New Oscars category - Outstanding Popular Film

This really is a terrible idea. They’re only doing it to increase TV ratings because they tend to go up in years where more popular films are nominated - only that high rated year when Lord of the Rings won everything was probably the most boring and uneventful in living memory. If they want to increase global ratings, just hold the ceremony on a Saturday so anyone outside the USA who wants to watch doesn’t have to take a day off work to do so.

People who only watch big franchise blockbusters generally aren’t interested in awards ceremonies and they still won’t watch even if a bunch of “popular” films are nominated any more than they’d watch the People’s Choice Awards. It’s only the vocal minority of some of them that go on about the likes of The Dark Knight being snubbed (note - I thought it was a solid 3 star movie but really nothing special), and they already increased the Best Picture category to have up to 10 films because of that.

The only thing I dislike about the whole Oscar “season” is that the majority of recognised films are all released together in the same three month window. Mostly the terrible pretentious bait films don’t win, but they do tend to get nominated a lot, when much better films released earlier in the year go unnoticed, just because they’re not fresh in the memory of voters. That’s not a complete rule - Silence of the Lambs for instance was a huge exception and went against every tradition.

The Oscars were in quite a healthy state in the 1970s and 1990s, when a lot of the populist films also coincided with the awards. To that I’d say to mainstream Hollywood - start making better, original films again instead of sequel after sequel of existing franchises. I love a good Marvel film as much as anyone, but they’re a billion dollar industry and don’t need awards like a smaller, independent film may need to even get distributed in the first place.

They're welcome to as many categories as they wish; just stop using awards as an excuse to clog up cinemas with re-releases of old films and right after Xmas/New Year, when regular cinema-goers are already desperate for something decent after an unalloyed diet of cartoons and schlockbusters during school hols.

Good idea, Tom Cruise has never won an Oscar. Current Oscar winners are arty films that appeal to a particular demographic (old white male filmmakers). They seem to discriminate against any movie that has been very popular.

I watch most of the nominations and would not recommend any of them to friends of family. I recommend the recent good Star Wars movies however.

You should try and catch The Shape of Water, if you didn't see it. It's bonkers and delightful and has a dancing fish-man romancing Sally Hawkins.

The fact that last years best film Oscar was won by a love story between a woman and a giant newt shows the need for mainstream popular movies to have their own category.

Aquaman will certainly be classed as mainstream.

Some additional new categories, as suggested by The New Yorker:

www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/other-new-oscar-categories

Seriously??

Nonsense.

Let's look at last year's Best Picture nominees.

Dunkirk - war film, $528 million box office
Get Out - horror film, $256 million box office
The Shape of Water - fantasy film, $196 million box office
The Post - political drama, $178 million box office
Three Billiboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - crime dramedy, $160 million box office
Darkest Hour - biopic, $151 million box office
Lady Bird - coming of age dramedy, $79 million box office
Phantom Thread - period drama, $47 million box office
Call Me By Your Name - European LGBT drama, $42 million box office 

So out of nine films, only three didn't manage to make $100 million at the box office. The other six were absolutely box office successes that drew in audiences aka they were popular films. Dunkirk and Get Out in particular were huge as the 19th and 37th highest grossing films of the year respectively. The winner - The Shape of Water - also made the top 50 as the 48th highest grossing.

So what about the three films that didn't make $100 million? Why should they have been nominated?

Well, when looking at a review aggregate such as Metacritic that assigns each film a score out of 100 based on how acclaimed it was, we can easily see why.

Dunkirk / Lady Bird - 94
Call Me By Your Name - 93
Phantom Thread - 92
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - 87
The Shape of Water - 86
Get Out - 84
The Post - 83
Darkest Hour - 75

Lady Bird, Call Me By Your Name and Phantom Thread may not have taken the box office by storm (although the former two still made a lot of money thanks to minuscule budgets), but along with Dunkirk they were the most acclaimed films of the year and more acclaimed than the other nominees and the eventual winner. The Oscars are designed to award excellence in filmmaking. They're designed to award films that are technically brilliant, not films that appeal to the most people. 

