My thoughts on the Most Popular Film Category

So last Wednesday the Academy for Arts and Sciences, (The Oscar’s to you and me) announced that they were going to add a new category to the award show for most popular film.  Now the internet and the film community have since derided it as the Academy trying to stay relevant, some have gone further and said that with the inclusion of this category that film in general is now dead.

This is completely stupid! Having a category that reflects what the average movie viewer watches is a good thing!

Let’s put this into perspective for folks. On average most people living in places such as the U.S and UK will go to the movies 5 times per year, since it’s an expensive past time in some places costing £10 a ticket ( which may not seem like a lot but when you’re a family of 4 this adds up really quickly).  So if you’re spending your hard earned cash by going to the cinema, are you going to go watch the Oscar darling about J. Edgar Hoover or the latest Star Wars movie? 9 times out of 10 they’ll go to something that allows them to escape the world we live in.

Now don’t get me wrong I enjoy the Oscars and I enjoy the prestige films that come out around that season, but let’s face it, there is a type of Oscar film that the Academy and film critics like. Guess what film I’m talking about. A man is on the run from an oppressive government with his daughter and father who has dementia. What film did I just describe? It was Logan.  If this was changed to have instead of having our main characters be Mutants on the run from the government be Jew’s on the run from Nazi’s then this would have been nominated for best picture, but because it is set in a comic book movie, by some it is seen as lesser

Before you say it I know that Logan had been nominated for best adapted screenplay. The problem to me is that the Oscars are meant to be a capsule of what was relevant in our culture at the time, what we valued and our outlook on the world. Let’s look at past Oscars for an example. In 2009 The Dark Knight was famously not nominated for an Oscar while The Wrestler was. The Dark Knight is one of the corner stones of not just the comic book movie genre but in modern blockbuster movie making and is a film we still talk about today, whereas The Wrestler is largely forgotten and is only remembered because it was nominated. The Dark Knight is a far more important and a better reflection of what we as a society were dealing with but again because it was a comic book movie it was over looked, even in a year where the films villain won Best Supporting Actor posthumously!

This brings us to next year’s Oscar race where at the moment Black Panther is largely thought to be a front runner for best picture and they are now wondering that with the inclusion of this category does that give the Academy an out to not nominate it for the big one and instead give it what essentially comes to a participation award. Short answer is it probably never was going to be nominated for Best picture. Most of the Oscar films last year with the exception of Get Out came out in the latter half of the year so next year’s nominees we most likely haven’t even heard of and Black Panther would get lost in the shuffle.

That’s why this award is a good idea.  It reflects what many people already know, there is more than enough room for both prestige films and ones that are seen by the wider public. I might be speaking in hypotheticals, but what if someone who is watching the award show next year tunes in to see who wins most popular film then becomes intrigued by something else? What is to say they won’t go out and watch it therefore widening their pallet?  A lot of the films that got many of us hooked as kids were these high fantasy films like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and Jaws, but as we got older our tastes changed and developed. Over the last few years the Academy and many film fans have seemed to forget that. To many the Oscars are seen as obsolete since to them it’s a bunch of old white guy’s deciding what films they liked this year.  Most people don’t care about the Oscars so to me anything that raises interest in it is always going to be welcome.