James Cameron says Oscar's are biased against blockbusters

The Oscars face a fascinating dilemma every year. Their primary intention is to award the so-called “best” in film, but they also televise the ceremony, and they’d like for the broadcast to score high ratings. Lately, they’ve had some difficulty on that front. In 2016, the ratings hit an eight-year low, causing many to wonder how the Academy could possibly fix their problem. Some viewers point to the Oscar nominees, implying that since casual audiences are largely unfamiliar with them, they are less inclined to tune in to see who wins. There are other reasons for the continuous slide (the show itself is too long, etc.), but there definitely seems to be a difference between viewers’ favorite movies and the ones the Academy recognizes.

To their credit, the organization has tried to broaden their horizons, most notably by expanding the Best Picture field to include as many as 10 films annually. Still, populist hits such as Deadpool (which scored several prestigious nominations this year) are left off the ballot in favor of smaller dramas that far fewer people have seen. According to Oscar-winning director James Cameron, this is a byproduct of an in-house bias the Academy has against big studio tentpoles.

In an interview with The Daily Beast, Cameron candidly discussed his opinions on how the Oscars are handled, claiming that the Academy has the mindset of telling moviegoers what they “should” like, as opposed to rewarding the films “people really want to see.” Cameron further elaborated, explaining why he feels this is the way things are:

“There’s definitely a bias. The Academy still has a majority of its members that are actors. Look, I love actors, but that’s how they think—they’re generally skeptical of technology. So when they see a film that’s too dependent on visual effects, they say, oh, that’s not an acting movie. Well Titanic was a visual effects movie in sheep’s clothing, you know? Yes, it had visual effects, but it was about the people and about the story. The visual effects were eclipsed by that. But if you do a movie like Avatar, the effects are right out front, and even though I felt the acting was just as good, and the story we were telling was just as good, they’re not going to reward it the same way. That’s just a fact of life. I had made a decision way before Titanic that I wasn’t going to serve two masters: I was going to put my visual cinema first. Even though I’ve spent an awful lot of time on scripts and on performance, I still love doing big, visual cinema. I doubt I’ll even get nominated again, but if I did, I’m probably going to lose to a Woody Allen movie. That’s the nature of it. So you don’t try to serve two masters.”

Submitted January 31, 2017 at 10:15PM by Hi_Im_zack http://ift.tt/2kmXNRB