See My 2024 Picks and Predictions: Nebula: nebula.tv/videos/thomasflight-who-should-win-at-the-oscars-2024 Patreon: www.patreon.com/posts/who-should-win-98423359
One thing that frustrated me this year was that three of the animated movies this year (Across the Spider-Verse, The Boy and the Heron, and Elemental) had the potential to be nominated in other categories, most notably Original Score, and there was just…nothing. It was Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio all over again. Two years in a row where animation wasn’t seen worth recognizing anywhere. Sure there were some years where animation didn’t get recognition, but two in a row?? The last time that happened was in the 80s, and since then animation has been blessed with: Disney’s Renaissance and Revival eras, Pixar’s 3D animation, increase of competitive studios and voices with DreamWorks, Illumination, Laika, etc., foreign studios such as Ghibli, Aardman, and Cartoon Saloon finding American audiences, independent animation finding a wider reach, the founding of the Annie Awards, and of course the actual creation of the Best Animated Film Oscar. Animation has been a major part of the most financially successful, critically-acclaimed, and audience-beloved movies ever made. And it’s tiring that the film industry as a whole hasn’t caught on to that.
Elemental was only average, nothing impressive. The joke I made about fire being racist towards water in the first scene was basically the plot of the film.
@@Moloch187 I thought Elemental was average as well, but Thomas Newman’s score did make the shortlist along with Joe Hisaishi and Daniel Pemberton. The Academy had THREE options and ultimately decided on none.
@@M_k-zi3tn I was genuinely surprised as well. There seemed to be so much support for Pemberton at BAFTA, Critics Choice, and Golden Globes. It was literally one of the best aspects of the movie. But sure, I guess give John Williams (a composer I DO love and respect) a legacy nomination for his “retirement”.
It is very hard to do that without potentially incentivizing people putting themselves in more danger than they normally are comfortable with. If a film wants to push for that award, they would feel like they have to take on extra risk to truly impress the judges with their stunts, which means that reward is then rewarding people needlessly risking their lives, which is absolutely terrible. Any way you try to implement something like that always has that problem and it seems impossible to completely avoid. It is also the reason the academy generally avoids awarding awards posthumously, as it can potentially incentivize people to treat themselves like shit in the name of a performance, just like a stunt award.
My argument against that category is that it would be highly skewed towards the Action genre, making it more appropriate for a specialist awards ceremony. I do not think any other categories right now are that skewed towards a genre, most would be Costume towards period films.
Screen actors have their own guild, while stuntmen only have a private club inside the SAG. It's a business/union thing. I believe the SFX/VFX blending stems from the same reason.
I hate the fact that The Boy and the Heron and Across the Spider-Verse were ignored completely outside of Best Animated Feature, yet mediocre flicks like Napolean and Maestro got so much love.
10000% Maestro doesn't deserve to be on there, I think most people agree on that, but Bradley Cooper has clout and probably paid a lot of marketing money to ensure Oscars voters saw it. Napoleon is dogshit, but its Ridley Scott so we HAVE to include him. But besides those two stinkers, I think a lot of people agree the nominations this year were genuinely quite great, there's absolutely snubs, Past Lives for one, I see people mentioning Iron Claw and Barbie too. But there's been far worse years.
@@GuineaPigEveryday I love love loved Maestro. I genuinely think its a masterpiece. The blocking, the direction, the performances, the nuance, the script, the music... I really think its the movie of the year. ... Napoleon was dog shit though. Out of interest what didn't you like about Maestro?
Maestro had a clear vision, I think it's a matter of taste. Napoleon, on the other hand, um, it's hard to believe the same director did Blade Runner. What happened to Ridley Scott, really?
@@DizzyBusy Funnily enough I was think the same thing. But take a look at his filmography. There are a handful of fabulous movies but a lot of workmanlike dross too
@@K.A.Josephyeah but Anatomy of a Fall is nominated for best picture right now and a likely candidate to get snubbed. If there’s any reference to Anatomy of a Murder here it’s indirectly via Anatomy of a Fall whose name is clearly a nod to that movie.
"Best" is a misnomer "Favorite" is more apt. Truer still, "Preferred" or "Most liked" by the Academy. "The Best" just sounds....sexier AND marketable..
What about Best Picture? Which picture? A 90 minute movie contains almost 13,000 pictures. They can’t all be best. The Academy should specify which picture in a film is the best (or favorite or whatever).
in the ceremony itself they call the categories "outstanding acting/directing" or "outstanding achievement in sound" etc which i've always thought was so much classier and respectful
You're perfectly right. I can say the same about this video, which seems as if the vlogger is complaining that certain favorites of his had not won or were snubbed in the nomination process.
One thing that the Academy can do that would benefit a lot of cinephiles and ultimately lead to increased viewership and interest in the awards , is to get the previous winners of technical awards to do breakdowns and analysis of either current nominees or famous/ all time great movies. The acting, directing and Best Picture nominations are easy to decipher for the general public. But the average moviegoer is not familiar with the technical aspects of filmmaking and the nominees in those categories. This would help the audience appreciate the movie more. Also, making it compulsory for a movie to be eligible to be nominated being the release of home media would go a very long way in helping the industry.
The thing is, you are equating „leading to increased viewership“ and „benefit cinephiles“. The problem is, I don‘t think the Academy sees it the same way. They don‘t want to appeal to cinephiles, they want to appeal to the mainstream audience to increase the viewership. Remember when two years ago, they REMOVED some awards from the awards show and cut them together in a montage to make the show „flow better“ or whatever? They didn‘t REMOVE AWARDS FROM AN AWARDS SHOW because they wanted to appeal to cinephiles who love the movies. They did so, because those awards were considered „small awards“ or „boring“ for the regular mainstream viewer and they thought they could get more viewers by leaning more into the „show“ aspect. What you describe would be great for somebody like me who is interested in this stuff! It won‘t do a thing for the mainstream audience which the Academy tries to target all the time.
Now we already have youtubers doing that. The Academy can jump in, of course, but they shouldn't do it on the evening proper, it's already too long as it is
just watched the iron claw and its fucking baffling that people were upset that Barbie got “snubbed” for two awards, meanwhile everybody who worked on The Iron Claw didn’t get ANYTHINGGGGGG tf is wrong with y’all
It’s more issue of release time and promotion. It was released in mid December, which you can argue is still enough time for Oscar nominations, however there wasn’t nearly as much promotion for it to be watched by the members of the Academy. If it were to be released in Thanksgiving, it would’ve gotten an nomination. Take a look at Past Lives, another A24 film of this year, it was released during summer and didn’t have much advertisements but it had enough time for many members of Academy to watch. Eventually the name gets spread and more members watch the film. Look at Uncut Gems, released on Christmas and didn’t have much promotion, very similar to Iron Claw, and those two didn’t get nominated. It’s just a matter of time and how much money you’ll spend on promotion.
@@LynnAMVExactly. I haven't seen it, but hear if it had come out sooner or if copies had gone out to Academy members sooner, it would've done very well.
I haven't seen it but I think that film should have gotten the nominations that Barbie has, best picture, really? Although I would have nominated Greta Gerwig to best director, even tho I preferred her two previous films.
@@LynnAMV A24 should've pushed _The Iron Claw_ to this year. Imagine Zac Efron hogging the Best Actor 2024 spotlight with no resistance for months as we speak.
4:11 my brain did a record skip at this footage of Cary Grant presenting an Oscar to Jean Simmons, which goes to show how much of a hyperfixation classic film is for me. Simmons unfortunately never won any Oscars (nor did Grant), and I had to look up what this footage was actually depicting. It was the 1958 Oscars where Alec Guinness won Best Actor for Bridge on the River Kwai, but couldn't attend so Simmons accepted on his behalf.
The practice of the December release is particularly annoying for those of us who live overseas, with those December releases in the USA mean the films are often released in Australia the next year. So when critics lists come out, most of the films listed aren't even available to be seen here.
