Winning the Best Picture Oscar: Blessing or Curse?

The Academy Awards are the film industry's most prestigious awards. Movie fans such as myself spend the months of September, October, November, and December guessing the nominees. Then when the nominees are announced in January, we try to predict the winners. Everyone wants to win an Oscar, right? Well, maybe. It is an honor to be honored by your honored colleagues. But winning an Oscar puts a lot of pressure on the film. A lot of casual movie goers may only see a movie because the Oscar win is a seal of approval.

With hundreds of movies released each year, there's bound to be someone who likes a movie a lot better than the award winner. And so sometimes the Oscar win is more a curse than a blessing. For every time the Academy gets it right (12 Years a Slave, the most recent example), sometimes the public consensus is that the winner was poorly chosen. There have been a number of times when the eventual Oscar winner was a good movie that had the sorry fortune of being merely a good movie. These were films that perhaps beat out more critically acclaimed/fan appreciated works by favorite veteran directors. Ultimately, their histories are tarnished, becoming "that movie that stole the Oscar from a better movie." What I often wonder is, what does it mean to win the Academy Award for Best Picture?

The poster child for "Best Picture Oscar win as curse" is Shakespeare in Love. In 1998, the period romantic comedy won the top prize over the favorite Saving Private Ryan. To this day, whenever the Oscars come up in an online discussion, someone will claim the Oscars are meaningless because the light comedy Shakespeare in Love defeated the more important film Saving Private Ryan. There's a tinge of misogyny to that claim, because Saving Private Ryan is a very macho war movie while the eventual winner is a female-skewing romantic comedy. I haven't seen Saving Private Ryan so I can't tell you if it deserved to win over Shakespeare in Love. But had the Gwyneth Paltrow starring film not won the top prize with six other major awards including Best Actress, it would be remembered as a quirky, intelligent take on the Shakespeare legacy. But now it's become the symbol of bad Oscar wins.

For a less extreme example, let's go to The King's Speech, which prevailed over The Social Network back in 2010. I like The King's Speech a lot. I saw it twice in theaters. I like The Social Network a lot. I own it on blu-ray. The King's Speech's Oscar win over The Social Network was not a surprise; the two films were going neck and neck. You could make the argument that The Social Network was the more relevant film, with more innovative filmmaking. The King's Speech is a good movie, but a safe option for an Oscar winner. Like Shakespeare in Love, the worst thing to happen to The King's Speech's legacy is winning the top prize at the top film awards ceremony.

There are countless examples of movies losing their goodwill by winning the Oscar for Best Picture: Forrest Gump, Crash, Chicago, Slumdog Millionaire, Rocky, Birdman or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance, Terms of Endearment, American Beauty, Driving Miss Daisy, A Beautiful Mind, I could go on. A lot of the Oscar winners are good movies, many of them are great movies. But having the label of "Oscar winner" puts the film on a pedestal. In the words of Gloria Steinem, "a pedestal is as much a prison as any small confined space." People watch Oscar winners with the expectation that the film must be next-level awesome. Is that fair? Maybe, maybe not. To call something "best" is a definite statement; we mustn't forget, however, that the entity that makes the decision isn't an infallible be-all, end-all of film criticism.

I've come to the conclusion in the last few years that the Oscars are not meant to be a measure of objective, empirical quality. There's no way that any one entity could pick the literal best film of the year, right? Instead, the Oscar winning film becomes more about what statements the Academy wants to make about the year in film. And when I look at the kinds of films that have won Oscars, even ones that were welcomed with controversy and ridicule, I see a longing to retain the relevance of adult-skewing movies in the face of superhero overhaul and franchise culture. The Academy is nostalgic, but for old school Hollywood where films like Shakespeare in Love reigned. In some way, the Academy is trying to hold on to its own relevancy by remaining closed off to how filmmaking is changing.

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