For many people the biggest news on this year’s Oscars was the Sean Penn’s joke about Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s green card. Or the totally inadequate hosting by Neil Patrick Harris and the consequent low audience rating of the ceremony. Or the public display of disappointment by Michael Keaton when he heard he was not winning the coveted award. But for me the big thing that the Oscars told us this year is the ever growing trend of the critics and the box office going further and further apart.
It is a dangerous trend, one that I cannot see reversed in the years to come. In the golden years of cinema the movies that won the Oscars were usually the biggest winners in the box office as well. One just has to mention two of the greatest movies of all time – Gone with the Wind and The Godfather to underline the point. And if the best movie at the Academy Awards was not by accident a huge financial success, so were at least two or three of the other nominees.
The last decade has seen a dramatic shift in this regard. The last time when The Best Movie winner score huge in the box office was The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. But the last installment of the Tolkien/Jackson trilogy is a special case – it came on the tidal wave of two hugely successful prequels, acclaimed by the critics. The Academy realized it would erode its status if it did not pay homage to one of the most popular movies of the decade. The Return of the Kings swept all the eleven awards in the categories it was nominated at the 76th Academy Award Ceremony, but that was eleven years ago. The movie also cashed the incredible $1.1 billion, making it the second most successful movie of all time (it would later be overtaken by only five other movies in the decade to come).
Ever since then no movie has even closely matched this feat – to dominate both the Oscars and the box office. Actually, throughout the last few years we have seen precisely the opposite – the critics favourites have slumped in the box office while the big hits have received no award acclaim at all.
But let’s see the numbers, shall we? The most successful Oscar winner for best movie of the last decade has been The Departed, which finished 15th in the 2006 annual box office. Given the fact that the movie was directed by the legendary Martin Scorsese and featured iconic actors like Jack Nicholson, Martin Sheen, Leonardo DiCaprio, Alec Baldwin and Matt Damon, it is somewhat of a disappointment that it cashed only $289 million worldwide. The Departed is arguably the best gangster movie of the last decade and a more than deserving Best Movie winner. This however did not translate into an automatic box office success.
The highest grossing movie in 2006 was Pirates of The Caribbean: Dead Men’s Chest, which cashed in no less than a billion dollars. While hugely entertaining, the second installment of the Pirates quadrilogy was nowhere close in quality to The Departed. It had flare though, it had comedy, action and Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow. A recipe for huge success.
And while The Departed result is still respectable considering its purse, what can we say about the The Hurt Locker or The Artist? The Hurt Locker is arguably among the worst movies ever to win in the most prestigious category and this translated in its poor box office result. It finished outside the top 100 movies in 2009 and is the worst Academy Award winner in this regard for the past twenty years. The movie cashed in just short of $50 million worldwide – a real slap in the face for all the Academy members who voted it the best movie of the year.
The Artist is not much different. The darling of the critcs in 2012 is considered simply unwatchable by the large audience. It cashed in about $130 million worldwide, most of them in Europe. But this mediocre result meant that the black-and-white drama would finish only 71st in the annual box office. And to show that there was not much of improvement the 2014 winner – 12 Years A Slave, finished 61st in the annual box office.
You do not need to be a rocket scientists to see the trend here. The mass audience simply does not agree with the critics choice. Actually, this has been the case for a whole decade, with very few exceptions. But we should not forget the fact that the Academy did snub one of the most successful movies of the past years – The Dark Knight – and did not even nominate it in the Best Picture category, despite the fact that the Christopher Nolan epic more than deserved it.
Now it is time to reverse the point. If the critics favour movies that are too elitist (though I would not call The Hurt Locker such a thing), is the opposite also disappointing? Do the box office results for the past decade show a triumphant cavalcade of action-packed, adventure-themed roller-coasters that do not differ significantly?
I am afraid this is precisely the case. The most successful movies of the past ten years have been The Avengers, The Hunger Games, The Transformers, Avatar, Pirates of the Caribbean, Spiderman and so on. With the significant exception of the 2008 The Dark Knight none of these superhits is even remotely interesting. All of them are hugely entertaining, but that is an entirely different thing. Hollywood is trying to convince us that these two terms are synonymous, if not similar. And that could be true if you were fifteen and have not read a single book in your life. The Marvel universe that has overtaken the movie-making business is not likely to release its grip – not surprisingly, the most successful movie of 2015 will be either the second Avengers or the new Star Wars that comes out in December.
And guess what? None of these movies has the slightest chance to be nominated for the Oscars, not in a thousand years. And it is a pretty safe assumption that the 2016 winner will be out if the top 20 in the annual box office, especially if it resembles Birdman or The Theory of Everything. It is the heart of the cynical philosophy of modern Hollywood – just make a sequel of something that already earned more than $500 million and begone the quality! As for the Oscars.. Does anybody out of the industry care about them anymore?
