Are The Oscars Becoming “Cool” Again?

Just two years ago as we headed towards the 94th Academy Awards I found myself frustrated and in deep disagreement with a lot of my fellow Oscar junkies. That year there was a lot of discourse in regards to how out of touch the Academy had become with the regular person off the street. Jimmy Kimmel (Who ironically went on to host the next two ceremonies) took shots at that year’s nominated slate of contenders, referring to them as “vegetable movies” and called out the Academy for not nominating more films seen by the public. While half of the films nominated for Best Picture that year were among my own personal favorites, only Dune and Don’t Look Up were likely recognized by the casual movie go-er and perhaps even so unseen by them anyways. Some argued that coming off its incredible box office and high audience scores that Spider-Man: No Way Home should’ve been a populist contender that year – a sentiment I agree with that most people would find to be an inoffensive opinion, but is deeply controversial among hardcore cinephiles and awards season followers.

There is something to be said about the fact that we’re not awarding popularity, we’re awarding art. As a film critic that has watched over two hundred films each of the last few years, I can empathize with the frustration that the average movie-watcher is blissfully unaware of some great arthouse cinema that they’re missing out on. Small films that I believe audiences would love if they bothered to catch up with them. In conversations with friends and family I always try to guide them to see films they otherwise wouldn’t even know existed, but my good reviews can only go so far when the casual movie go-er only has so much time in their day to devote to escaping reality through a movie. And yet there is some frustration in listening to people who have only seen three to five new movies from the year complain they don’t recognize awards contenders, because they haven’t sampled more movies outside of the big box office behemoths.

But film isn’t just regulated to arthouse cinema. Big movie stars and major film franchises that we grow up with and pass down to our kids are also a part of the medium and thus I can sympathize when the average movie-watcher tunes into the Oscars and feels like there’s chunks from the year in film missing for a ceremony that’s supposed to be celebrating the best in film from the past year. The regular person who tuned into the ceremony that saw Birdman and Boyhood battle for Best Picture was also likely wondering how was it that not at least one of the movies of Interstellar, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Guardians Of The Galaxy, or Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes which are all critically acclaimed box office hits didn’t take part in that race.

My controversial take is that there should be a happy medium between both. You should have representation of some of the biggest box office hits with some of the biggest movie stars that will drive an audience in. You should also recognize some of the best smaller films from the year which will only see more eyeballs on them when the bigger audience tuning in for the big movies gets curious about the other contenders. There’s a reason that every year a boost in box office and streaming numbers happens for movies nominated for an Oscar, only for it to happen again for the winners a few weeks later.

But something seems to have changed the last two years. Whether it be because of the aftermath of the pandemic causing a new appreciation for the movie theatre experience, the downfall of superhero fare of late allowing for a box office with more variety, the return of epic blockbusters with original ideas, or the Academy’s aggressive fine tuning of its membership to become more international, much younger, and a little more hip. All of these elements seemed to have lead us to being on the cusp of a new era for the Oscars – being “cool” again; particularly mainstream “cool”.

In the last three years viewership has steadily started to climb back up from 10 million for the 2021 ceremony to nearly 20 million for the latest one, and that’s not accounting for younger audiences that catch clips rather than watch the entire show or for streaming viewers. I attended a public event at a non-profit classic movie palace in the Tampa Bay area to watch this year’s event and even the most top-tier tickets were sold out.

We’ve now had back-to-back years in which two of the top three box office grossers were nominated for Best Picture. IP such as Avatar, Barbie, and Top Gun have been represented in the race for the big prize and others such as Batman, Black Panther, Godzilla, Mission Impossible, and Spider-Man have also seen recognition come their way. Last year we saw an absurdist sci-fi comedy that the youth connected with and created costumes to attend comic-cons in win Best Picture. This year an epic three hour bio-pic that almost made a billion dollars and directed by one of the more populist auteurs in the industry won the grand prize. We’ve had some great winners during the 2010s like 12 Years A Slave, Moonlight, and Parasite but my casual family and friends haven’t yet seen those films, and yet these last two years they actually know of and watched the winners.

As a Godzilla fan I never thought I’d see the day that a film from the franchise would get an Oscar nomination much less would win that Oscar. I never thought I’d see Christopher Nolan have his Spielberg moment as a big blockbuster director that reached the pinnacle of recognition from the industry. I never thought I’d see something like “I’m Just Ken” performed at the Oscars. I never thought I’d see Robert Downey J.R win an Oscar or that the script to a comedy my friends were asking me about win Adapted Screenplay against the Best Picture winner. Yet all that happened this past Sunday night.

And yet all that happened even while smaller films were getting nominated and winning prizes as well. Casuals who tuned in to watch Oppenheimer dominate or watch Barbie and Godzilla Minus One win an Oscar also will become curious about movies like Anatomy Of A Fall, Poor Things, or The Zone Of Interest after watching those films also walk away with Oscars. A balance was achieved.

The complaints about the Oscars not connecting with the regular person off the street have been becoming more and more faint over these last two years and if my inkling is right that we’re returning to a 90s-type era where there is a populist and box office component to what wins the big prize, those complaints might be all but gone in the coming years. And as someone who empathized with some of the past complaints from my family and friends about the Oscars before, I can’t say I see much room to keep those complaints up based on the last two years.

There will always be debate about awarding something subjective like movies with awards, there will always be frustrations with certain films not getting recognition from the Academy, there will always be political and cultural debates around awards given out and things said on the stage, because all those things have been a part of the Oscars through its near century of existence. But you have to have your head in the sand if you can’t see the shifts over the last two years. The Academy is finding that balance of recognizing smaller films while also recognizing big movies that the average person saw. The Oscars, I dare say, are starting to become “cool” again.