6 Reasons Everyone’s ‘Solution’ for the Oscars Is Terrible

6 Those Terrible Oscar Picks of the Past Were Known to Be Terrible at the Time

First, here’s the basic idea that prompts the suggestion: There are a bunch of Oscar picks in the past that we now call dumb, so if they made the picks now instead of then, the Oscar voters would be more likely to get it right. But we don’t think those snubbed movies are good just because we’re an enlightened generation looking back. We think they’re good because they’re good, and people knew they were good at the time as well.

Complainers note that Pulp Fiction lost out to Forrest Gump for Best Picture, even though it was a revolutionary film. But Pulp Fiction isn’t just considered revolutionary in hindsight. It was wildly praised at the time and was perhaps considered even more revolutionary then than now. Crash is looked back on as a terrible winner, but people said it was a terrible winner in 2006 itself. The King’s Speech looks like a baffling choice for 2010, given that several directors released possibly their best works that year, but again: This isn’t something we’re saying with 2025 eyes. That’s something people noted the very day the Oscars made that choice.

Those are just examples from the living memory of some of the people reading this. The very site you’re reading was around when those last couple examples happened (we were mostly pissed about Inception not being picked for Best Director). The same appears to be true for earlier snubs. Citizen Kane may not have won Best Picture, but critics did effusively praise it at the time and were probably even more blown away by it then than anyone is now. 

If Oscars overlook films that critics love most at the time, that means time isn’t the secret ingredient keeping Oscar voters from making the “right” choice. Instead, other stuff is at play.

5 It’s Not An Infallible Award. It’s Hollywood Rating Itself

The Oscars aren’t picked by critics. Nor are they picked by judges or by the general public. They’re voted on by the Academy, a group of 10,000 insiders. This group is simultaneously exclusive enough that they don’t represent broad consensus while also large enough that they aren’t really elite. Any interview with an anonymous Oscar voter reveals someone who doesn’t appear to have smart thoughts about movies at all.

Many awards are picked by members belonging to the branch of the Academy related to that award. Acting awards are nominated by actors, costume awards are nominated by costume designers, etc. In some cases, this means the most informed people make the choices, but it also means everyone nominates their friends. Then, for the ultimate voting, all members can vote, and that means many people vote on films they haven’t even watched. Yes, voters are given screeners so they can watch every nominee, but no one holds a gun to their head to make sure they do. With some categories (Best Animated Film), voters admit they watched none of the nominees and just pick whichever movie they heard their kid screaming the most about. 

Make these same people vote on films from five or ten years ago, and they’re not suddenly going to become informed and incisive about them. At best, they might now defer to popular consensus because they’ve had more time to hear that some film is praised. But only a tiny fraction of films ever get that sort of consensus, such films aren't necessarily the best ones and praising them introduces new problems.

4 Lasting Impact Isn’t Something That Needs Praise

When people speak of past snubs, they look at some of the biggest movies in history and see that they were denied the Best Picture title. “The Oscars passed on giving Star Wars the award, and they passed on Jaws. Surely we today would pick those as the best films of their respective years.”

Those are some odd examples to pick, as both films did win Oscars, if not Best Picture — and the films that did win Best Picture those years (Annie Hall, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) aren’t quite scorned or forgotten now. But let’s say a movie really was passed up for awards and then went on to become hugely famous. Why exactly is it so important to call it Best Picture in retrospect? If it’s already so famous and known, that sounds like the sort of film that would benefit the least from additional accolades, and where additional accolades would make the least difference to the public.

The worse snubs are the movies that never get vindicated by popular culture years later. If I say “2017’s First Reformed was snubbed,” I mean that I wish it got more recognized because then more people would watch it and enjoy it. If a movie misses out on awards and then everyone sees it anyway, well, that may be interesting to point out, but it doesn’t really matter, does it?

It seems like some people want their favorite movies to have gotten awards for a sort of intrinsic reason. E.T. should be the Best Picture of 1982 because you think it was the best picture of 1982. I understand that. But if you want a retrospective list of each year’s best movies, anyone is allowed to make that list at any time. The Academy Awards serve a different purpose.

3 The Oscars Serve a Timely Industry Function

For the Oscars, no one locks themselves in a room and tries to objectively rate each one of the year’s films. Movies win Oscars because their studios campaign for them to win. Studios campaign because they want those accolades now, both for bragging rights and because awards mean the movie will make more money while it’s still a relatively recent release.

That would be impossible to do if each show awards movies from five or ten years ago. And I’m sure some people will look at that and say, “Good, campaigns shouldn’t determine who wins,” but that means you aren’t asking for an improved Oscars race. You’re asking for something besides the Oscars. You're asking for a fair and accurate list of each year’s best films, which, again, anyone is welcome to make on their own at any time. 

The Oscars were originally designed to stop actors from unionizing. They now exist for the industry to praise itself. It’s a self-serving institution, and recent releases can get a bigger boost from current recognition than films from years past can.

That sounds cynical, but when we’re talking about giving awards to those who deserve it, we should consider the interests of those deserving people. If someone did this year’s best performance, they want their Best Acting Oscar now, when the recognition will bring them additional roles, not 10 years from now. Same for Best Director or all those technical awards. The goal is to reward the winner, not to provide the most accurate assessment for someone five years in the future. 

If we wait several years, that recipient might not still be working or might not even be alive. Which brings up another issue... 

2 A Gap May Make All Biases Worse

The biggest flaw of the Oscars isn’t shortsightedness. If anything, it’s the opposite. Voters tend to award actors or directors whom they feel are “due” for an award, based on a large body of work, rather than considering the one film in question. If we make voters look back across more years when making their pick, they’ll now also consider everything the nominee did after that film in question.

Given the chance, voters will give awards for 2020 to whichever stars became extremely notable for work done in 2024. They’ll surely deny awards to anyone who fell from grace in the intervening years due to some scandal, though this doesn’t change which film was best in the year under review. And if a nominee died in the intervening years, they’ll now gain a huge advantage in the race. Given a 10-year delay, maybe every single award will go to whoever most recently died.

People today mock how Jamie Lee Curtis got the Oscar in 2023 over her Everything Everywhere All at Once costar Stephanie Hsu. Seemingly, this recognized Curtis for her yogurt commercials and general activism rather than for the acting role itself. Do you think five years of hindsight would make voters more likely to now award Hsu, or would they be even more likely to give it to the name who stayed in the news? 

1 It’s a Ritual to Represent the Year’s Passing

Ultimately, the Oscars matter a lot more to the people receiving those awards than to you or I. But we do follow the Oscars, and it’s not for an authoritative tabulation of which movies were best in 2014. It’s because we want to think about movies from this past year. In practice, it often winds up being movies from just the past few months, since Oscar-like movies choose their release dates to be as close to the end of the year as possible, but we want to look back at the past year and at no farther than that.

It's because one more year has passed, and we like to think about what just happened. The real film aficionados do care about formally praising movies of the past, and once again, they’re welcome to write appropriate lists anytime they want, and many of them do. For everyone else, the Oscars is a ceremony that’s relevant in the moment, and that’s what’s fun about them. 

An Oscars ceremony where everyone talks about some seemingly arbitrary year several years in the past would be utter madness. At best, it would be like a nostalgic reunion show, but five or ten years really isn’t long enough for the nostalgia to hit. Really, we’d have to make it 20 years later, and it would have to happen in addition to the actual Oscars ceremony that recognizes the past year’s films. This 2004 Look Back show would feature aging actors talking about their old roles and revised categories that better suit retrospection and...

Dammit, I better stop talking now before I convince myself this is a good idea after all. 

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