With the 90th Academy Awards in the books and a few days to catch our breaths, we can now look back and see what we learned from yet another crazy award season. The ever-changing Academy with its younger, more diverse membership, is providing new insight into what to look for at the Oscars in the future, and what types of movies they value. So, without further ado, let’s get into what we learned from this year’s Oscars.
1. A movie cannot be divisive and win Best Picture
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri ran into the buzzsaw among film and pop culture critics this award season for its foolhardy representation of race relations in America. Even still, the Martin McDonagh film went on to win at the top prize at the Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild Awards and BAFTA, and in most years that would be enough to cement a Best Picture win at the Oscars. But like the backlash to La La Land last year, the preferential voting system used for Best Picture prevents this kinds of divisive films from winning. While The Shape of Water may have had a selection of voters who found it too weird and off-putting, or underwhelming, the film didn’t have nearly the amount of hatred as its co-frontrunner.
2. The Oscars will always rubber-stamp acting winners
This year was the first time the four acting winners swept the entire season, with Gary Oldman, Frances McDormand, Sam Rockwell and Allison Janney winning at the Golden Globe, Critics’ Choice, SAG, BAFTA and Oscars. The foursome of Critics’ Choice, Golden Globe, SAG and BAFTA are nearly unbeatable, and even if the demographics of the Oscars are changing compared to those precursors, sometimes the momentum is too much for anyone else to overcome. Over the past few years the only real upsets we’ve seen were in races that were anything but locked in, like Mark Rylance’s surprise win for Bridge of Spies.
3. Buzz helps, but not always
Jordan Peele’s Original Screenplay win for Get Out was the perfect symbiosis of the rightful winner also having the most energetic buzz in a wide-open race. Same goes for A Fantastic Woman in Foreign Language Film. But we saw buzzy contenders like Faces Places in Documentary, War for the Planet of the Apes in Visual Effects, Edith+Eddie in Documentary Short and DeKalb Elementary in Live Action Short lose to other films. Buzz is an important factor to take into account, but you shouldn’t always trust it as your guiding light in every category.
4. The key to the Shorts categories is emotional pull
Dear Basketball, Heaven Is a Traffic Jam on the 405 and The Silent Child are about wildly different things, but they do share the common core of being emotional and accessible. Voters have a lot to suss out when it comes to these shorts and it seems like the more you resonate with someone’s heart, rather than confronting them on an intellectual level, the more success you will have. This was my first time watching all of the Short nominees and I got all of my predictions wrong because I foolishly went with what I thought was best. It is now clear that voters are more inclined to go with the movies that make them feel, even if the movies themselves aren’t the greatest.
5. Voters like to spread the wealth
The days of Titanic or The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King sweeping appear to be over, as no Best Picture winner has won more than five Oscars since 2009. This year they gave an award to seven of the nine Best Picture nominees (leaving out Lady Bird and The Post), and even Best Picture winner The Shape of Water won only four awards in total. It may be tempting to just predict the nomination leader all the way down the line, but we see now that voters are actually looking at these categories individually and making informed choices.
6. It greatly helps to be the most seen nominee in your category
Excluding all the specialized awards like Animated, Documentary and Foreign Language, voters mostly selected Best Picture nominees as winners. There were only a handful of instances where voters went with a non-BP nominee instead — Allison Janney in Supporting Actress for I, Tonya, Blade Runner 2049 in Cinematography and Coco in Best Original Song. While voters are technically supposed to watch all the nominees, we know some of them don’t, so you have to think that they’ll vote for the movies they’ve seen, which is more than likely the Best Picture nominees at the very least. Even beyond Best Picture, Blade Runner 2049 had five nominations compared to War for the Planet of the Apes‘s one. Both feature dazzling effects, but the average voter would probably want to watch a movie with five nominations and cross them all of the list rather than just one, right? And we saw which movie won Visual Effects.
7. There’s a still long way to go until gender equality
Frances McDormand’s speech became the moment of Oscar night as she invited all of her fellow female nominees to stand up in the audience. While the camera did cut to several women like Margot Robbie, Allison Janney, Sally Hawkins and Octavia Spencer standing up proudly, a wide shot showed just how few there were in comparison to the men around them. You also have to consider that a great number of the women who stood were for Actress or Supporting Actress — you know, the categories that literally force voters to nominate women. There’s also the troubling statistic that 33 men won Oscars on Sunday while only six women did, including McDormand and Janney. Rachel Morrison’s history-making nomination for Best Cinematography will hopefully trigger an explosion of female artists not just in front of but behind the camera. But it isn’t incumbent upon the Academy to vote for women if they do not earn it. That’s why it is the movie studios themselves, alongside directors and producers, and casting departments, that must open the door to the vast numbers of qualified women in every field. Then we might come closer to real and worthy gender parity at the Oscars.