We all love The Oscars. Don’t we? We all stay up all night long to enjoy the wonderful spectacle and razzmatazz, see the dresses, hear the speeches, roll around in hysterics at the compare for the night. If they can find one.

Actually, we don’t. Well I don’t. I love movies but have never found the Academy Awards worthy staying up for. To me its always been a bit irrelevant. Mainly because I have no idea what ‘The Academy’ does the rest of the year. If it does anything. And the whole, let’s face it, really American event is a touch too saccharine for this British palate.

Yet it has a power. ‘ACADEMY AWARD WINNNING…’ is a guarantee of more people seeing the film, the star, the director, the cinematographer’s 3rd assistant’s nanny, because historically its the ultimate accolade. And more people means more money. And that’s how the world goes round.

But I’m not alone in finding the whole thing a bit ‘irrelevant’. And because relevance is the Academy’s sole purpose to the entire movie industry, that is a big danger for its existence. If the potency of ‘AWARD WINNING!!!’ is reduced to ‘yeah, so what?’ then the role of the academy is reduced to nothing.

So we had the ‘too white’ years in which any actor, director or writer of any colour whatsoever was almost institutionally ignored, and now we have the reversal. Because the Academy just has to stay relevant, it can’t just pick massive and pure white blockbusters each and every year. And pick it does. Let’s face it ‘best movie’ is a rather subjective judgment, as is best anything, so it becomes a bit political.

This year Green Book won the best movie award. I didn’t see it. Because in trailers it looked a bit clicheed, a bit stereotypy, a rather predictable culture clash reversal with an urbane, sophisticated black dude and a ‘talian New York wise guy goodfella on a road trip in the still segregated South in 1963. It shows the bigotry, the hypocrisy, the stupidity of segregation and how a Northern virtual dim-wit was oblivious to it, having had no experience of such in NY City.

Yet Spike Lee decided it was a movie about racism too much from the white perspective and went to storm out when Green Book won its award. Whereas Black Klansman, for which Lee won best director Oscar, a great movie which depicts the horrible racism, bigotry and hypocrisy in the South, is presumably fine.

But Lee had to win an award, because the politics demand that he do so, and quite deservedly, if not for Black Klansman, which was an ok movie, but for his vast work over decades. Which is always how the Oscars have worked.

So I’ll continue to ignore the Oscar Ceremony, the babes in 50,000 dollar dresses, the bling, the often embarrassing and seemingly endless speeches, but reserve the right to be influenced by the ‘ACADEMY AWARD WINNING’ banners on movie posters.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx