Allowing for shifts in taste and sensibility, I think it's clear that the classic middlebrow "Academy film" (as historian David Thomson has observed, it's pretty much a genre unto itself) is still with us. Much as I admire this year's list of best-picture nominees, all five of them fit the description. Only the nomenclature, the financial details and the circumstances of production have changed. Indiewood's new breed of Academy films aren't necessarily worse or better than the ones produced under the old system, but they're cheaper and leaner and more tightly focused on an educated, upper-middle-class audience. They don't usually cost as much money, or make as much back. What has suddenly and almost completely vanished from the Oscar ecosystem is the major Hollywood blockbuster, or even the midsize one.
In 2007, there were at least 11 studio films released that earned more than $200 million apiece in domestic box office. That's a lot of success for a business that's constantly whining about its financial predicament. Of those movies, only the animated "Ratatouille" was nominated in any major Academy Award categories. ("The Bourne Ultimatum" and "Transformers" got several technical nominations.) Conversely, there have been only two films among the last 15 best-picture nominees that grossed even $80 million ("Juno" this year and "The Departed" last year).
This year's best-picture list has collectively earned less than $300 million, with almost half of that total coming from the unexpected success of "Juno." While I haven't tried to do the math, in constant-dollar terms that's got to be at or near an all-time low. And it's not a fluke. If you exclude the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, which strikes me as a special case in recent movie history, no film that earned $200 million or more has been nominated as best picture since "The Sixth Sense" in 1999.
It's not that the Oscar voters have suddenly embraced finely honed yupscale tastes and left multiplex America behind. At least, it isn't just that. It's more that Hollywood, in the corporate oligopoly sense of the word, has left the older, affluent, movieland-insider demographic of the Academy behind. Today the major Hollywood studios are run as industrial production arms of multinational entertainment conglomerates. They have outsourced the production of adult-oriented, Oscar-plausible films to independent producers so they can focus on their core product lines: action franchises for teenage boys, romantic comedies for young women, animated spectacles for kids and a handful of other generic options. While the abrupt indie-fication of Oscar night was presumably an unintended consequence, it was a logical and even predictable outcome.
It decidedly wasn't always this way. While the very biggest blockbusters weren't always Oscar fare, the Hollywood studios specialized, across many decades, in crafting large-scale entertainments that drew large and diverse audiences and Academy voters alike. Step into the way-back machine and you'll see what I mean. In 1997, which in retrospect looks like the end of a long era in Oscar history, the best-picture winner was "Titanic," one of that decade's biggest hits. There were two other nominees that year -- "As Good as It Gets" and "Good Will Hunting" -- that topped $100 million.
Five years earlier, the nominees included "A Few Good Men," one of the year's biggest hits, along with "Scent of a Woman" and the eventual winner, "Unforgiven," smaller Hollywood films that did exceptional business by the standards of the time. Five years before that, in 1987, best-picture nods went to "Fatal Attraction" and "Moonstruck," two highly popular, adult-oriented films, and the Oscar went to "The Last Emperor," a three-hour historical spectacle from a European director that was partly financed by Columbia Pictures. (Try to make that deal happen today!)
In 1982, the nominees included Steven Spielberg's "E.T.," one of the biggest box-office films in Hollywood history, along with "Tootsie," which grossed $177 million (perhaps twice that much in present-day dollars). Five years earlier, we find the movie that changed everything in Hollywood, George Lucas' "Star Wars," nominated alongside "The Goodbye Girl," which also topped $100 million. (Best picture went to "Annie Hall," which decidedly did not.) Another half-decade earlier, in 1972, we find one of the legendary years in Oscar history, when the nominees included "The Godfather" and "Cabaret," two big hits, alongside the critical fave "Deliverance."
I think you get the point: More often than not, there was a crowd-pleasing Hollywood smash, or several of them, on Oscar's short list. In 1965, "Doctor Zhivago" and "The Sound of Music" were both nominated. A year earlier, "Mary Poppins" and "My Fair Lady" got nods alongside "Dr. Strangelove," "Becket" and "Zorba the Greek." In 1962, "Lawrence of Arabia," that era's defining big-screen spectacle film, was nominated and won. In 1958, the roster included "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," "Auntie Mame," "The Defiant Ones" and "Gigi" (the winner), all of them box-office hits; infamously, neither Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo" nor Orson Welles' "Touch of Evil" was even nominated.
Sure, the big studios still crank out productions aimed at adult audiences and awards voters (see "American Gangster" or "Dreamgirls") but they do it less and less frequently with less and less aptitude (see "American Gangster" and "Dreamgirls"). We're only five years removed from seeing a major-studio musical that grossed $170 million take home the big prize, and it's not like that could never happen again. But we've reached the culmination of a long historical process whereby the production of Hollywood blockbusters aimed at undifferentiated masses of young people and the production of smaller and more purportedly serious movies aimed at grownups have become distinct and mutually irrelevant operations.
Does this have dire consequences for art and/or the future of democracy? Are Indiewood's Oscar films somehow less significant because they generally cost less to make and reach fewer viewers? Most important of all, will network viewers still tune in, in vast numbers, to see Jon Stewart's quips, the fabulous and horrifying gowns and the abysmal production numbers, even if they haven't seen the movies? Right now I would answer those questions probably not, probably not and maybe. But on that "maybe" hangs the future of a tottering cultural empire.
About the writer
Andrew O'Hehir is a senior writer for Salon.
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