“I Knew We Were Gonna Get Nailed”: Inside the Academy’s Popular-Oscar Mess

Academy board members open up about the great popular-film-Oscar debacle of 2018, and explain how the prize may yet be incorporated into future ceremonies.

By Rebecca Keegan

November 16, 2018

During a black-tie dinner under the gilded ceilings of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel’s Blossom Ballroom in 1929, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences handed out its first Oscars, honoring not one but two films with what the nascent industry group considered its top awards. At the brisk, 15-minute ceremony, William Wellman’s popular, red-blooded war epic, Wings, won the Oscar for “outstanding picture,” and F. W. Murnau’s daring, monochrome romance, Sunrise, collected the prize for “unique and artistic picture.” In explaining the dilemma of selecting the year’s winners, director William C. DeMille, who co-hosted the event, said, “It is a bit like asking, ‘Does this man play checkers better than that man plays chess?’”

A year later, the Academy scrapped the unique-and-artistic-picture category altogether, and the outstanding-film Oscar became the equivalent of today’s best picture, its name since 1962. Though the awards categories have shuffled over the years as the movie business has evolved, it’s clear that from its very founding, 90 years ago, the Academy has been grappling with an existential question that still vexes the roughly 9,000-member organization today: In a popular art form, what matters more, the popularity or the art?

That question reared its head once again during a sleepy week last August in a glass-walled conference room on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. Late in the agenda at an Academy’s board-of-governors meeting, a sprawling and sometimes contentious group that currently includes Laura Dern, Steven Spielberg, Paramount chief Jim Gianopulos, and 51 other film professionals, Academy C.E.O. Dawn Hudson and president John Bailey introduced a plan they hoped would save their organization from cultural obsolescence and potential future financial hardship. The board created a new Oscar for achievement in “popular film.” Among themselves, they debated different ideas—to award it to a film that had been released on at least 2,000 screens, to base eligibility on box-office receipts, or to involve the general public in voting.

“There was a precedent for it, so the thought was: Let’s look at it. Without diminishing our commitment to the art of cinema, can we introduce a populist element to it to engage the audience?” said a source familiar with the board’s conversations. Since the group couldn’t agree on the criteria just yet but feared a leak of their discussions to the press, the Academy announced its tentative “popular film” Oscar plan, along with a slate of other changes designed to boost ratings for the telecast, including shortening the running time and pushing up its place in the crowded awards-season calendar. “You say, Am I doing the right thing or am I not doing the right thing?” one board member said, recalling the meeting. “I knew we were gonna get nailed.”

Announcing the notion without the details yet determined “allowed everybody to piss on it from a great height,” said the source familiar with the conversations. Less than a month after revealing it, the board nixed the popular-film Oscar category from the next Academy Awards ceremony, and Hudson pledged in an interview with Vanity Fair to pursue “further study, without abandoning the principle.”

When the Academy announced the popular-film Oscar on August 8, the idea was quickly eviscerated in the press and on social media, and board members began to field bewildered and angry calls from their colleagues. Rob Lowe, whose most memorable Oscars connection up to this point had been his agonizing 1989 musical opening number featuring Snow White, tweeted, “The film business passed away today with the announcement of the ‘popular’ film Oscar. It had been in poor health for a number of years. It is survived by sequels, tent-poles, and vertical integration.” Los Angeles Times film critic Justin Chang wrote that the idea was “a breathtakingly cynical, pandering initiative.” And many Academy members felt the popular-film Oscar tarnished the group’s biggest virtue as a brand: its association with distinction and quality. It was as if the members had gotten into Harvard and their Ivy League university decided to start offering degrees in dodgeball. Many Academy members also wondered how their own movies would fare, and whether a studio film that might otherwise be considered a best-picture contender would instead end up with the popular-film Oscar as a sort of participation trophy. “None of us knew what the word ‘popular’ referenced,” said an awards consultant for one studio. “Is Transformers the same thing as Titanic? Does a best-popular-film nomination scuttle your chances at best picture?”

Though the announcement caught the wider Academy by surprise, the notion of an award somehow linked to the general public followed years of dialogue and research within the organization about how to broaden its audience, a topic that took on a new urgency after record-low ratings for the March telecast, where Fox Searchlight’s The Shape of Water took the best-picture prize. Viewership for awards shows of all types are down, and the Oscars remain, effectively, the most dominant in a shrinking group. While high compared with, say, this year’s Emmys, which drew just over 10 million people, the 26.5 million viewers who watched the 2018 Oscars live represented a 19 percent decline from 2017, and a 39 percent drop from the show’s recent height in 2014, when popular studio films like Gravity and American Hustle were in the best-picture race.

