Matt Yglesias takes issue with a Dan Drezner post on the Oscars and cautions us on weighing in on the technical awards.
I think it’s perfectly fair for a lay movie fan to decide that, say, Natalie Portman’s performance in Closer was neither the best performance in that film nor the best Natalie Portman performance of the year and that, therefore, it’s an odd choice…. But neither I — nor you nor, unless I’m seriously mistaken, Dan — actually knows anything about what the sound editor for The Polar Express or the Director of Photography for A Very Long Engagement did. I can judge the actors performances and the script as independent parts of the movie pretty well, and assess how good I thought a movie was overall, but parsing out the different contributions made by the director and various technical people to the overall gestalt is pretty damn hard to do unless you have some kind of specialized knowledge of the relevant field. Sometimes, it makes sense to defer to the experts.
I was thus prepared for a Drezner post filled with hubris, only to find a fairly straightfoward (and reasonable) claim that Collateral should have been considered for best Cinematography and Bourne Supremacy for Best Editing. But it occured to me that people are talking at cross purposes. Matt’s right that as nonpractitioners we really don’t know the technical aspect of cinematography or editing. But Dan’s not unreasonable in looking at cinematography and editing as aesthetic dimensions capable of being judged by their formal qualities and textual effect. In fact, the history of the Academy Awards has involved moving from a trade award (every industry has them, but people outside the industry don’t usually bother to follow them) to a prestige award having to do with the aesthetic quality of a cultural product. A lot of people grumble that the Oscars are still about industry politics, but it’s undeniable that the cultural elevation of cinema and televisual broadcast have effected a move away from an industrial and technical basis of the awards.
Only this affects categories unevenly. Direction, acting, screenwriting - these are categories clearly aesthetic, both to those who vote on awards and those who watch at home. Cinematography, art direction and editing are easily readable as aesthetic categories to those with a literacy of cinema, a subset of lay opinion, but perhaps not to others. Sound Editing and Visual Effects are pretty much straightforwardly technical - they have an aesthetic effect of course but as categories they separate out the process of making films. And then there are the technical awards not given on the telecast but in some dingy hotel ballroom days before the show.
One of the frustrating things about those who care about cinema as an aesthetic form is less that “Oscars are a joke” to quote one MY commenter, than that in certain areas the aesthetic - at least as it’s construed by those who conceive of film as art - seems to carry no weight at all. At least that’s what I’ll blame when I lose the Oscar pool once again.
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