Oscar and Hollywood in splitsville!

The Academy has turned its back on the multiplex moneymakers and wrapped smaller indie films in its warm, glittery embrace. But Hollywood isn't crying (yet).

Editor's note: Salon is offering special coverage leading up to the Oscars this Sunday.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Movies, Arts & Entertainment, Independent Film, Academy Awards, Oscar Week 2008

Feb. 18, 2008 | Every year without fail, some journalist comes wandering out of hibernation and notices, with the force of revelation, that the Academy Awards are not based on popularity or, on the other hand, on some sober and considered judgment of cinematic quality. By God, it's just a big party where the film industry congratulates itself! I'm thunderstruck!

In years gone by, this generally took the form of disdainful cinephiles bemoaning the Academy's atrocious taste. ("Ordinary People" wins over "Raging Bull"! "Dances With Wolves" wins over "GoodFellas"! Yul Brynner wins over Olivier! And so on.) More recently, we've heard the inverse of that criticism, in which the Oscars have become an inward-looking, bicoastal-elite, anti-populist celebration of arty niche movies that no regular folks out there in cud-munching Middle America have actually seen. You know, weird obscurities like "The Departed," "Chicago," "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King," "A Beautiful Mind" and "Gladiator" -- all of them 21st-century best-picture winners, with a cumulative $1 billion-plus in domestic ticket sales.

Right-wing movie critic Michael Medved is the acknowledged kung-fu master of this complaint, but he's stayed quiet this year, even with an indie-rich roster of Oscar nominees to rail against. (Maybe he's still exhausted from all the righteous indignation he worked up against "Brokeback Mountain" in 2006.) Still, the Oscars-vs.-ordinary-moviegoers meme comes up every winter like a hothouse orchid: Time magazine's Richard Corliss took it out for a spin in December (in an essay with the self-recriminating title "Do Film Critics Know Anything?"), and freelancer Michael Ordoña just cranked out a noncommittal reported piece on the subject for the Los Angeles Times. His conclusion: There are movies that pile up awards and movies that pile up money. They aren't usually the same, except when they are.

There's a reason why this idea that the Oscars have become a snobbed-up, limousine-liberal affair, out of touch with ordinary Americans, never goes away: It has a grain of truth, however teensy and elusive, at its core. At first glance, mind you, it seems pretty silly, and maybe at second glance too. OK, so "Spider-Man 3" and "Shrek the Third" (this year's box-office champs) didn't exactly rack up the nominations. Those were summer movies for tweens and teens, destined to melt into sludge long before awards season, like a double-pistachio cone dropped on the beach boardwalk on Labor Day. As the list of recent winners given above suggests, Academy voters' tastes seem every bit as middlebrow and mainstream-friendly as they ever were.

Oscar's perceived divorce from public opinion nonetheless reflects something real. It reflects how closely the Academy Awards are now identified with a specific grade of Indiewood product, meaning movies distributed and marketed by the studios' specialty divisions (Fox Searchlight, Warner Independent, Picturehouse, Miramax, et al.) but not generally produced by them. Overwhelmingly, this means mid-budget, independently produced dramas and comedies with A-minus casts, name directors, adult themes, faintly literary origins and a slightly eccentric style. You know: Little Miss Juno Crashes Sideways Into Brokeback Mountain, Where There Will Be Blood.

Beyond that, it reflects anxiety over a real and recent shift in the Hollywood economy -- which has abruptly split itself into a relatively low-budget prestige wing and a deranged, 'roided-out industrial production line -- whose overall effect on the art and business of film is not yet clear (but is unlikely to be salubrious). More broadly still, the widening gulf between Indiewood's Oscar-targeted fare and the media conglomerates' lumbering blockbusters speaks to Hollywood's growing internal unease in an era of global expansion and consolidation that depends on ever bigger, ever dumber and ever more standardized productions.

Looking beyond that list of recent hits that went home with statuettes, things have changed rapidly in Oscarville over the last few years. Most obviously, there's the much-discussed indie takeover. As recently as 2003, four of the five best-picture nominees were wide-release studio films that grossed at least $90 million apiece, with one unconventional outsider thrown in to spice the pot. (That year it was "Lost in Translation.") But in the last three Oscar seasons, 10 of the 15 nominees have been independent or quasi-independent productions. Moreover, at least three of the five exceptions were indie-flavored, mid-budget pictures made at studios thanks to the clout of a star producer (George Clooney, in the case of "Michael Clayton" and "Good Night, and Good Luck," and Clint Eastwood in the case of "Letters From Iwo Jima").

At least on the surface, that's a startling transformation. As always in Hollywood, it's wise to view the terminology and statistics with a skeptical eye. We've had several waves of "independent film" since the early '80s, but the phrase remains a slippery term of art, at best, that means different things to different people. Within the industry, it generally refers to the mechanics of how a film is financed and produced; it has nothing to do with daring or unconventionality or artistic ambition or amount of drugs consumed on-set or any other such intangibles.

It's not like the Academy fell out of its collective tree one day in 2005, removed the scales from its eyes and began handing out awards to five-hour Hungarian films or $5,000 "mumblecore" productions or whatever. "Juno" and "Crash" and "Sideways" and "Brokeback Mountain" and "No Country for Old Men," along with most of the other recent indie-esque Oscar candidates, are exactly the kinds of prestige movies the Hollywood studios could and probably would have made under different circumstances or in other eras.

Conversely, as you drill backward into Oscar history you keep finding things -- Hollywood classics, in some cases -- that could only be made now as independent films. I'm pretty confident that nobody in Hollywood would see much sex or sizzle potential in "Hope and Glory" (a 1987 best-picture nominee) or "Gandhi" (1982) or "Deliverance" (1972). (And they'd be right; none of those movies made much money.) For that matter, try to imagine pitching such vintage Oscar fodder as "Annie Hall" or "The Graduate" or "To Kill a Mockingbird" to a contemporary Hollywood executive. (Well, OK, maybe "The Graduate" -- if you made it wackier and made Mrs. Robinson, like, 29 and insanely hot.)

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