Yeah, that's a huge annoyance of mine too. So many of the oscar nominees are only just releasing now in Melbourne. How hard is it to release at the same time?
They do that because, if a movie gets released outside of the US after it has gotten nominated at the Oscars, it will help sell more tickets. I live in Rome and that happens here too. "Parasite" came out during the last quarter of that year, already having won major awards by that point, but they re-released it the following Winter because it was an "Oscar title".
I'm wondering if you could make a brief explanation video of these; IMDB, Letterboxd, Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic of how they make the database of movie criticizing and aggregates reviews. Would love to see the next video on this topic.
Academy Awards (which has been heavily advertised) is ultimately just a reference to pick a "good" movie. Then it's up to us to decide which film to watch.
Nah. I think it’s good for sparking debate as well. Discussion on snubs is good fun and sparks interest in other movies. The problem is if people stop paying attention which I think is becoming the case
@@ssssssstssssssssa lot of people treat "snubs" as if the academy is somehow supposed to agree with most of their tastes. There's literally nothing the academy can do to get most people to agree. Even if you took every ounce of politics and favoritism out of it, there would always still end up being upsets and surprise picks pretty much every year. Not only are these things subjective but it's a mix of people voting separately that simply are not the general public EDIT: not to mention the fact that you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone that has the stamina and availability to watch hundreds of eligible films every single year. Each person's gonna have their own way of narrowing down what's worth their consideration.
Yeah I don't really care who the winner is, I just like to check out the nominees to see if there's something I might like. Ford v. Ferrari, Whiplash, Argo, Moneyball, The Artist, The King's Speech, Parasite are examples of movies that I watched because they were nominated and I ended up liking them. So I'm not one of those Oscar haters but I also don't watch the ceremony.
I've always thought of the Oscars as the "SuperBowl for movie nerds", meaning it creates a lot of fun discussion and is fun to watch in a competition sense, but at the end of the day the results should not be seen as that historically important, because it almost always comes down to popularity in the moment over any kind of artistic merit.
I think this is especially emphasised in animation where everything is so studio based. I mean the same handful of American studios are nominated every year that the animation branch of the academy is probably so heavily skewed in a super commercial direction. So often animated films that win actually important animation festivals like Annecy aren’t even shortlisted.
I think we were all very surprised that "Nimona" and especially "Robot Dreams" got nominated instead of "The Super Mario Bros. Movie" and "TMNT: Mutant Mayhem".
@@VicenteTorresAliasVits Takehiko Inoue's _The First Slam Dunk_ beat Masaaki Yuasa's _Inu-oh_ (submitted for the 95th Oscars) AND Makoto Shinkai's _Suzume no Tojimari_ (submitted for the 96th Oscars) for Best Animated Feature at the recent Japan Academy Film Prizes. Yet distributor GKIDS decided to give it NO support beyond its international release, and devoted all its resources to Oscars season promotion for Hayao Miyazaki's _How Do You Live? (The Boy & the Heron),_ which arguably could've gotten nominated on Miya-san's name alone.
I think Oscars are still necessary cause most of the times good films get recognised & are rewarded(even if they don't perform great box office)and such talents continue to get funding to make more unconditional offbeat great films that masses (busy riding big budget themeparks) may not watch
Good point, there is a notable rise in viewership of more challenging/experimental films that otherwise wouldn't have much attention on them, and in theatrical numbers too, Poor Things for example is maintaining good numbers, and in a day and age where marketing campaigns are relegated 99% to big studio blockbuster-spectacle films, i think the Academy Awards are 100% important to maintaining some sense of rewarding artists who take a chance and try something. Also it's a historical time-capsule, and like a Calendar for films, its great to look back at old Oscars because you can see a lot of really popular exciting films from well-known directors and actors, but also some smaller ones that just don't get discussed that much anymore, not necessarily because they're bad but just because they're not that mainstream. I don't know, the Academy Awards used to be better, I think ppl dismiss that a lot, they talk about it as if it was shit to begin with, but it still offers the spotlight for interesting films, and honestly thats increasingly the only recognition some films that aren't studio-shlock will get nowadays, I mean seriously, Academy Awards while sometimes pretentious used to coincide with big box office hits too for a long time, now they don't, there's quite a lot of Oscars films that just never go past 100mil. Idk the Oscars getting worse is also cuz the cinema landscape is just not great for rewarding good films anymore, the Oscars are very flawed but at least they give some light to interesting art.
It's not just that SPR lost, it's that it lost to that trash Shakespeare in love. It's not even about taste or subjectivity. It's like Tiramisu and Tacos , they can't compete because they're on completely on different levels.
@@somebody7070 The only thing SPR had going for it was the first 20 minutes. Shakespeare in Love is so much better than SPR. Tom Stoppard's script is a pure delight with its in-jokes about the theatre and show business. It won 7 oscars which means that somebody must have liked it.
@@kellydg471 oh honey , there's no point in us having this conversation anymore. If you feel the way u feel which is fine, but I judge you MASSIVELY , than good for you. Also more like somebody must have liked sexually harassing Gwyneth Paltrow and you know who I mean
Thanks for the video. Just a reminder, Louis B. Mayer created the Oscars to stop actors from unionizing back in 1920s. He, and rightly so, realized the actors and so many in the field , in that time, would relish getting an award over, say, important things, like health insurance, fair working hours, and so forth. And thus the Oscars were born, not to celebrate art, but to market films to the masses. And fair enough. However, so many self-declared pundits (especially on You Tube today) have zero, repeat zero, idea how the "town" Hollywood (both the physical location and the industry) really work. Many think that Academy voters choose "what is the best". And that's for the most part, not the case. In many ways, it's favoritism, it's an axe to grind, it's checking off the box, unfortunately, because they are too busy to pay attention. Here's the reality. Many, many great films, performances, contributions, were never, repeat, never nominated for an Oscar. And yet we celebrate them more than most Oscar winners. Here's the question any filmmaker should ask themselves. Would you rather spend a million dollars on a film that earned no Oscar nominations but was revered for all time or one that earned 10 Oscars but was forgotten within a year?
the greatest snub in recent memory has been either Best Animated Film is continuingly giving it to movies that apeals to the kids most & Ship of Thesus not getting nomination for either Best Picture or Best Foreign Film because it was an Indian film with English dialogue...
The timing of this is sort of funny. Joel Haver, the youtuber known for his animations and Sketch comedy has hosted an event where he asks people to film a movie DURING the Oscars. He announced a day or two ago that he was cancelling the planned awards show because he had recieved too many submissions for him to conceivably watch so he decided to cancel that aspect of the show. I didn't really piece together that he just illustrated in microchosm the biggest issue with the ACTUAL oscars.
