I was listening to a podcast on my road trip to see my daughter over Thanksgiving. I highly recommend it. It’s called It’s the Pictures That Got Small and it’s about old Hollywood.
It’s impossible to find just by googling. That’s because there is another podcast called It’s the Pictures That Got Small, and the host is the much more famous Karina Longworth. But this isn’t that podcast. This is a different podcast, and it’s well worth your time (the other one might be as well. I haven’t listened to it).
This one is hosted by Francesca Luisi and stopped posting in 2023. Variety profiled her, along with other old movie podcasts back in 2021I have listened to many episodes now, including the Making of Psycho, East of Eden, The Wizard of Oz, and Casablanca. In each of these, we see everything that went into making some of the greatest films of all time. From the micromanaging of studio heads like Jack Warner, to the painstaking attention to detail and obsessive focus of Alfred Hitchcock, to the physical and emotional ordeals many stars endured to achieve this level of greatness.
It made me think about movies today and how they just aren’t as good as they used to be. They no longer care more about the audience than they do about themselves. We are in the “self-care” era after all, and it has made for worse movies, sorry to say. I don’t need to hear every complaint every star has on the set, as though there aren’t thousands of people out there who would trade places with them. That doesn’t mean stars should be abused as they were in the past, but it does mean that we’ve entered an era of infantilization of grown adults wherein everyone is a victim on set and needs protecting, especially women.
That is neither here nor there, just an observation of what things were like in the past compared to today, and how it wasn’t easy to produce and deliver the greatest films ever made. I don’t know if we’ll ever get back to that, to be perfectly honest. But there is one thing Hollywood and the Oscars can do right now to reverse course on our doomed future (everything on streaming).
They can shrink Best Picture down to five and limit it to American studio-produced movies. Then, they can expand the International Feature category to 10 and change the rules, allowing the directors or producers of those movies to win the Oscar and eliminating the submissions-by-country rules. You still have the problem of the preferential ballot, but you don’t have to use Best Picture to include all of the strong films from other countries, which are now taking the extra slots rather than the genre movies, as once intended.
Five Best Picture contenders this year might look something like this:
One Battle After Another
Sinners
Hamnet
Frankenstein
Marty Supreme
Maybe. And think of how easy it would be to fill ten from International Feature. Look at those five, if those were the five, and think of how much of a big deal it is to say these were the five best movies of the year? Why are there ten slots for Best Picture and only five for Best Director or in the acting categories? It makes no sense. The BAFTAs still do five, the Oscars can too.
If you have five, movies have to be better. They have to be more successful. They are more memorable. There is some power in having a Best Picture nomination as opposed to now, where almost no one remembers what was nominated. They barely remember what won.
The economics of Hollywood means five in the race shows power to a specific studio, as opposed to anyone and their brother getting in for Best Picture, and there is no rhyme or reason to it except to satisfy bloggers, activists, and publicists. Audiences don’t care.
80 years ago, during the last “Fourth Turning,” the Academy did shrink Best Picture down to five, with the last year of the expanded ballot being the Casablanca year and the first being the Going My Way year. There is no question that the Golden Age of the Oscars occurred during the era where there were five, not ten, Best Pictures, and there is no question that the brand began to diminish once they expanded in 2009.
This is an easy problem to solve, though it will mean standing up to the barrage of temper tantrums and sanctimonious op-eds. Trust me, I know. More movies mean more money for FYC ads and more money for the trades. It also satisfies the tiny cabal of bloggers and critics who now control the Oscars and see them as their own fantasy diorama that solves all of society’s problems and portrays an idealized picture of the film industry.
But it’s the audience that used to be the priority and the audience that now gets the short shrift much of the time. Movie theaters are going the way of the 8-track and record stores. We can give up and allow this evolution, or we can try to fight and hold onto something that used to mean we all sat under one roof and shared in a cultural experience, shared in a story.
Just because the ruling class has decided they are the “resistance” and are fighting “The Nazis,” doesn’t mean Casablanca is not a universal story. It is their distortion of reality that would ever make this movie partisan. Their crazed fanaticism and desire to make every movie and every story about their imagined tormenter. In reality? They couldn’t defeat him in an election. Not exactly Hitler marching into Poland.
We need those shared cultural experiences—the country does, families do, friendships do, people on dates—all of us. Hollywood has decided to lock itself away like so much of American culture and tell the other half of the country to Keep Out. That is a recipe for disaster at the box office. So many of the best films this year are universal experiences that don’t lock out audiences. The Best Picture Five listed above have 4/5 universal stories and one that is extremely partisan (One Battle After Another). And maybe that partisan one will win because it reflects the utopian Left’s worldview. I don’t know.
But I do know that we saw quite a few films this year that were movies anyone could sit down and understand — for the most part, like Weapons. Like Wicked: For Good (at least, that’s what I’ve heard). Hollywood seems to have gotten the message and is ever so slowly turning the ship around, or trying to. But the Oscars can help by acknowledging the collapsing film industry and responding by once again shrinking Best Picture down to five.
They won’t. But they should.
And p.s. Alfred Hitchcock probably should have won the Oscar at least once in his career as a director. But that Academy could never have given Hitchcock, an outsider, the Oscar over Billy Wilder, the ultimate insider. He always lost to insiders:
1940: Nominated for Rebecca (won Picture), John Ford won Director for The Grapes of Wrath
1943: Nominated for Lifeboat, lost to Leo McCarey and Going My Way for Picture/Director
1944: Nominated for Spellbound, lost to Billy Wilder and The Lost Weekend for Picture/Director
1954: Nominated for Rear Window, lost to Elia Kazan and On the Waterfront for Picture/Director
1960: Nominated for Psycho, lost to Billy Wilder again for The Apartment for Picture/Director
Back then, it was a game of insiders and a film industry that fortified them. And true, locked a lot of people out. But now, we have almost the opposite. It’s an industry that values its insiders less than it used to and most certainly doesn’t fortify them. What matters to Hollywood is the fake absolution they get from virtue signaling and genuflecting, at the expense of audiences. Ryan Coogler shoud win a Best Director Oscar for not just one of the most successful films of the year, Sinners, but also for the hits he churned out for Hollywood – he got there all on his own with no thanks from the Academy. They shut out Fruitvale Station.
On the other hand, Paul Thomas Anderson has been making movies the critics and some film fans like for a long time now and if this is an industry that rewards that kind of a history, then people will say he deserves it too. But by what measure, all of this?
In the end, it might not be either of them. It might be Chloé Zhao for Hamnet who has delivered her best work to date and won’t be winning for Academy absolution. But because her film moved people deeply in unforgettable ways.
Anyway, I don’t know how it will go or how it SHOULD go. I do know one thing: it’s time to shrink the Best Picture race down to five just as they did after World War II when output was scarce.
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