academy-awards2I already laid out why I think the Academy Awards aren’t culturally-relevant. Lots of others have as well. What I noticed was missing, though, was how that could change.

Similarly, there’s a long-standing charge that the Hugo Awards (the equivalent of the Academy Awards for science fiction and fantasy, at least in terms of aspiration, and almost as old) are not representative of the genres the awards claim to cover. There’s a curious parallel, where we see that both sets of awards are chosen by a small minority compared to the total population of those who consume the relevant media. 

Yet, honestly, the Hugo Awards are far more inclusive, despite the same tendency the Academy has to choose a person rather than the work. The Hugos are chosen by a small minority, yes, but that minority is made up of attendees and supporting members of WorldCon, and anyone can purchase a supporting membership. I do it myself, in large part because I get electronic copies of almost all nominated prose works. (Not all publishers do this, but it’s customary for them to make the book available to Hugo voters to give them an informed choice.)

There is a campaign right now, in its third year, with the tongue-in-cheek name Sad Puppies, that aims to expose a claimed level of bias and also bring more attention on the Hugo Awards themselves. Considering the reaction to last year’s nomination ballot, the bias seems evident; but far more important, I think, is that it drew more people to purchase supporting memberships and vote in record numbers.

That part is key because, honestly, anything that attempts to be representative should be as representative as possible. The best books of the year should be the ones the majority liked best. The more people who buy supporting memberships and vote, the better it is for the Awards.

Of course, personally, I think that one year is hardly representative. I’d prefer it to cover the works published at least five years ago. In that way, we can easily see which ones stood up as being truly popular in a lasting way, rather than temporarily interesting. The Hugos do have some retroactive awards, but it’s not the same idea.

Regardless, I think the Hugo model is far better than that of the Academy. With the Hugos, we have a voting population made up mainly of untrained audience members or amateur and small-scale writers, yet with a greater likelihood that they know what they’re talking about in terms of technique than the typical movie-goer. It’s tempting to say that it’s because book-readers are more likely to recognize good technique, but that’s a false assumption; regular movie-watchers can and do learn from constant exposure in exactly the same way. Rather, it’s the modest fee for membership that helps the Awards, since it means that those who would vote on a whim but otherwise not really care tend to pass it over.

The idea, as you all have no doubt guessed by this point, is . . . why not take the same model for movies?

We’ve seen with audience-vote-based reality shows that it’s easy to set up a system where people can log in and cast a vote with little issue. An estimated 37.3 million people watched the Oscars this weekend, and that’s considered a low figure based on past performance. If we made a pie-in-the-sky guess that one-tenth of that viewership would be motivated enough to pay a $30 annual voting membership fee, that would mean over a hundred million dollars raised. That’s more than enough to cover the lavish celebration, a website and server sturdy enough to handle the load and secure enough to prevent fraud, and plenty left over for some very visible do-gooder charity endowments. (Or even to fund an acting and film scholarship series, perhaps? Raise the next generation of stars and directors and technicians?)

The sad thing is, the Academy would never go for this. They seem to prefer the idea of the awards being truly Hollywood-based, giving pats on the back to each other rather than truly putting their money where their mouths are and risking a genuine “representative” vote.

Because, remember, Oscars night isn’t actually about the movies. It’s not. It’s about the celebrities who show up. Otherwise, why would we have that red carpet, where they all try to outdo one another? Why does the news coverage care more about the dresses the women are just-barely wearing rather than having an ESPN-style dissection of each movie and what it means to American and even world culture?

Maybe what we really need is to cut them out entirely. Perhaps someone, or a group of someones, should stand up and declare that they’re going to start a new film award night. Structure it as a miniseries rather than a one-night special; I’m serious about the ESPN comparison, actually, as I think it would be very easy to set up an interview series on the nominees for each category and cover them in interesting ways over several nights. (Not back-to-back, but a weekly special for two months or so, leading up to the grand party.)

There’s one major benefit I’ve seen to the Hugo model, exposed by the Sad Puppies campaign. That benefit is engagement. I’ve never seen so many people engaged on the point of quality in fiction. I’ve never heard of this many people arguing this much over what makes a good book. That can only be a good thing, because even though many are dogmatic, the constant arguments mean those arguments get refined. I’m seeing schools of thought blossoming on my monitor as the months go by. Some are absurd, others are thoughtful; some I disagree with, others agree with me, and still more make me rethink what I consider to be set in stone (in as much as an art can ever be set in stone).

I would love to see this happen for the Academy Awards. I want them to be culturally-relevant. I don’t enjoy the current situation, where we have the worst of both worlds — an award curated by a group of professionals who rarely, if ever, act professional. The purpose of an award managed by elite experts is so that expertise can be brought to bear; but if that expertise is not evident, what benefit is there over a general vote by non-experts?

An Academy set up around the Hugo model seems far more likely to work for the issue at hand. The fee keeps it winnowed to those who can truly care, without keeping it to just those with money to burn. The public nature of the event becomes focused to the runup, as people debate the merits of a movie back and forth, rather than the Monday quarterbacking that we have now, where every movie that didn’t win has been “snubbed.” (And yes, I can use sports metaphors. Hush now.)

There will always be arguments that it falls short; and undoubtedly this model would produce results that skew toward “popular” over “quality.” Yet the popular often has plenty of quality, as the best-grossing movies tend to be the ones that actually interested audiences enough that they went to the theater rather than waited for it to show up on Netflix. The highest-grossing movie of 2014 was Mockingjay which, while I enjoyed it, I don’t think deserved to be Best Movie of 2014; but if it had been voted as such in this model, I’d have known this: it spoke to that many people, and that in itself is quality.

James Gunn, director of Guardians of the Galaxy (which has already won its share of awards regardless of red-carpet Hollywood attention), had a similar point to make about how the Academy tends to look down on popular movies:

Whatever the case, the truth is, popular fare in any medium has always been snubbed by the self-appointed elite. […] What bothers me slightly is that many people assume because you make big films that you put less love, care, and thought into them then people do who make independent films or who make what are considered more serious Hollywood films.

Will I ever see this award model? Probably not. But I don’t think it’s entirely unlikely that it might happen, or something like it. As the general public gets more and more bored with the three-hour spectacle of the Oscars, and most of us scratch our heads at the titles of the movies announced because we’ve never heard of them, the Academy Awards will continue to bleed viewers. This year, more than ever before, I heard a chorus of voices asking variations on a single question: “Why do we care?”

Eventually, I think the Academy Awards will have to rethink their approach, or they will become eclipsed by a far more inclusive set of awards that more people will think worthy of their time and attention. Either way, I’d like the premiere film award to be one representative of the tastes of the people who buy the product, rather than those who make it in the first place.