The 'Shakespeare in Love' campaign also likely sabotaged Cate Blanchett's win for Best Actress (Elizabeth I) - a snub that I take more personally than needed
Of the last ten Best Picture winners, only three were directed by white males(including one Asian-American/Jewish-American collaboration). Two were directed by Mexicans, two by directors of African descent, and one by a Korean. Two were directed by women(20%, despite only 14.6% of US film directors being women), and one of those women is of Asian descent. Of the last eleven winners for Best Director, only two were white males: Damien Chazelle and Daniel Scheinert(albeit with Scheinert in collaboration with Asian-American Daniel Kwan). Two others went to a Asian male directors(including Ang Lee winning his second award). Two were directed by women, including Asian-American Chloe Zhao, which means that three out of the last fourteen winners of Best Director were women(over 20%). Five of the last ten awards went to Mexicans. So far in the 21st century(2001-2022), there have been 16 Oscars for Acting that have gone to Black performers which, out of 88 awards given, is just shy of 20%, while the actual percentage of Americans who are of African descent is only around 14%. This year, 25% of Oscar nominees for acting are of African-American heritage. Over the last seven years, nearly 40% of Academy Award wins for acting have gone to a visible minority: Mahershala Ali(twice), Viola Davis, Rami Malek, Regina King, Daniel Kaluuya, Youn Yuh-jung, Will Smith, Ariane DeBose, Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan(and that doesn't include Troy Kotsur, who is deaf). ...and I haven't even gotten to the percentage of screenwriting awards since 2009 that were written or co-written by visible minorities(Jordan Peele, Spike Lee, Taika Waititi, etc), with half of the writing Oscars in the 2020's going to women. Is there a problem with diversity in our culture? Of course, but this criticism as applied toward the 21st century Academy Awards is overstated(in least in the top categories).
a fun thing to do is just going to the wikipedia article for a random year's Academy Awards. Pretty much every time you're gonna find snubs or bad decisions. Take the 39th Academy Awards, 1967. A movie called Born Free won best original score. I haven't heard of it but in hindsight it's of course easy to say that none other than The Good, the Bad and the Ugly should have won that year's Best Original Score Category. you can do that for every year. Recency bias is a thing, which is also what oscar bait movies are exploiting, and completely overlooking movies is also a thing
I aim to see every nominated film every year. Obviously most of the time, that‘s not possible. Most of the time we‘re talking about over 50 movies per year, over 35 feature length movies. So, it‘s hard to expect people to see EVERY movie. HOWEVER: If you get to vote in a category, it should be MANDATORY that you‘ve seen the movies nominated in these categories! If I can do it for most movies in the entire list, then industry people with easy access to all these movies should DEFINITIVELY be able to do so for the categories they have the privilege to vote in!
I live in Europe and if even 20 years ago the Oscars were very popular, today practically no one cares. I don't even know if as any TV station rebroadcasts the event.
Ultimately, the Oscars have always been a popularity contest and subject to industry politics; they have always skewed to conservative tastes, and the dynamics of team "A" versus team "B" has occasionally resulted in the surprise of a win for team "C". They are a lot of fun if you don't take them too seriously, and not much fun when they take themselves too seriously.
Oscars are hardly about performance but how well actors campaigned themselves, their narratives, and with current political landscape. Oscars are not arbiter of merit, or quality of performance.
Or you get journalists (movie critics), whose job it actually is to watch 300 films a year, at least to do the first part of the skimming, and then when you have your nominees, the peers come in and award or not award the remaining films they can reasonably be expected to have seen.
@ThomasFlight i love your channel, especially videos on Why is it like that. Like your video on why Wes Anderson movies like this, you are able to see all the details and what makes it special. I wish you do more videos on things outside of movies, i love your video on how memes captured our attention. I am currently watching movies on the list you made "Films that destroy traditional narrative form but that aren't so experimental as to be utterly incomprehensible" i love it, even if i don't like the movie it's still a special one.
Isn’t it also true that some favorites to win didn’t because voters thought that others would vote for them, and then enough of them thought the same thing and it didn’t get enough votes and caused upsets?
4:14 I think worth remembering is that the oversights can seem obvious as they're happening but what seems obvious does not actually turn out to necessarily be correct. One very high-profile snub I remember was Crash beating Brokeback Mountain in 2006. Brokeback Mountain was a huge point of conversation at the time due to its relatively (at the time) explicit depiction of a gay relationship while Crash was considered to be bland Oscar bait faire. But in the time since, Brokeback Mountain has also kind of fallen out of mainstream attention and is not really a film that is still widely talked about much or that influential, even though at the time it seemed to most people unhappy with the result that it would be. Similar story in 2019 when Green Book won over Roma, which has also not had that big an impact 5 years later. Thats not to say Green Book or Crash were great choices either, just that the "obvious" better choice didn't really turn out to be the correct one.
Hindsight is also infinite because future generations will reevaluate movies again and the consensus may flip. Cinema is a relatively young art form compared to the rest, but the Renaissance is an example of that.
Brokeback Mountain is very much still talked about I would argue, people definitely still discuss it and there are plenty iconic scenes. Sure it’s not as prominent as other queer films but there’s definitely a broad demographic of people who have seen it
Brokeback is definitely still talk especially more than fucking crash which is only mentioned due to basically everyone finding it undeserving of best picture win lmao
This term is used pejoratively (not necessarily intended by the video) but Deer Hunter is an AMAZING movie, and while it's a shame it had to be marketed this way to be a success, I'm glad it was.
This vid sums up nicely why I lost faith in Filmjoys channel when they put Barbie at #1 because they hadnt bothered to see Poor Things, which was more original, artistic, consistent and had a far more coherent feminist message.
A good companion video to this is Dan Murell's If I Ran the Oscars. He talks mostly about how he would improve the ceremony itself, but he does talk about how to fix the Academy member problems as well as marketing budget restrictions in For Your Consideration campaigns. I love awards season and watching the Oscars, but the Academy needs an overhaul or they are going to lose it's core audience of cinephiles.
A big marketing Oscars campaign is not guarantee to get a bunch of nominations (ie Saltburn). I would have included ‘Power and influence in Hollywood’ as a big driving factor (like in the Weisentein example, it was not because his campaigns had money but because he was feared in the industry), and also on the other spectrum you have outcasts like Parasite that create a buzz among viewers that even while old male academy members can’t ignore. Today movie marketing starts waaay before the Oscar’s, with viewers more engaged with the results of film festivals and the conversation happening in social media and RUclips channels like this one. There’s so much more than those magazine ads!
the oscars is simply the industry supporting the industry, just like every other broadcasted award show. its unsurprising that the 'oscar bump' in the box office is shrinking given the constant growth of information sharing over the internet. where a moviegoer would previously rely on oscar nominations or professional critics to get an idea of whats 'good', they can instead seek out aggregated views more easily that provide filters and slicers to find what is 'good' (letterboxd, etc.)
Whatever the shenanigans of Harvey “Shitheel” Weinstein, Shakespeare in Love is a better film than Saving Private Ryan. The Thin Red Line is the film that should’ve walked off with the win that year.
I really wanna have the opportunity to talk with the Best Original Score voting branch and have an in-depth argument for why snubbing Daniel Pemberton and Joe Hisaishi was the one of the most idiotic choices they've ever made.
It's been pretty evident the Oscars voters don't even watch the movies they nominate. Not to mention all the indie and foreign films that are always ignored. Them being busy people is not an excuse. If they're so busy, they have no right to be there in the first place.
I think that voting is difficult, across all awards as you've perfectly summed up. Filmmakers and Academy members cannot watch everything, I'm not sure how you fix that. The Ballon d'Or in football is actually voted on by journalists not football players (though the captain of a country's international team also votes, I may have some of this wrong but it is journalist driven). I'm not sure if that would help the academy, making their membership larger. Giving more people an opinion. As I said this is an award-wide issue. I'm eligible to vote in the Eisner Awards (comic book Oscars essentially) due to being a published comic book writer, and every year I only vote on a handful of categories. Because I can't vote in a category that I haven't read everything in, I would love to read every nominate piece but as you said people who make art are often busy making art. I'm busy writing, or reading stuff to assist my own writing. I'm trying to get better at reading more nominated stuff because it always feels weird filling out a small amount of the ballot. Just wanted to give my own perspective as someone who has eligiblilty to vote on awards even if it isn't the Oscars. Great video as always.
Film awards are literally just industry awards. Every industry has awards. From plumbers to video games, from architecture to forestry. You name it, the industry has awards and awards ceremonies. Film awards are no different other than being televised. It's a popularity contest. A way for that specific industry to tap itself on the back and make it's employees feel special. A load of crap. EDIT: DID BRO REALLY JUST PRONOUNCE THE GUYS NAME STANLEY Q-BRICK? Wow dude. Wanna read his name bud? Ku-brick.