The Academy, a nonprofit organization, gets the vast majority of its funding from its Oscar-telecast rights, which have been sold to ABC through 2028. As the group builds a nearly $400 million new museum, scheduled to open in 2019 in the historic, former May Company building on Wilshire Boulevard, shoring up that funding has become ever more important. Under the Academy’s contract with ABC, the group earns more money if ABC earns more from its ad sales, according to three people familiar with the contract. At a time when few events inspire anyone to watch TV live, the Oscars still do, and ABC was able to charge advertisers up to $2.6 million for a 30-second spot during this year’s show (about half the price for a 30-second ad during this year’s Super Bowl). Whether advertisers will pony up as much after last year’s ratings disaster remains to be seen.

Though the popular-film-Oscar announcement felt sudden to many Academy members, the group’s nearly decade-long effort to reward more popular films actually began in 2009, when they expanded the size of the best-picture category after Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight failed to secure a best-picture nomination. That change has had the unintended consequence of seeing more esoteric. independent films garnering nominations, rather than the large studio films it was meant to boost. “Over the years we’ve narrowed our scope of movies that we are honoring for excellence,” Hudson said. “When we announce our nominees in January, a lot of films are not accessible to film lovers around the world. They’re just not in theaters. We want the Oscars to evolve. We want to be relevant to and engage with our audience of film fans.”

After the 2018 telecast, which was hosted by Jimmy Kimmel and produced by Michael De Luca and Jennifer Todd, discussions about changes to the show that had percolated for years escalated. In the spring, an Academy and ABC post-mortem meeting about the telecast felt like a “red alert,” one board member said. “ABC said, ‘Look, guys, we understand the films that are nominated are the films that are nominated, but we have to make the show more relatable,’” said a source familiar with the conversation. “‘We leave it with you guys to figure out a way to do that.’” The board member said the issue reached “a tipping point.” “This year on the heels of #MeToo and Time’s Up—the show had become so political,” the board member said. “It was too long. It just veered off its mission.”

In addition to the popular-film Oscar, the board voted to push up the date of future Academy Awards ceremonies, to combat the sense of awards fatigue audiences feel after weeks of red-carpet coverage of shows like the Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild Awards. “It’s still disheartening when fans don’t feel it necessary to tune in to the Oscars in the same way,” Hudson said. “We want to be relevant. We want to be important, as important as we’ve been for the last 90 years. We need the next 90 to have just as much of an impact in part of our culture.”

The 2019 Oscars show will be produced by Donna Gigliotti, who was behind Shakespeare in Love, Silver Linings Playbook, and Hidden Figures; Glenn Weiss, the Oscars-telecast director best known for proposing to his girlfriend during this year’s Emmys ceremony, will co-produce and direct it. One of the Academy’s moves was to shorten the sometimes four-hour-plus telecast to three hours by conferring certain awards during commercial breaks and editing those honorees into the show, an experiment Gigliotti and Weiss will be pioneering.

The popular-film-Oscar idea is not dead. It is being discussed in small groups through the fall, and the board will take it up again in the new year, multiple board members say. “Everyone suddenly realized, I don’t think we’re ready for this yet. Everybody thought it would be a good idea, but we suddenly realized Oscar season is upon us and we didn’t have an infrastructure,” said one board member. As Bailey said at a film festival in Poland in November: “So the board reconsidered and tabled it—which is not to say that the idea is dead. Even after a stake was driven through its heart, there’s still interest.”

The notion of a fan-voted prize, which would not carry the name “Oscar,” seems to hold favor with some board members. “There are logistic issues and practical issues, but the idea of having some engagement with the public is an area worth exploring,” said the source familiar with the board’s thinking. “What are the crowd-pleasers? What are the ones people feel passionate about and how do you convey that into the nomination process? How do you harmonize that with a group of professionals who understand the artistic and creative process of making movies, who want to assign the highest level of accolade you can get? That’s the conundrum.”

One way Academy members who aren’t on the board might chose to weigh in is with the films they nominate this year, as studios are offering an unusually large crop of movies that have both artistic and populist merit, including Disney’s Black Panther and Mary Poppins Returns, Warner Bros.’s A Star is Born, Fox’s Widows, and Paramount’s A Quiet Place.

“What happens next depends on, what are the nominees, how engaged are people, what are the ratings?” said the source familiar with the board’s thinking. “Is there a good mix of commercially successful films with more artistic films? And if we do go the popular Oscar, it’ll be done in a thoughtful, less rushed way.” Almost as if they had been planning it for 90 years.