The changing shape of the Oscar

The Oscar may not connote the best cinema but winning the Academy Award for ‘Best Picture’ gives a film more immediate visibility internationally than any other film award because of the glamour associated with it. Since visibility is something that most people wish for, it makes sense not to sneer at it but speculate on the kinds of films that win it, and also on how one might make a film deliberately to aim for the honour.

When one studies film history, one quickly realises that the films or directors most esteemed in the US have not won the award. Alfred Hitchcock, for instance, received the recognition only for ‘Rebecca’ (1940), not a film regarded very highly and it is his ‘Vertigo’ (1958) that is widely held to be among the greatest films ever made. Genre categories have not won the award and it is the ‘film drama’ that is thus favoured, and preferably made on an epic scale. Coppola’s ‘The Godfather’ (1972) and its sequel ‘The Godfather (Part 2)’ (1974) are not of the gangster genre – although they are about gangsters - but are more epic-like in scope, and they both received the award. Then, there was also the rule that the ‘Best Picture’ had to be in English and films in other languages were eligible only for the Oscar for ‘Best International Film’.

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For some reason none of these factors seem to be relevant today when a South Korean film like ‘Parasite’ (2019) is named ‘Best Picture’ and another like the Swedish film Triangle of Sadness (2022) is nominated. Top Gun - Maverick, which was nominated for this year, is an action film and the sequel of an earlier film Top Gun (1986) which was nominated only for technical awards - although it was not inferior to this one. But awards have become so much more tolerant in the area of ‘seriousness’ that action films – once considered too flippant – have become contenders. RRR was not nominated for the award in 2023 but critical opinion widely favoured it and one would not have been surprised if it had.

Why the shape of the Oscar has transformed can only be speculated about but it would seem that there is a general decline in the level of seriousness with which cinema is received today which makes the ‘art film’ somewhat outmoded as a cultural category. Among the Oscar categories the ‘Best International Film’ included winners like the auteurs Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Francois Truffaut, Costa-Gavras and Akira Kurosawa. I have not seen this year’s winner (‘All Quiet on the Western Front’) but its German director Edward Berger is not well-known – as for instance Asghar Farhadi was in 2016.

This tendency away from social importance being accorded to the director’s ‘authorial vision’ is arguably not restricted to cinema since one would be hard-pressed to name the last five Nobel winners for literature, when the winners had once been household names. Where artistic work was once believed to possess transformative moral power and was therefore valued, it is no longer felt to have it and the reason could be that political decisions and technology (which deeply influences the socio-political/cultural direction taken by humankind) are outside the realm of public understanding.

In the ‘post-truth’ era, one cannot be certain or even confident of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, which means that any serious artistic statement - with claims to prophesy - will be taken with a pinch of salt. I would propose that RRR’s wide acceptance in international circles despite is flippancy only mirrors this development. RRR, one may note, may be ‘patriotic’ but it is only patriotic about Indians beating the West at dance!

The Oscar, to reiterate what has already been said, is a highly prestigious award and it is culturally advantageous for any country to have its best films compete for it. The cultural establishment in India has generally picked art films – including Koozhangal (2021) and The Last Film Show (2022). The ‘Best International Film’ Oscar is also a relatively less visible award and I do not believe that the criteria for it have transformed – the way it has for the ‘Best Picture’.

This article has been about the changing shape of the Oscar in terms of what winning it means and while there may not be any significant change in the way Indian nominees need to be selected, there could be a difference in the way aspiring artists in film need to regard their work if they wish to make a mark internationally. It is significant that two Indian documentaries (‘All that Breathes’, ‘The Elephant Whisperers’) have made a mark at the Oscars this year, one nominated and the other a winner, and both highlight the lives of simple people in an exotic but changing milieu.

I propose that since accurate information about India is still scarce outside, it is not the Indian film with local political/propagandist value (‘The Kashmir Files’) that makes a mark as much as something that holds up the simpler aspects of India - with faith in human beings to remain good despite the provocations that society offers.