The Oscars' patronising new Best Popular Film award undermines its very existence

Maybe, just maybe, it's okay that the Oscars be a celebration of the best achievement in cinema as the people who make it see it, regardless of whether this opinion is shared by people at the local multiplex

The Oscars is appreciated by those who want to know what people who live and breathe film actually think (Getty)

Why do we have film award ceremonies? Why do we even have film critics, like myself? These are questions that resonate as grimly rhetorical in my less self-confident days, but they’re genuinely intriguing ones.

The simple answer, surely, can only be that people want to defer judgment to experts. Statuette-laden award ceremonies and star rating-festooned reviews are there because, while everyone can and should form their own opinion on a piece of cinema, they would perhaps also like to hear the thoughts of the people who are either making it – like voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – or obsessively watching and thinking about it most hours of the day, like myself.

It would seem utterly self-defeating then – fundamentally undermining and raison d’être-obliterating – that the Oscars would introduce a Best Popular Film award, as it just has. An award that could more accurately be billed Best Film That We Actually Thought Was Only Okay, But What Ya Gonna Do?

At the en of a letter sent to members on Wednesday morning announcing a raft of changes to the Oscars format, Academy president John Bailey wrote: “We will create a new category for outstanding achievement in popular film. Eligibility requirements and other key details will be forthcoming.”

I certainly look forward to seeing what these criteria for “popular film” turn out to be. Cold, hard box office cash? Gross performance in China? Number of Reddit upvotes on an oblique teaser trailer? Frequency of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in proceedings?

This is a desperate move from the Academy, which is concerned about falling Oscars viewer ratings – though I would argue the ceremony occupies a larger part of the collective conversation than it ever has; it’s just grown more nebulous and the show isn’t consumed solely on television sets any more. But the new category manages to patronise absolutely everyone.

For winners it seems to imply what you’ve made is the best cynical grab for money of the year – which may be true; for winners of the Best Film, traditionally the night’s biggest award, it implies you’re a snob making arthouse cinema for your elitist friends; and for the viewers to which it is pandering, it reaches through the screen, slaps you in the face and says: ”Here, you’ll like this one! It’s got explosions in it!”

And that, frankly, is the best case scenario. What is perhaps even more likely than the award going to the most competently produced blockbuster, is it going to the mainstream film with the cleanest morals. No doubt Black Panther will be the first recipient of the award, in 2019, and while it may be the best of a bunch of increasingly tiresome superhero movies, it paves the way for the new award to be a shortcut to appeasing diversity lobbyists, a way of condescendingly giving a pat on the head to whichever blockbuster is being most lauded for its politics, while serving as a buffer for the Academy against criticism of its “woke” credentials.

“We are committed to producing an entertaining ... more accessible Oscars for our viewers worldwide,” Bailey wrote, assuming the average human couldn’t possibly get their head around recent, narratively linear Best Film winners such as Moonlight and Spotlight.

In the age of Trump and counter-Trump can we not have one thing that isn’t obsessed with populism? Maybe, just maybe, it’s okay that the Oscars be a celebration of the best achievement in cinema as the people who make it see it, regardless of whether this opinion is shared by people at the local multiplex. Perhaps it’s actually the Oscars’ move away from being a celebration of film and towards serving as a viral content-producing Saturday Night Live derivative, that is turning people off.

We can argue about whether the Oscars is a silly, self-congratulatory parade, and perhaps not worth the ire, but ultimately it’s fun to rank movies – which is essentially what the Oscars does, and what we all do when discussing film with friends – and it would be nice to preserve this process at a time when truly excellent cinema faces an existential threat from more stock, profitable vehicles.

I’ve yet to encounter a single person who thinks this new category is a good idea – possibly because I’m not writing this from the Marvel Studios boardroom/lair – and here’s hoping the Academy has the necessary humility to admit it got this one wrong and pull the award before it’s disastrously deployed.