It’s that time of year again! Hollywood’s army of pretty-young-things are out in force, hitting up any red carpet or media outlet that will have them. At no other time is the blatant ambition and power politics at the heart of the Hollywood machine so obviously exposed for public consumption. Between November and February, California plays host to nature’s greatest feeding frenzy. Extreme diets, plastic surgery, and a sob story or two are par for the course in the pursuit of gold for the mantelpiece and for the bank account. The only thing missing are the films themselves.
This season’s batch of production-line awards bait includes Benedict Cumberbatch’s stoic The Imitation Game, the Stephen Hawking weepy The Theory of Everything, and Julianne Moore’s dementia-drama Still Alice. There’s little need to familiarise yourself with these films, let alone see them. You’ll be bombarded by them for the next four months. The “names” behind these projects will lecture you about how underrepresented their film’s issue-du- jour is. The phrase “ground-breaking masterpiece” will be bandied about at record speeds. Then March will come around and you’ll never hear from them again. Has anyone watched Dallas Buyer’s Club since Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto took to the Oscar podium, fulfilling their comeback-kid narratives and thereby ending their film’s relevancy? In the grind of awards season, the film is just the first of the many shiny vehicles that will carry each contender from ceremony to ceremony, and hopefully to the next stage of their careers.
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But what gets these films their moment in the sun? What makes them worthy contenders? Certainly not their quality. In recent memory, widely reviled movies such as Jonny Depp’s The Tourist, Tom Hanks’ Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Kate Winslet’s Labour Day have all been in contention for trophies. The fact is, of the twenty or more ‘serious’ award ceremonies, most are excuses for the organisers to mingle with the stars they’ve nominated. Even the Golden Globes, Hollywood’s second biggest awards show, is judged by a shadowy association comprised of ninety un-noteworthy, SoCal dwelling journalists whose only qualifications are having had four articles published abroad in the past year and a desperate desire to stand next to celebrities.
The Oscars, perhaps, are a little better, with a voting body of over a thousand “Academy Members”, experts in their respective fields. And yet, with the average member being white, male, and, crucially, 63 years old, there’s little room for anything controversial or subversive to break through. Even last year’s frontrunner, 12 Years a Slave, struggled to encourage voters to watch the free DVD screeners, given the harrowing subject matter. Thus the handshaking at parties, on red carpets, and in front of TV crews took over. For 12 Years, Lupita Nyong’o’s elegance and eloquence became the film’s smiling face. The narrative of a talented actress plucked from Kenyan obscurity for the chance to become a “star” was more appealing than the story of institutionalised oppression. And so the campaign eclipsed the film. Read the Oscar-forecast on any film blog — distributors and their past campaigns are more discussed than the film itself.
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So why do we continue to follow awards season, when its outcome means so little? The answer? We don’t. In our increasingly corporate world, the film studios, television stations, and publishing houses are facets of singular, monolithic overlords. Their all-encompassing control of our media becomes an opportunity for synergistic cross-promotion. Awards mean inflated box office revenues, a dependable celebrity news-cycle, and big, award-hungry stars vying for magazine covers. Then, in the stars’ orbits spin the ancillary businesses — fashion houses, luxury good producers and beauty companies, who pay astronomic fees to have the hot celebrities of the moment flaunt their wares and hawk their products. Thus we, the unwitting viewers, are sucked into the celebrity-industrial-complex, becoming naught but a captive audience in its nefarious revenue-boosting schemes. We’re victims queuing to be sacrificed on the award show’s stage.
And yet, I can’t wait to meet this season’s It Girl, and to find out what she’s wearing.
