The Oscars outrage cycle runs on a predictable schedule.
The nominations are announced. The think pieces about the snubs are published. The ceremony happens. The wrong film wins. The think pieces about the wrong film winning are published. Everyone agrees the Oscars are broken.
In March, the cycle resets.
I want to propose an alternative reading: the Oscars are not broken. They are working exactly as designed. And the conversation about the 'wrong' results is a conversation that has fundamentally misunderstood what the award is for.
WHAT THE OSCARS ACTUALLY ARE
The Academy Awards are a marketing mechanism. They were established in 1929 by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences - itself established by the major studios - to promote the Hollywood film industry. The award was designed to serve the industry's commercial interests, and it continues to do so.
An Oscar win adds approximately $30 million to a film's global theatrical gross on average, according to industry estimates. Best Picture nominees add approximately $15 million each. The award functions as a seal of commercial approval from within the industry that translates directly into audience attendance. The campaign that produces an Oscar nomination is, in most cases, a marketing campaign: the screenings, the mailings, the 'for your consideration' advertisements in trade publications, the social functions where voters spend time with films and their stars.
WHY THE RESULTS ARE WHAT THEY ARE
The Oscar electorate is approximately 10,000 people - film industry professionals, primarily American, primarily in the production and performance sectors of the industry, with a demographic skew that has shifted significantly toward women and people of colour in recent years following the Academy's post-#OscarsSoWhite reforms, but which still skews toward the established mid-career professional.
That electorate votes based on its own experience of the films in the context of how those films are marketed to it during the campaign season. The film that wins Best Picture is not necessarily the film that a panel of film critics would consider the best film of the year. It is the film that the Oscar electorate - film industry professionals being professionally marketed to - most responded to. These are different questions with different answers.
THE SPECIFIC STRUCTURAL BIASES
The Academy has documented biases that produce predictable patterns: the preference for films about the film industry itself, for films about the recent past over the contemporary present, for films about certain kinds of suffering over others, for certain performance styles over others. These biases reflect the cultural preferences of the electorate - the kinds of films that resonate with film industry professionals who are the product of a specific educational and cultural formation.
The Oscars' relationship to international cinema is the clearest example of structural bias. The Best International Film category exists as a separate competition, which is itself a signal: non-English-language films are categorically distinct from 'films.' Parasite's Best Picture win in 2020 was correctly celebrated as historic; it was also the first non-English-language film to win Best Picture in the award's 92-year history. The Cannes Palme d'Or is an international prize because film is an international art. The Oscars is an American prize that occasionally acknowledges international work.
HOW TO WATCH IT PROPERLY
Watch the Oscars as a document of the Hollywood industry's relationship with its own history, not as a document of what the best films of any year were. The films that win tell you what the American film industry wanted to celebrate about itself in a particular moment. That is useful cultural information.
The films that lose - or that weren't nominated - are the place to look for what the award doesn't measure. In the year Moonlight won, La La Land's premature announcement was the story; the more interesting story is what wasn't nominated. In the year Parasite won, the genuinely interesting question is what the win means for the structural relationship between American and international cinema going forward. The outrage cycle misses those questions by spending its energy on the wrong results.
I want to propose an alternative reading: the Oscars are not broken.