wins a majority of first-place votes, the lowest-ranked film is eliminated and its votes redistributed until one movie secures over 50%, meaning the winner is the one with the broadest overall support. This has led to an increase in inoffensive, middle-of-the-road films that everyone likes a little, rather than films that a smaller group passionately loves, winning the award. Reverting to the straight majority vote will, no doubt, reward movies that inspire the most genuine passion over movies that simply survive the elimination process as the safest consensus choice.
This brings us to the final suggestion. The Academy, and its membership, needs to be re-evaluated. As outlined earlier, it’s clear its members’ tastes lean towards prestige drama, most likely as a result of its membership demographic. The latest publicly released records showed that the average voter age was 63 with only 14% of its members under 50. On the upside, it has reportedly drastically altered its membership since, also bringing in more women and people of color. It is essential, though, for the Academy to continue down this path and diversify across age, background and creative disciplines, to help eradicate the notion of the Academy ‘being out of touch,’ and any kind of voting bias that has long plagued the Oscars.
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