The best idea I have heard is one that came from my Dad: The Academy has to pick best picture 5 years after they came out. So the 2023 best picture couldn't be determined until the 2029 Oscars. That way the academy has less of a chance to fall prey to the "important films" and the truly better films of a cinematic year will stick out because they have true staying power. This of course will never happen, but I think it would get at the source of a lot of the issues.
Talking about the technical needs to be a member of the academy, I know definitely that they're false. I know someone who was added to the academy with one directing credit in the directing category, this is when they were adding people specifically of X race or gender to pad out their diversity numbers.
It’s sad to say, but a lot of times if you look at movies five years later, you can see who the real winners were Unless you know movies and you know when you’ve been ripped off or not
11:30 is key and it's for this reason that there will always be what people to be "snubs"...at the end of the day, there's way too many movies to watch so certain ones have to be brought to their attention some kind of way
The original work is the Barbie franchise, which you may have heard of. I think it's interesting what definitions people assume about what constitutes "a work" and "an adaptation". There are plenty of adaptations, even acclaimed ones, that radically change the original story. Is it possible to adapt an artwork that had no story to begin with? I don't know why not.
Another aspect is also how hard it is to get your movie into the theatres. I can't say how many movies I see at festivals that are excellent movies but the never get a theatrical release simply because it's that difficult. The big budget movies make so much that the cinemas will gladly screen them for months (I believe EEAAO was screened for 6 months in my city) while others get a couple days or a week if they're lucky.
Loved this video!! I was planning on taking off work to watch the oscars. Then I saw that All of Us Strangers didnt get a single nomination and changed my mind. Movies are subjective, yes, but not a single nomination for such a objectively great film? Very much a bunch of bull, but i hope they change that in the coming future
@VicenteTorresAliasVits not sure it's my place to answer that. Every film has heaps of hard work put into it, however I think it was terribly shameful that Aoustrangers didn't get anything. I watched many of the 2023 movies, and can confidently say some of the best acting was in Strangers. I think the hype around a film helps it more than if it's good or not though. And Strangers released too late for any major hype for the oscars.
This is WAYYY off target but I do wish you'd do an analysis of the film "Tommy". Today, I've just seen it for the very first time. I got the gist of it. However, I sense there are some nuances I missed.
I have a friend who is an academy voter (he's an Oscar winner, you haven't heard of him), and every year he watches every movie nominated in the categories he votes for (he posts his thoughts on facebook, it's neat). This, it appears, is very unusual behavior among academy voters. Sure, they can't watch all the eligible films. But most of them don't even watch all the nominees in their categories!
I was hoping and am really glad to see you include the Shakespeare in Love best picture win in this video. Its one of the most egregious and disgusting events at the Academy Awards that I always call back to when people criticize the awards show. This isn't a recent issue. The show has been nasty for a while.
I stopped giving a damn about the Oscar’s when the lighthouse didn’t win anything and then was fully killed when the banshees of inishiren didn’t win anything either
One of my favourite film director Anurag Kashyap once said award shows no matter big or small, always says more about the jury then the art itself that won and it kind of stuck with me and i have never been able to get it out of mind I didn't take it in a negetive way but now everytime i see a film, Director, actir ein something there is a curiousity in my mind about a group of people deciding why it deserves it It can turn into a fulm like 12 angry man but just in a random indie film festival in s room gull of jury of vetren and new filmmaker just talking about films for 2 hours
I wish I could hear you opposite Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins on The Big Picture podcast, would be such a great cross section of film culture. @TheRinger make this happen!
I watched this video on nebula but I couldn't comment so Im posting here. I feel like you dismissed the idea of giving academy members a randomised list of 20 films to watch too easily. I agree that 200+ is too many but if being an academy member is prestigous than 20 films is definitely acceptable. And if 20 is still too much 10 would still reduce the impact (if not morso). If you want to have an impact on the industry you should have some responsibility.
I don't give a f**k about the competition/awards and I've never watched The Oscars. But I always make sure to check the nominated films, because they are often pretty damn good.
Do you have a theory as to why 4 of the 5 best cinematography nominees are either partially or totally black and white? Seems like such a weird trend in 2024.
![State of Play | September 24, 2024 [ENGLISH]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/fVs0suPHAX8/mqdefault.jpg)
See My 2024 Picks and Predictions:
Nebula: nebula.tv/videos/thomasflight-who-should-win-at-the-oscars-2024
Patreon: www.patreon.com/posts/who-should-win-98423359
I just like that "Meg 2: The Trench" submitted itself for Best Picture. We should all possess such unearned confidence
Must be contractual. Ultimately everyone who made it knows it wil never touch oscars at all
Or such a self aware sense of humor lol
One thing that frustrated me this year was that three of the animated movies this year (Across the Spider-Verse, The Boy and the Heron, and Elemental) had the potential to be nominated in other categories, most notably Original Score, and there was just…nothing. It was Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio all over again. Two years in a row where animation wasn’t seen worth recognizing anywhere. Sure there were some years where animation didn’t get recognition, but two in a row??
The last time that happened was in the 80s, and since then animation has been blessed with: Disney’s Renaissance and Revival eras, Pixar’s 3D animation, increase of competitive studios and voices with DreamWorks, Illumination, Laika, etc., foreign studios such as Ghibli, Aardman, and Cartoon Saloon finding American audiences, independent animation finding a wider reach, the founding of the Annie Awards, and of course the actual creation of the Best Animated Film Oscar.
Animation has been a major part of the most financially successful, critically-acclaimed, and audience-beloved movies ever made. And it’s tiring that the film industry as a whole hasn’t caught on to that.
Elemental was only average, nothing impressive. The joke I made about fire being racist towards water in the first scene was basically the plot of the film.
Personally thought Boy and the Heron had a pretty poor score and poor use of music - especially for a Ghibli film, where they often excel
I was genuinely surprised that Spiderverse wasnt nominated for best Original score but Indiana Jones was nominated. What madness is this.
@@Moloch187 I thought Elemental was average as well, but Thomas Newman’s score did make the shortlist along with Joe Hisaishi and Daniel Pemberton. The Academy had THREE options and ultimately decided on none.
@@M_k-zi3tn I was genuinely surprised as well. There seemed to be so much support for Pemberton at BAFTA, Critics Choice, and Golden Globes. It was literally one of the best aspects of the movie. But sure, I guess give John Williams (a composer I DO love and respect) a legacy nomination for his “retirement”.
The real travesty about Academy is that they don't include Best Stunt Coordination in their categories.
Totally agree.
Also they don't give awards for SFX & VFX separately
It is very hard to do that without potentially incentivizing people putting themselves in more danger than they normally are comfortable with. If a film wants to push for that award, they would feel like they have to take on extra risk to truly impress the judges with their stunts, which means that reward is then rewarding people needlessly risking their lives, which is absolutely terrible. Any way you try to implement something like that always has that problem and it seems impossible to completely avoid. It is also the reason the academy generally avoids awarding awards posthumously, as it can potentially incentivize people to treat themselves like shit in the name of a performance, just like a stunt award.
My argument against that category is that it would be highly skewed towards the Action genre, making it more appropriate for a specialist awards ceremony. I do not think any other categories right now are that skewed towards a genre, most would be Costume towards period films.
Screen actors have their own guild, while stuntmen only have a private club inside the SAG. It's a business/union thing. I believe the SFX/VFX blending stems from the same reason.
I hate the fact that The Boy and the Heron and Across the Spider-Verse were ignored completely outside of Best Animated Feature, yet mediocre flicks like Napolean and Maestro got so much love.
10000% Maestro doesn't deserve to be on there, I think most people agree on that, but Bradley Cooper has clout and probably paid a lot of marketing money to ensure Oscars voters saw it. Napoleon is dogshit, but its Ridley Scott so we HAVE to include him. But besides those two stinkers, I think a lot of people agree the nominations this year were genuinely quite great, there's absolutely snubs, Past Lives for one, I see people mentioning Iron Claw and Barbie too. But there's been far worse years.
