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Finally, an Oscar for What People Watch

I suppose, years ago, getting an Academy Award mattered.

Maybe winning ‘Best Picture’ Award meant that  it was the Best Picture and people would go to see it because it was worth seeing.   I don’t know.

We don’t broadcast the Academy Awards in Jamaica any more.  We used to.  But  for years, with all respect, the Awards are  meaningless.

“Best” whatever doesn’t mean that it is the Best whatever for the year. The criteria the privileged few who get to vote use  has nothing to do with reality.

People go to the movies.  People return and recommend what they like and pan what they didn’t.   Other people listen to them, and go or don’t go to a particular movie, based on what people they know suggest.

What the members of the Academy who vote select or don’t select is irrelevant.

Perhaps a few decades ago the decision of the Academy had some value but today,  it is as persuasive as an advertisement.

Avatar had more viewers, world wide, than any other movie, ever.  But the Award for ‘Best Picture’ was given to some movie I haven’t bothered to see.

The relevance of that statement is  I can watch any movie, from Academy Award Winners to cult, Free.  That a movie won ‘Best  Picture’  is no particular accreditation.    This sort of explains the irrelevance of the Oscars.

For example,  ‘The Shape of Water’ won Best Picture in 2018.   I  had watched about thirty minutes of it, then yawning,  switched to something else,  because The Shape of Water was rubbish.

Every year is the same.

What the people watch and talk about is not what the ‘Academy’  thinks is worthy.  Hence, winning  an Academy Award is no recommendation.

Take ‘Black Panther’; everyone I know has watched it and recommended it.  I watched it, I liked it.

As most people feel as I do,  the Academy, to stay ‘relevant’ is inserting the ‘Most Popular’ movie category.

Hence the Academy is not changing its method of selecting ‘Best’, which will remain irrelevant, they will just take note of what the movie going public selects.

I know it sounds screwy, but in America, where getting the most popular votes doesn’t mean you win an election, I guess  it makes sense.

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What do you think?

Written by jaylar