7.5 — The Awards

Prizes that shape careers, cost more to campaign for than most films cost to make, and are decided by voting systems that almost nobody who follows them has read.

The Oscars

What is an Academy Award, and who votes?

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was founded in 1927, and the awards were an afterthought — the organisation's original purpose included mediating labour disputes in a way favourable to the studios, and giving out prizes was a side project.

Voting is by the Academy's members, currently around ten thousand people, who are working professionals invited to join, divided into branches by craft. Each branch nominates in its own category — directors nominate directors, editors nominate editors — and then the entire membership votes on the winners in every category.

That structure explains a great deal. Best Picture is nominated and voted on by everyone, which pushes it towards consensus; the craft categories reflect the judgement of people who do that job.

The Academy was for most of its history overwhelmingly white, male and old. After the 2015 and 2016 nominations produced twenty white acting nominees in a row and the resulting public criticism, the Academy substantially expanded and diversified its membership, roughly doubling it over several years.

Why is Best Picture counted differently?

Because it uses a preferential ballot and every other category does not, and the difference genuinely changes who wins.

In most categories, voters pick one name and the most votes wins. For Best Picture, voters rank the nominees. If no film has a majority of first preferences, the film with fewest is eliminated and its ballots are redistributed to their next choice, repeatedly, until something has a majority.

The consequence is that a film loved by 30 per cent and hated by everyone else loses to a film that most people put second or third. The system rewards broad acceptability rather than passionate support, and it was reintroduced in 2009 at the same time the field was expanded beyond five nominees.

Anybody arguing that a particular winner was not the best film is usually arguing with the ballot design rather than with the voters.

What does an Oscar campaign involve?

A marketing operation with a budget that can reach several tens of millions of dollars for a major contender.

It includes screeners sent to voters, screenings with question sessions, trade advertising, publicists placing profiles, and a schedule of appearances that keeps a performer in front of voters for months. The campaign season now runs longer than the shooting of most films.

The modern template was set by Harvey Weinstein at Miramax in the 1990s, whose campaigns were aggressive enough that the Academy introduced rules restricting direct contact with voters and negative campaigning against rivals.

The consequence is a structural bias. A film without a distributor willing to spend cannot realistically win, regardless of quality, which is why the same handful of companies appear year after year and why streaming services entering the business spent heavily and immediately.

What are the famous mistakes?

1935: a write-in campaign for Bette Davis after she was left off the ballot led the Academy to permit write-ins, then to ban them again.

1973: Marlon Brando won Best Actor for The Godfather and sent Sacheen Littlefeather to decline it on his behalf, in protest at the depiction of Native Americans in film. She was booed and the incident was disputed for decades afterwards on several grounds, including her own claimed ancestry.

2017: La La Land was announced as Best Picture and had begun its acceptance speeches when it was corrected on stage to Moonlight. The presenters had been handed a duplicate envelope for the previous category.

The most consistent criticism is what the awards have missed rather than what they got wrong on the night. Hitchcock never won Best Director. Kubrick won once, for visual effects. Citizen Kane lost Best Picture. Chaplin, Cary Grant, Peter O'Toole and Glenn Close have between them dozens of nominations and few or no competitive wins.

The other awards

What is the difference between Cannes, Venice, Berlin and Sundance?

They are festivals rather than industry awards, and each has a different function.

Cannes is the most prestigious and the most industry-driven: it is simultaneously a competition, judged by a small jury of film-makers and writers, and the world's largest film market, where distribution rights are bought and sold. Its top prize is the Palme d'Or. It is invitation-only for the public and famously strict about premieres.

Venice, founded in 1932, is the oldest film festival in the world. Its Golden Lion has in recent years become a strong predictor of Oscar contenders, because its September date sits at the start of the awards season.

Berlin — the Golden Bear — is the most politically engaged of the three, founded in 1951 in a divided city, and it has the largest public attendance.

Sundance in Utah is an independent film festival and functions primarily as a marketplace where distributors buy small films. It has launched a very large share of American independent careers.

A festival jury and an Academy vote measure different things. A jury of nine people can give a prize to a film eight of them dislike but one champions successfully; ten thousand ranked ballots cannot.

What are the major Indian film awards?

The National Film Awards are given by the Government of India, decided by juries, and cover films in every Indian language. They are the most credible on merit and the least covered in media.

The Filmfare Awards are the oldest private awards, from 1954, and are the ones people mean when they say "Indian Oscars". They are voted by a combination of readers and a jury and are widely regarded as being influenced by industry politics.

The Dadasaheb Phalke Award is India's highest honour in cinema, given for lifetime contribution.

There are also strong regional award bodies, and the language-specific film industries take their own awards more seriously than the national ones.

What are the EGOT and the other completion sets?

EGOT means winning an Emmy (television), a Grammy (music), an Oscar (film) and a Tony (theatre). Fewer than twenty people have done it competitively.

The Triple Crown of Acting is an Oscar, an Emmy and a Tony for acting specifically.

In sport and elsewhere the same idea recurs, and it is worth noticing what it selects for: not the greatest performer in any one field, but somebody whose work crossed four industries with separate voting bodies. Composers and writers are over-represented in EGOT lists for exactly that reason.

What awards actually measure

Do awards predict what lasts?

Poorly, and the historical record is available to check.

Take any decade's Best Picture winners and compare them to the films from that decade that are actually watched, taught and referenced now. The overlap is real but partial, and the misses are systematic rather than random.

Comedies, horror, science fiction and animation are consistently under-rewarded relative to their influence. Films that were controversial on release are under-rewarded and frequently better remembered. Films about the film industry itself do unusually well, which is a straightforward consequence of who votes.

The systematic bias has a name in the industry: "Oscar bait" — a film with the features that historically win, made partly because they win. Period setting, real events, illness or disability, a performer transformed physically, and a redemptive ending.

Why does the Nobel Prize in Literature cause so much argument?

Because it is awarded by eighteen members of the Swedish Academy, working substantially in one language tradition, for a global body of literature most of which they read in translation.

The omissions are the standing indictment. Tolstoy, Joyce, Proust, Woolf, Borges, Nabokov, Chekhov, Ibsen and Achebe never received it. Several of them were nominated repeatedly.

The Academy has also had periods of visible political influence, and a scandal in 2017–18 involving the husband of a member led to the resignation of several members and the postponement of the 2018 prize.

Its defenders point out that it has drawn attention to writers who would otherwise have been unread outside their language, which is a real function and possibly the most valuable one it performs.

The 2016 award to Bob Dylan produced the sharpest recent argument about what literature is, and the Academy took two weeks to reach him.

What is the point of awards at all?

Three honest functions, none of which is identifying the best work.

They are a distribution mechanism. An award or a nomination is a marketing asset that gets a small film into cinemas and onto viewing lists that it would otherwise never reach. For a foreign-language or documentary film this can be the difference between existing commercially and not.

They are a labour institution. Awards are given by guilds and academies whose members are working professionals, and being nominated changes what a person is paid and what they are permitted to make next. That is not a side effect; for most nominees it is the main effect.

And they create a shared conversation. A field with no shared reference points has no way for an audience to talk about it, and an annual argument about which film was best is more useful culturally than no argument.

The mistake is treating the result as a measurement. It is a vote, by a specific group, under a specific system, after a campaign — and every one of those four words does work.

What comes next

The last page of this Part turns to music: how a scale is built, why some notes sound wrong together, and where the instruments came from.