@@GuineaPigEveryday I love love loved Maestro. I genuinely think its a masterpiece. The blocking, the direction, the performances, the nuance, the script, the music... I really think its the movie of the year. ... Napoleon was dog shit though. Out of interest what didn't you like about Maestro?
Maestro had a clear vision, I think it's a matter of taste. Napoleon, on the other hand, um, it's hard to believe the same director did Blade Runner. What happened to Ridley Scott, really?
@@DizzyBusy Funnily enough I was think the same thing. But take a look at his filmography. There are a handful of fabulous movies but a lot of workmanlike dross too
@@matfresco At this point, he's made more bad movies than good movies! I'm sure he has die hard fans out there, just not in me
One weird trick to win Best Picture every time: cast John Cazale in your movie.
Aight imma do that next year
@@Wesleyminakerhe dead
Already patched
I keep telling you, he's 88 years old, and he's dead!
This guy posted a comment before the video was uploaded. How?
All Oscar campaigns should only be like David Lynch's
For your consideration... Laura Dern
🐄
I didn't get the point of it.
@@teamblue2431I don't think there was one either. It's just a funny and creative way for campaigning Laura Dern's performance.
I love that guy. He also makes music, they sound like his movies.
‘Anatomy of the academy’ is now my favorite combination of words.
I just watched the film (Anatomy of A Murder) And I think it’s reference to that.
It’s great movie by the way I’d recommend it to you.
@@K.A.Joseph I think it's a reference to the movie "anatomy of a fall". It released last year, so it would make sense to be a reference to that
@@Pallialbertti that also makes sense, but Anatomy of murder is genre classic and well known film and usually it gets referenced a lot.
@@K.A.Josephyeah but Anatomy of a Fall is nominated for best picture right now and a likely candidate to get snubbed.
If there’s any reference to Anatomy of a Murder here it’s indirectly via Anatomy of a Fall whose name is clearly a nod to that movie.
Saul Bass would have designed the sh1t out of that movie poster
"Best" is a misnomer "Favorite" is more apt. Truer still, "Preferred" or "Most liked" by the Academy. "The Best" just sounds....sexier AND marketable..
What about Best Picture? Which picture? A 90 minute movie contains almost 13,000 pictures. They can’t all be best. The Academy should specify which picture in a film is the best (or favorite or whatever).
in the ceremony itself they call the categories "outstanding acting/directing" or "outstanding achievement in sound" etc which i've always thought was so much classier and respectful
Fair enough but they're all outstanding nominees aren't they? The winner "stood out" because....? @@ds1116
You're perfectly right. I can say the same about this video, which seems as if the vlogger is complaining that certain favorites of his had not won or were snubbed in the nomination process.
Often, it is "most"
One thing that the Academy can do that would benefit a lot of cinephiles and ultimately lead to increased viewership and interest in the awards , is to get the previous winners of technical awards to do breakdowns and analysis of either current nominees or famous/ all time great movies.
The acting, directing and Best Picture nominations are easy to decipher for the general public. But the average moviegoer is not familiar with the technical aspects of filmmaking and the nominees in those categories. This would help the audience appreciate the movie more.
Also, making it compulsory for a movie to be eligible to be nominated being the release of home media would go a very long way in helping the industry.
The thing is, you are equating „leading to increased viewership“ and „benefit cinephiles“.
The problem is, I don‘t think the Academy sees it the same way. They don‘t want to appeal to cinephiles, they want to appeal to the mainstream audience to increase the viewership.
Remember when two years ago, they REMOVED some awards from the awards show and cut them together in a montage to make the show „flow better“ or whatever?
They didn‘t REMOVE AWARDS FROM AN AWARDS SHOW because they wanted to appeal to cinephiles who love the movies. They did so, because those awards were considered „small awards“ or „boring“ for the regular mainstream viewer and they thought they could get more viewers by leaning more into the „show“ aspect.
What you describe would be great for somebody like me who is interested in this stuff!
It won‘t do a thing for the mainstream audience which the Academy tries to target all the time.
That last part raises the ceiling even more for independent films getting recognition, depending on how wide you mean home media.
@@AfutureV Probably just means it is widely available, like on a streaming service or something, and not only being showed at film festivals
Great idea!
If they were interested in any of that, they would have done it by now.
Now we already have youtubers doing that. The Academy can jump in, of course, but they shouldn't do it on the evening proper, it's already too long as it is
just watched the iron claw and its fucking baffling that people were upset that Barbie got “snubbed” for two awards, meanwhile everybody who worked on The Iron Claw didn’t get ANYTHINGGGGGG tf is wrong with y’all
It’s more issue of release time and promotion. It was released in mid December, which you can argue is still enough time for Oscar nominations, however there wasn’t nearly as much promotion for it to be watched by the members of the Academy. If it were to be released in Thanksgiving, it would’ve gotten an nomination. Take a look at Past Lives, another A24 film of this year, it was released during summer and didn’t have much advertisements but it had enough time for many members of Academy to watch. Eventually the name gets spread and more members watch the film. Look at Uncut Gems, released on Christmas and didn’t have much promotion, very similar to Iron Claw, and those two didn’t get nominated. It’s just a matter of time and how much money you’ll spend on promotion.
@@LynnAMVExactly. I haven't seen it, but hear if it had come out sooner or if copies had gone out to Academy members sooner, it would've done very well.
those two statements can absolutely coexist though
I haven't seen it but I think that film should have gotten the nominations that Barbie has, best picture, really? Although I would have nominated Greta Gerwig to best director, even tho I preferred her two previous films.
@@LynnAMV A24 should've pushed _The Iron Claw_ to this year. Imagine Zac Efron hogging the Best Actor 2024 spotlight with no resistance for months as we speak.
4:11 my brain did a record skip at this footage of Cary Grant presenting an Oscar to Jean Simmons, which goes to show how much of a hyperfixation classic film is for me. Simmons unfortunately never won any Oscars (nor did Grant), and I had to look up what this footage was actually depicting. It was the 1958 Oscars where Alec Guinness won Best Actor for Bridge on the River Kwai, but couldn't attend so Simmons accepted on his behalf.
The practice of the December release is particularly annoying for those of us who live overseas, with those December releases in the USA mean the films are often released in Australia the next year. So when critics lists come out, most of the films listed aren't even available to be seen here.
Yeah, that's a huge annoyance of mine too. So many of the oscar nominees are only just releasing now in Melbourne. How hard is it to release at the same time?
They do that because, if a movie gets released outside of the US after it has gotten nominated at the Oscars, it will help sell more tickets. I live in Rome and that happens here too. "Parasite" came out during the last quarter of that year, already having won major awards by that point, but they re-released it the following Winter because it was an "Oscar title".
I'm wondering if you could make a brief explanation video of these; IMDB, Letterboxd, Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic of how they make the database of movie criticizing and aggregates reviews. Would love to see the next video on this topic.
LOVE this idea!
ditto
bro is cooking
Absolutely! Especially about letterboxd. I wonder how much influence it has now. It’s much more famous than just a few years ago
Ooh, yes! Especially since Letterboxd is a viewing AND reviewing platform.
The campaign for the Bradley Cooper film Maestro was particularly egregious to me
That film was so bad
Bradley was good in that film but arguably performances like Nicolas Cage in Dream Senario or Zac Efron were far more deserving.
Please, can you expand on this?
@@raid4deforce259 Andrew Scott was even better than those two.
It's so pretentious
Academy Awards (which has been heavily advertised) is ultimately just a reference to pick a "good" movie. Then it's up to us to decide which film to watch.