As for your claims about demographics, it's no secret that old white men have made up the majority of the Academy and so in the past their tastes have leaned a certain way. But since the #OscarsSoWhite scandal they have invited thousands of new members and made a real push for a younger, more diverse membership. Do we really think that old white men LOVE stories about teenage girls like Lady Bird? That they LOVE stories about 17 year old boys facing their sexual awakening with a 24 year old man like Call Me By Your Name? That they LOVE films about a woman having sex with a fish like The Shape of Water? That they LOVE horror films based around race relations and the black experience like Get Out? No, I think in reality old white men are far more likely to enjoy the latest Star Wars films. I mean for goodness sake last year the Best Picture winner was a film about a black, gay man that had no white people in the cast.

The most recent Star Wars film by the way got four Oscar nominations. The original Star Wars film (when the membership of the Academy was far more old, white and male) was nominated for Best Picture. Two years ago the film that took home the most Oscars was Mad Max: Fury Road, an action blockbuster that made $379 million at the box office, also nominated for Best Picture and Best Director. Tom Cruise has three Oscar nominations and has hardly been overlooked by the Academy. 

Should huge blockbusters be recognized when they are worthy? Yes. And for the most part, they are already. But no, they do not need their own category. They do not need Oscars. They already make a huge amount of money. They already take up every screen in my local cinema, forcing me to have to travel to the nearest major city to see a film that I'm actually interested in (yes I prefer Oscar nominated films to blockbusters 99% of the time, no I'm not an old white man). The ONLY reason studios are willing to finance films like Call Me By Your Name, Lady Bird and Phantom Thread, quite frankly three of the best films I've ever seen, is because they know at the end of it there's a chance of recognition from awards bodies that will encourage people to go see them and help them to make money. Disney, Marvel and whoever else don't need to do that. They already make an incomprehensible amount of money. This category is nothing but a ploy for ratings fueled by whining fanboys who don't like it when they get told the things they like the most (which is fine) aren't actually the best. It's the equivalent of saying Mean Girls, poorly reviewed, should have won a Tony this year because it does well at the box office and teenagers moan about it not winning on Instagram. 

It's the sort of statement that only really works if someone never goes to the cinema at all. What happens if you decide to see a film that you think is safe enough because you don't reckon it fits the standards for Oscars, enjoy it immensely, then it later wins Best Makeup And Hairstyling or Best Sound Mixing? Do you have to go to confession and beg forgiveness? Do you have to go to a therapist and rethink everything you thought you knew about yourself? I get that popular doesn't always mean best, but sometimes things are popular *and* good. Look at Mad Max: Fury Road for heaven's sake.

Have you seen The Shape of Water yet, TM? It's out on DVD.

Honestly, I do think snutte is right that the taste of the Academy has fundamentally changed in recent years. You are missing out on some really wonderful films if you dismiss anything Oscar-nominated out of hand - it's not like in the Miramax (and Weinstein) dominated 90s when you could pretty much predict the plot-beats of every Oscar-nominated film - in fact the more formulaic Oscar-bait films are having a much tougher time getting nominations of late.

Black Panther would have been nominated for Best Picture without this new category I think pretty easily and it would have been a huge achievement as the first superhero movie to do so. Now that's in jeopardy as it will likely just get what will be seen as a consolation prize and if the backlash remains, the category will be removed for the following year and Black Panther's Oscar will be seen as a bit of a joke/Oscar trivia.

The director of Black Panther, Ryan Coogler, recently rejected Academy membership suggesting he's not even bothered in the first place. And why would he be, his film is one of the most financially successful films of all time. He doesn't need this.

The Planet of the Apes series have been recognized by the Academy for their technical merit, having been nominated in the visual effects category. Suicide Squad, about as lowbrow as you can get, won an Oscar for best makeup. They're not afraid to go lowbrow when there is something genuinely worth recognizing. 

A few years ago there was always a solid 10 nominees, then membership complained because they couldn't think of 10 films (ridiculous) so now we have a sliding scale of 5-10 (so far it has always been 8 or 9). If you forced them to nominate 10, these so called lowbrow films would be in the mix a lot more often and it would make a lot more sense than making a joke of the whole thing by suggesting popularity is something that should be awarded on the same level as actual high quality filmmaking. If people that live and breathe the film industry can't think of ten films worth nominating each year then I question if they should even be members in the first place.

The only solution to the above is to leave it all up to me. I probably see more films per year than some critics, and I’m a damn sight less pretentious but still open minded to the non mainstream... I have no life outside of work, friends and cinema/theatre with friends.

It’s the only way I’ll ever be satisfied with the results.