Do the Oscars Need a Facelift?

Written by Scotty

In one word, I have to say YES.  Year after year, there are new award shows popping up and they still all bring the same message that we, as fans do not know what a good movie is.  I will admit, I take pleasure in watching B movies as people put it, but these are much more entertaining that what gets nominated by the Academy.  Now, am I upset that there are movies I have not seen, nor heard of getting awards?  Damn skippy and I know that I am not the only one.

If you have a movie that only caters to one type of person, it does not make it bad for them, but shame on the Academy for thinking that everyone else should see it.  It has been ages since an actual blockbuster movie has been nominated for a best picture, much less been a winner.  This is one of my biggest gripes about the award shows these days, since every film is broken down in forty different ways and only the finest, according to a group of six thousand people who have actually seen the film get their final say. 

It has been going on for over eighty years and the group continues to give the highest marks to films that end up losing money because nobody has seen them.  This is what needs to change in my opinion, the films that should be up for best picture should be the movies that grossed the highest amount, since that is what the people want to see.  I do not understand why we as fans even care about what the committee says, since we have already spoken by paying our thirteen dollars to see the movie in the theater, or paid twenty dollars to get the DVD.

A change needs to be made to how the movies are selected since most of these would be considered B movies due to their lack of revenue.  There are great movies out there that people never see, I agree with that since not every studio or production house is able to advertise to the world, but I do not understand why one singular group is in charge of telling the world what the best movie is, that nobody has ever seen.  I know that when a movie gets a nomination for best picture, it starts to trend up in sales or rentals so people can see what the committee has seen, but that is a cheat to get the overall gross for the film into the black.

Our lives revolve around numbers, I hate to say it, but they really do and this is the way that the movie industry should be moving as well.  The Golden Globes have been successful in adapting over the years but honestly, the only movie award show that seems to make sense these days is the MTV Movie Awards.  This is based on what the fans have seen and liked over the year, and you are guaranteed to have seen at least one of the movies over the year, but have heard of all of them.  I will never try to take away what the Oscar means to all of the people that have won it in the past, but I will say that we are in 2015 now and the same rating system that the Academy has used for the past eighty years is out of date and they need to come into the 21st century already.

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