Nah. I think it’s good for sparking debate as well. Discussion on snubs is good fun and sparks interest in other movies. The problem is if people stop paying attention which I think is becoming the case
@@ssssssstssssssssa lot of people treat "snubs" as if the academy is somehow supposed to agree with most of their tastes. There's literally nothing the academy can do to get most people to agree. Even if you took every ounce of politics and favoritism out of it, there would always still end up being upsets and surprise picks pretty much every year. Not only are these things subjective but it's a mix of people voting separately that simply are not the general public
EDIT: not to mention the fact that you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone that has the stamina and availability to watch hundreds of eligible films every single year. Each person's gonna have their own way of narrowing down what's worth their consideration.
Yeah I don't really care who the winner is, I just like to check out the nominees to see if there's something I might like. Ford v. Ferrari, Whiplash, Argo, Moneyball, The Artist, The King's Speech, Parasite are examples of movies that I watched because they were nominated and I ended up liking them. So I'm not one of those Oscar haters but I also don't watch the ceremony.
I've always thought of the Oscars as the "SuperBowl for movie nerds", meaning it creates a lot of fun discussion and is fun to watch in a competition sense, but at the end of the day the results should not be seen as that historically important, because it almost always comes down to popularity in the moment over any kind of artistic merit.
I think this is especially emphasised in animation where everything is so studio based. I mean the same handful of American studios are nominated every year that the animation branch of the academy is probably so heavily skewed in a super commercial direction. So often animated films that win actually important animation festivals like Annecy aren’t even shortlisted.
I think we were all very surprised that "Nimona" and especially "Robot Dreams" got nominated instead of "The Super Mario Bros. Movie" and "TMNT: Mutant Mayhem".
@@VicenteTorresAliasVits Takehiko Inoue's _The First Slam Dunk_ beat Masaaki Yuasa's _Inu-oh_ (submitted for the 95th Oscars) AND Makoto Shinkai's _Suzume no Tojimari_ (submitted for the 96th Oscars) for Best Animated Feature at the recent Japan Academy Film Prizes. Yet distributor GKIDS decided to give it NO support beyond its international release, and devoted all its resources to Oscars season promotion for Hayao Miyazaki's _How Do You Live? (The Boy & the Heron),_ which arguably could've gotten nominated on Miya-san's name alone.
I think Oscars are still necessary cause most of the times good films get recognised & are rewarded(even if they don't perform great box office)and such talents continue to get funding to make more unconditional offbeat great films that masses (busy riding big budget themeparks) may not watch
Though as Thomas stated there needs to be vast improvements or else they'll continue to get less & less relevant
can’t say that with the iron claw. idk how tf a24 fucked that up
Good point, there is a notable rise in viewership of more challenging/experimental films that otherwise wouldn't have much attention on them, and in theatrical numbers too, Poor Things for example is maintaining good numbers, and in a day and age where marketing campaigns are relegated 99% to big studio blockbuster-spectacle films, i think the Academy Awards are 100% important to maintaining some sense of rewarding artists who take a chance and try something. Also it's a historical time-capsule, and like a Calendar for films, its great to look back at old Oscars because you can see a lot of really popular exciting films from well-known directors and actors, but also some smaller ones that just don't get discussed that much anymore, not necessarily because they're bad but just because they're not that mainstream. I don't know, the Academy Awards used to be better, I think ppl dismiss that a lot, they talk about it as if it was shit to begin with, but it still offers the spotlight for interesting films, and honestly thats increasingly the only recognition some films that aren't studio-shlock will get nowadays, I mean seriously, Academy Awards while sometimes pretentious used to coincide with big box office hits too for a long time, now they don't, there's quite a lot of Oscars films that just never go past 100mil. Idk the Oscars getting worse is also cuz the cinema landscape is just not great for rewarding good films anymore, the Oscars are very flawed but at least they give some light to interesting art.
@@Sirrajj If they wanted to be relevant they would nominate the top ten highest grossing movies.
Saving Private Ryan was robbed. I remember watching the Oscars that year and the entire family sat silent, in shock.
Good
It's not just that SPR lost, it's that it lost to that trash Shakespeare in love. It's not even about taste or subjectivity. It's like Tiramisu and Tacos , they can't compete because they're on completely on different levels.
@@somebody7070 The only thing SPR had going for it was the first 20 minutes. Shakespeare in Love is so much better than SPR. Tom Stoppard's script is a pure delight with its in-jokes about the theatre and show business. It won 7 oscars which means that somebody must have liked it.
@@kellydg471 oh honey , there's no point in us having this conversation anymore. If you feel the way u feel which is fine, but I judge you MASSIVELY , than good for you. Also more like somebody must have liked sexually harassing Gwyneth Paltrow and you know who I mean
@@kellydg471 You either didn't watch the video or don't understand the politics of the Oscars.
Thanks for the video. Just a reminder, Louis B. Mayer created the Oscars to stop actors from unionizing back in 1920s. He, and rightly so, realized the actors and so many in the field , in that time, would relish getting an award over, say, important things, like health insurance, fair working hours, and so forth. And thus the Oscars were born, not to celebrate art, but to market films to the masses. And fair enough. However, so many self-declared pundits (especially on You Tube today) have zero, repeat zero, idea how the "town" Hollywood (both the physical location and the industry) really work. Many think that Academy voters choose "what is the best". And that's for the most part, not the case. In many ways, it's favoritism, it's an axe to grind, it's checking off the box, unfortunately, because they are too busy to pay attention. Here's the reality. Many, many great films, performances, contributions, were never, repeat, never nominated for an Oscar. And yet we celebrate them more than most Oscar winners. Here's the question any filmmaker should ask themselves. Would you rather spend a million dollars on a film that earned no Oscar nominations but was revered for all time or one that earned 10 Oscars but was forgotten within a year?
there's a comment from 15 hours ago but this was uploaded 40 seconds ago so i can't tell if i'm early or if i've found a warp in spacetime
I guess it was on Patreon before
Patrons get early access to videos!
@@ThomasFlight Confirmed, ThomasFlight patrons gain access to a time machine.
I've been kinda/sorta following the Oscars for years, and I learned alot from this. Thank you!
the greatest snub in recent memory has been either Best Animated Film is continuingly giving it to movies that apeals to the kids most & Ship of Thesus not getting nomination for either Best Picture or Best Foreign Film because it was an Indian film with English dialogue...
The timing of this is sort of funny.
Joel Haver, the youtuber known for his animations and Sketch comedy has hosted an event where he asks people to film a movie DURING the Oscars. He announced a day or two ago that he was cancelling the planned awards show because he had recieved too many submissions for him to conceivably watch so he decided to cancel that aspect of the show.
I didn't really piece together that he just illustrated in microchosm the biggest issue with the ACTUAL oscars.
Your videos are so “feel good” videos to me. They’re informative, cosy, beautiful.
One of my high school teachers husband got a vote in the Oscar's. We got to watch movies with the "for your consideration" watermark.
The 'Shakespeare in Love' campaign also likely sabotaged Cate Blanchett's win for Best Actress (Elizabeth I) - a snub that I take more personally than needed
Great analysis. Excited to see you approaching a million subscribers.
Of the last ten Best Picture winners, only three were directed by white males(including one Asian-American/Jewish-American collaboration). Two were directed by Mexicans, two by directors of African descent, and one by a Korean. Two were directed by women(20%, despite only 14.6% of US film directors being women), and one of those women is of Asian descent.
Of the last eleven winners for Best Director, only two were white males: Damien Chazelle and Daniel Scheinert(albeit with Scheinert in collaboration with Asian-American Daniel Kwan). Two others went to a Asian male directors(including Ang Lee winning his second award). Two were directed by women, including Asian-American Chloe Zhao, which means that three out of the last fourteen winners of Best Director were women(over 20%). Five of the last ten awards went to Mexicans.
