Awards Outlook - A New Academy Rule To Support Theaters
Photo from Vulture
Awards analysis is provided by Sean from @MathTeacherMovies.
There is a rumor of a new rule that the Academy is proposing in which a movie must play in fifteen of the twenty major theater markets in the U.S. and this has to be done before the end of the year. There is no doubt that this rule is combating films on streaming, which is not necessarily a good thing.
Theaters are the best place to see a movie, it is a way to pull yourself away from reality and sit in a room and experience a story with other strangers where you can react within a community. However, times are changing and the Academy is instead just ignoring that it's a problem.
The one aspect of the rule that does make sense is having the movie be released in those major markets before the end of the year in that sometimes films are released everywhere so late that they are either never seen by the audiences or more importantly the Academy.
It makes complete sense that the Academy wants to have a rule that will help business in the theaters but forcing small time nominees into more theaters doesn’t seem like the solution as this will not affect watching patterns of audiences.
This is definitely a rule that is going directly after Netflix and AppleTV+ as the streaming services that are the largest heavy hitters in the past few Oscar races. However, these streaming services won’t have much of an issue getting their films into this amount of theaters necessary for Oscar consideration, something they haven't had issues doing so in the past.
Franklin Leaonard has been an advocate for diversity in film and has commented that this will not fix that problem in the academy. As movies in much smaller streaming services and creators that don’t have as much say in where their projects can go, nevermind demanding that they are given a theater run.
While I personally love the theaters as much as a jumpsuit-laden Nicole Kidman, the Oscar's fetishization of movie theaters has become a problem in the past, with giving the Best Picture Oscar to Green Book beating Roma only because a group of older voters led the charge because the former was in theaters. Sometimes the Academy has a hard time accepting the future and if they continue with rules that make it harder for films on streaming, they will continue to look in the direction of what will eventually be considered out of touch.
This rule will not bring down the Academy or do anything to jeopardize the judgment of movies, but its meaning and sentiment are a great deal of an issue toward what they are trying to say.