The Academy Awards are fast approaching this year and with them comes renewed feelings of bile as they continue to disappoint and disgust common decency.
I used to not be jaded against the Oscars and award ceremonies in general, I used to actually really love the ridiculous pomp of it all. But as I learned more about the vile underbelly and as the quality of nominees has decreased, I have slowly been giving up on the concept of award ceremonies all together. And I find that very sad.
Like paranoid shut-ins frightened of the Illuminati, I liked to believe that there is a higher power in control of the arts. That there is a group of professionals out there who know what they are doing and are dedicated to rewarding hard work. After the Academy spewed out the latest batch of nonsense nominees with the force of wet fart, all that belief has faded away.
And it’s not even the big problems that have me the most annoyed. I can go on and on about how unfair the snubs for Selma, Gone Girl and The Lego Movie have been, but head-slamming awful snubs are on the menu for every award ceremony. No, what has me finally losing my last shreds of faith in a higher professional power is something small. An issue that shouldn’t exist in the first, and yet manages to infest a supposedly noble ceremony like a tapeworm.
This year the Japanese Studio Ghibli film “The Tale of Princess Kaguya” is up for best animated feature. The problem is that Princess Kaguya wasn’t released in 2014. It was released in 2013, but the American dub of the film was produced, and had a short theatrical run, in 2014. Because, according to the geniuses at the Academy, that is the only date that matters. They do clear foreign films for eligibility if it was released anytime in the previous year, but that sort of inconsistency ruins the system.
I understand the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences is an American organization dedicated to celebrating the best in American cinema and not every foreign movie is going to be available to the voting members. If that is the case, then why even bother with awarding foreign films if they are just going to break the system? These awards are being handed out on a year-by-year basis. That is their measuring stick. Bringing in films from other years, no matter the country it was originally produced in, no matter how much they try to accommodate them, breaks that system. It no longer holds any meaning if any film from any year can be up to receive awards as long as they hit state-side at some point.
We live in a global community, America does not exist within a vacuum. Just because a certain movie comes to America in a certain year, does not mean they aren’t influencing and having an impact on American cinema. So counting them as happening or being a part of another year’s history is ludicrous.
Snubbing films is one thing. That implies that there is something wrong with people running the system. Completely displacing one film to a totally different year because paying attention to cinema as a global enterprise is too hard implies that the system itself is broken. If it is too hard for these “professionals” to keep track of what year it is, then they should redefine their system to something less complicated.