So far in the 21st century(2001-2022), there have been 16 Oscars for Acting that have gone to Black performers which, out of 88 awards given, is just shy of 20%, while the actual percentage of Americans who are of African descent is only around 14%. This year, 25% of Oscar nominees for acting are of African-American heritage. Over the last seven years, nearly 40% of Academy Award wins for acting have gone to a visible minority: Mahershala Ali(twice), Viola Davis, Rami Malek, Regina King, Daniel Kaluuya, Youn Yuh-jung, Will Smith, Ariane DeBose, Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan(and that doesn't include Troy Kotsur, who is deaf).
...and I haven't even gotten to the percentage of screenwriting awards since 2009 that were written or co-written by visible minorities(Jordan Peele, Spike Lee, Taika Waititi, etc), with half of the writing Oscars in the 2020's going to women.
Is there a problem with diversity in our culture? Of course, but this criticism as applied toward the 21st century Academy Awards is overstated(in least in the top categories).
Are you sure that Oscar bait was already a popular phrase back in the mid 70's? I certainly never heard it before the 90s and I'm nearly 60 years old.
Now explain the never ending snub of horror and comedy.
Best score needs to recognise the scores of animated films more often.
Cringe comment
It feels like the Oscars exist for the sole purpose of being a "production" within itself rather than celebrating movies.
Is it a great video or is Tom’s voice just ridiculously soothing?
Both… it’s both.
a fun thing to do is just going to the wikipedia article for a random year's Academy Awards. Pretty much every time you're gonna find snubs or bad decisions. Take the 39th Academy Awards, 1967. A movie called Born Free won best original score. I haven't heard of it but in hindsight it's of course easy to say that none other than The Good, the Bad and the Ugly should have won that year's Best Original Score Category. you can do that for every year. Recency bias is a thing, which is also what oscar bait movies are exploiting, and completely overlooking movies is also a thing
The Deer Hunter is a very good film, though.
Cutting in that clip of the guy puking over the side of the landing craft from SPR… chef’s kiss.
I aim to see every nominated film every year. Obviously most of the time, that‘s not possible. Most of the time we‘re talking about over 50 movies per year, over 35 feature length movies. So, it‘s hard to expect people to see EVERY movie.
HOWEVER:
If you get to vote in a category, it should be MANDATORY that you‘ve seen the movies nominated in these categories!
If I can do it for most movies in the entire list, then industry people with easy access to all these movies should DEFINITIVELY be able to do so for the categories they have the privilege to vote in!
Really interesting having you demystify the Oscars process!
I live in Europe and if even 20 years ago the Oscars were very popular, today practically no one cares. I don't even know if as any TV station rebroadcasts the event.
Ultimately, the Oscars have always been a popularity contest and subject to industry politics; they have always skewed to conservative tastes, and the dynamics of team "A" versus team "B" has occasionally resulted in the surprise of a win for team "C". They are a lot of fun if you don't take them too seriously, and not much fun when they take themselves too seriously.
Oscars are hardly about performance but how well actors campaigned themselves, their narratives, and with current political landscape. Oscars are not arbiter of merit, or quality of performance.
Classic case of capitalism usurping artistry. Dissapointing nonetheless
This is a really brave and informative video essay! Thanks for making this.
Or you get journalists (movie critics), whose job it actually is to watch 300 films a year, at least to do the first part of the skimming, and then when you have your nominees, the peers come in and award or not award the remaining films they can reasonably be expected to have seen.
Really concise video. And I agree with your points. Ultimately though art cannot truly be, or should be seen as competitive. It cannot be.
Next video: Why is life like this.
I sm serious
I'm working on it but that video is going to take years of research.
@ThomasFlight i love your channel, especially videos on Why is it like that. Like your video on why Wes Anderson movies like this, you are able to see all the details and what makes it special.
I wish you do more videos on things outside of movies, i love your video on how memes captured our attention.
I am currently watching movies on the list you made "Films that destroy traditional narrative form but that aren't so experimental as to be utterly incomprehensible" i love it, even if i don't like the movie it's still a special one.
Excellent essay, thank you.
I loved this. You brought in some great case studies. Great work!
my favorite quote from spike lee: "Every time someone is driving somebody, I lose!"
Isn’t it also true that some favorites to win didn’t because voters thought that others would vote for them, and then enough of them thought the same thing and it didn’t get enough votes and caused upsets?
Thank for your high quality videos good stuff sir!
4:14 I think worth remembering is that the oversights can seem obvious as they're happening but what seems obvious does not actually turn out to necessarily be correct. One very high-profile snub I remember was Crash beating Brokeback Mountain in 2006. Brokeback Mountain was a huge point of conversation at the time due to its relatively (at the time) explicit depiction of a gay relationship while Crash was considered to be bland Oscar bait faire.
But in the time since, Brokeback Mountain has also kind of fallen out of mainstream attention and is not really a film that is still widely talked about much or that influential, even though at the time it seemed to most people unhappy with the result that it would be. Similar story in 2019 when Green Book won over Roma, which has also not had that big an impact 5 years later.
Thats not to say Green Book or Crash were great choices either, just that the "obvious" better choice didn't really turn out to be the correct one.
Hindsight is also infinite because future generations will reevaluate movies again and the consensus may flip. Cinema is a relatively young art form compared to the rest, but the Renaissance is an example of that.
Brokeback Mountain is very much still talked about I would argue, people definitely still discuss it and there are plenty iconic scenes. Sure it’s not as prominent as other queer films but there’s definitely a broad demographic of people who have seen it
Brokeback is definitely still talk especially more than fucking crash which is only mentioned due to basically everyone finding it undeserving of best picture win lmao
Remember Green Book? CODA? Spotlight? Those won Best Picture lol.
Spotlight is fantastic and riveting. The other two are very forgettable and meh
@@Zeromus5555what’s Spotlight?
Does anyone remember Crash?
Spotlight innocent
Spotlight is the worst of those 3. So boring.
Love the videos, man. Keep it up!!!
As always, very well thought-out and done properly. 👍👍.
By the way hows your migraines now?
Shouldve called the video: Anatomy of a Snub
This term is used pejoratively (not necessarily intended by the video) but Deer Hunter is an AMAZING movie, and while it's a shame it had to be marketed this way to be a success, I'm glad it was.
This vid sums up nicely why I lost faith in Filmjoys channel when they put Barbie at #1 because they hadnt bothered to see Poor Things, which was more original, artistic, consistent and had a far more coherent feminist message.
Thank you for sharing your video. I learned a lot of new things about the Oscars which I always wanted to know.
Your latest subscriber.
A good companion video to this is Dan Murell's If I Ran the Oscars. He talks mostly about how he would improve the ceremony itself, but he does talk about how to fix the Academy member problems as well as marketing budget restrictions in For Your Consideration campaigns.
I love awards season and watching the Oscars, but the Academy needs an overhaul or they are going to lose it's core audience of cinephiles.
A big marketing Oscars campaign is not guarantee to get a bunch of nominations (ie Saltburn). I would have included ‘Power and influence in Hollywood’ as a big driving factor (like in the Weisentein example, it was not because his campaigns had money but because he was feared in the industry), and also on the other spectrum you have outcasts like Parasite that create a buzz among viewers that even while old male academy members can’t ignore. Today movie marketing starts waaay before the Oscar’s, with viewers more engaged with the results of film festivals and the conversation happening in social media and RUclips channels like this one. There’s so much more than those magazine ads!
the oscars is simply the industry supporting the industry, just like every other broadcasted award show. its unsurprising that the 'oscar bump' in the box office is shrinking given the constant growth of information sharing over the internet. where a moviegoer would previously rely on oscar nominations or professional critics to get an idea of whats 'good', they can instead seek out aggregated views more easily that provide filters and slicers to find what is 'good' (letterboxd, etc.)
I will not lie, given the topic I excepted this video to at least 5h long.
