Over the weekend the Academy held their first-ever Academy membership meeting and in the process announced a rule change that will allow the whole of the Academy the opportunity to vote on the final ballot for all 24 Oscar categories, which is to say the Foreign Language and Documentary Short categories have now been added to the list. Not exactly big news considering the Academy has never been open about the number of members that vote each year, what films, performances, etc. they vote on or the final results.
In addition to the above announcement, the press release sent out included a quote from Academy President Hawk Koch saying, “Building on this past season’s 90% record voter turnout, we want to give our members as many opportunities as possible to see these great films and vote in these categories next year.”
There are a couple of things to note in that quote, beginning with the fact that while there was 90% voter turnout, 90% of the Academy didn’t actually end up voting. In fact, as Pete Hammond points out: “Koch told me 96% of those who signed up to vote electronically did so, while 87% of those who signed up for paper ballots eventually voted that way.” So are we getting the number of people that signed up or those that actually voted?
Then again, it doesn’t really matter. Until the Academy opens the doors to the final numbers the Oscars will never be looked at any differently. Full transparency is necessary to change the game.
What percentage of those that voted, voted for Argo to win Best Picture last year? How close was the Best Director race? Was it a matter of ten votes separating Ang Lee and Steven Spielberg? How close were Ben Affleck and Kathryn Bigelow to getting a nomination? For that matter, what was the support for Argo before the nominations were announced compared to after Affleck and the film started winning so many precursor awards?
Even better, how close was The Dark Knight to being one of the final five nominated for Best Picture at the 2009 Oscars? When they announced the Best Picture nominees would include anywhere from 5-10 movies and they did a study that showed from 2001 to 2008 there would have been years that yielded 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 nominees, what were those? Fill us in Academy!
The secretive nature of the process is what keeps the show from truly breaking out in my opinion. You can change the rules all you want, but until we see the actual effect of those rules it doesn’t matter. It’s just words, because in the end all we see are the winners without anything to suggest how they may have been different otherwise.
Last year’s Oscar producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron have been brought back to produce the show again this year and they’ve even reached out to Seth MacFarlane to host, citing a bump in the ratings as the reason. It’s strange to me they think MacFarlane or Zadan and Meron’s producing decisions had anything to do with the ratings. People don’t tune in because of the show, they tune in for the movies.
The Oscar host and everything the producers put together are essentially akin to the cheerleaders at a sporting event. Some people may tune in for the cheerleaders, others may tune in for the superstars, but most are tuning in to cheer on their team or simply watch a good game. Only problem, the Oscars are like watching a sporting event without being told the score, only to be told who won in the end. In that case, why would people even watch the game?