This is exactly what happened with Everything Everywhere All At Once last year too. Funny because the film was barely mentioned at this year's Oscars
Whatever the shenanigans of Harvey “Shitheel” Weinstein, Shakespeare in Love is a better film than Saving Private Ryan. The Thin Red Line is the film that should’ve walked off with the win that year.
Definitely agree on The Thin Red Line haha
I really wanna have the opportunity to talk with the Best Original Score voting branch and have an in-depth argument for why snubbing Daniel Pemberton and Joe Hisaishi was the one of the most idiotic choices they've ever made.
It's been pretty evident the Oscars voters don't even watch the movies they nominate.
Not to mention all the indie and foreign films that are always ignored.
Them being busy people is not an excuse. If they're so busy, they have no right to be there in the first place.
the Oscars are always a hit or miss and then miss again and possibly miss again and quite frankly miss again
I think that voting is difficult, across all awards as you've perfectly summed up. Filmmakers and Academy members cannot watch everything, I'm not sure how you fix that. The Ballon d'Or in football is actually voted on by journalists not football players (though the captain of a country's international team also votes, I may have some of this wrong but it is journalist driven). I'm not sure if that would help the academy, making their membership larger. Giving more people an opinion.
As I said this is an award-wide issue. I'm eligible to vote in the Eisner Awards (comic book Oscars essentially) due to being a published comic book writer, and every year I only vote on a handful of categories. Because I can't vote in a category that I haven't read everything in, I would love to read every nominate piece but as you said people who make art are often busy making art. I'm busy writing, or reading stuff to assist my own writing. I'm trying to get better at reading more nominated stuff because it always feels weird filling out a small amount of the ballot.
Just wanted to give my own perspective as someone who has eligiblilty to vote on awards even if it isn't the Oscars. Great video as always.
didn't they just reveal that a new oscar for "Best Casting" is gonna be given out lol ☠☠
The Oscars is just like US's political system. Lobbying group has too much power, and the outcome is less and less based on merits.
Film awards are literally just industry awards. Every industry has awards. From plumbers to video games, from architecture to forestry. You name it, the industry has awards and awards ceremonies. Film awards are no different other than being televised. It's a popularity contest. A way for that specific industry to tap itself on the back and make it's employees feel special. A load of crap. EDIT: DID BRO REALLY JUST PRONOUNCE THE GUYS NAME STANLEY Q-BRICK? Wow dude. Wanna read his name bud? Ku-brick.
IMO the best pictures are the ones who had an impact and are still remembered by the public, wether they won the category or not
It’s essentially what incest looks like in an artistic medium’s culture
The best idea I have heard is one that came from my Dad: The Academy has to pick best picture 5 years after they came out. So the 2023 best picture couldn't be determined until the 2029 Oscars. That way the academy has less of a chance to fall prey to the "important films" and the truly better films of a cinematic year will stick out because they have true staying power.
This of course will never happen, but I think it would get at the source of a lot of the issues.
great idea but never will happen
Talking about the technical needs to be a member of the academy, I know definitely that they're false. I know someone who was added to the academy with one directing credit in the directing category, this is when they were adding people specifically of X race or gender to pad out their diversity numbers.
It’s sad to say, but a lot of times if you look at movies five years later, you can see who the real winners were
Unless you know movies and you know when you’ve been ripped off or not
I'm still mad that Bohemian Rhapsody won -best score- sound mixing over First Man
no it didnt
why'd you have to remind me 😭
@@uranovayakilka2484 huh? Oops my bad wrong award
@@larssonk22 wait actually black panther won best score, and bohemian rhapsody won best sound mixing
@@thatfellarosto AHH that makes more sense sorry I meant sound mixing. Edited original comment
11:30 is key and it's for this reason that there will always be what people to be "snubs"...at the end of the day, there's way too many movies to watch so certain ones have to be brought to their attention some kind of way
Can anyone tell me what original work the film Barbie was based on?
Anyone?
Didn’t think so.
The original work is the Barbie franchise, which you may have heard of.
I think it's interesting what definitions people assume about what constitutes "a work" and "an adaptation". There are plenty of adaptations, even acclaimed ones, that radically change the original story. Is it possible to adapt an artwork that had no story to begin with? I don't know why not.
_MIA GOTH_ acting performance in PEARL was snubbed bcoz it was under Horror category 💀 She and PEARL movie wasn't even nominated in the Oscar wtf !
i love listening to this guy speak
Another great video Thomas. I'm still disappointed (but not surprised) that Laura Dern didn't get a nod for Inland Empire too.
Another aspect is also how hard it is to get your movie into the theatres. I can't say how many movies I see at festivals that are excellent movies but the never get a theatrical release simply because it's that difficult. The big budget movies make so much that the cinemas will gladly screen them for months (I believe EEAAO was screened for 6 months in my city) while others get a couple days or a week if they're lucky.
Theatres are suppose to be for cinema not art house productions. If there is really good art house movie that makes then it will
@@Art-is-craft so arthouse filmmakers are supposed to just not make money off their movies??
5:09 doodoo hehe
Loved this video!!
I was planning on taking off work to watch the oscars. Then I saw that All of Us Strangers didnt get a single nomination and changed my mind. Movies are subjective, yes, but not a single nomination for such a objectively great film? Very much a bunch of bull, but i hope they change that in the coming future
What would you not have nominated instead?
@VicenteTorresAliasVits not sure it's my place to answer that. Every film has heaps of hard work put into it, however I think it was terribly shameful that Aoustrangers didn't get anything. I watched many of the 2023 movies, and can confidently say some of the best acting was in Strangers. I think the hype around a film helps it more than if it's good or not though. And Strangers released too late for any major hype for the oscars.
This is WAYYY off target but I do wish you'd do an analysis of the film "Tommy". Today, I've just seen it for the very first time. I got the gist of it. However, I sense there are some nuances I missed.
thanks for saying it out loud.
Meanwhile, what happened to 'Cinema of Meaning'?
I have a friend who is an academy voter (he's an Oscar winner, you haven't heard of him), and every year he watches every movie nominated in the categories he votes for (he posts his thoughts on facebook, it's neat). This, it appears, is very unusual behavior among academy voters. Sure, they can't watch all the eligible films. But most of them don't even watch all the nominees in their categories!
I was hoping and am really glad to see you include the Shakespeare in Love best picture win in this video. Its one of the most egregious and disgusting events at the Academy Awards that I always call back to when people criticize the awards show. This isn't a recent issue. The show has been nasty for a while.
Marketing is everything 😆
Balam Industries sponsored field trip to destroy the Oscars
I stopped giving a damn about the Oscar’s when the lighthouse didn’t win anything and then was fully killed when the banshees of inishiren didn’t win anything either
One of my favourite film director Anurag Kashyap once said award shows no matter big or small, always says more about the jury then the art itself that won and it kind of stuck with me and i have never been able to get it out of mind
I didn't take it in a negetive way but now everytime i see a film, Director, actir ein something there is a curiousity in my mind about a group of people deciding why it deserves it
It can turn into a fulm like 12 angry man but just in a random indie film festival in s room gull of jury of vetren and new filmmaker just talking about films for 2 hours
I wish I could hear you opposite Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins on The Big Picture podcast, would be such a great cross section of film culture. @TheRinger make this happen!
I watched this video on nebula but I couldn't comment so Im posting here.
I feel like you dismissed the idea of giving academy members a randomised list of 20 films to watch too easily. I agree that 200+ is too many but if being an academy member is prestigous than 20 films is definitely acceptable. And if 20 is still too much 10 would still reduce the impact (if not morso). If you want to have an impact on the industry you should have some responsibility.
this channel is fucking awesome
I don't give a f**k about the competition/awards and I've never watched The Oscars. But I always make sure to check the nominated films, because they are often pretty damn good.
Do you have a theory as to why 4 of the 5 best cinematography nominees are either partially or totally black and white? Seems like such a weird trend in 2024.