I've Got A Theory: It Doesn't Matter

At the beginning of last year, I managed to get myself worked up on more than one occasion about the awards races, mainly the Golden Globes and the Academy Awards. The point I tried to ramble toward in those pieces was that collecting award hardware, especially Oscars, is often viewed by many to be an automatic distinction of class, pedigree or skill for a film. I felt then and still believe that this is misleading, because plenty of high-quality films, filmmakers, actors, and others go unnoticed annually; additionally, some films that win major awards flat out don't deserve them.

But there's a bigger and better argument to be made, and that is that film awards are ultimately too subjective to carry any real weight. Yes, it sounds good and feels nice to say that a film won two or three or 11 Oscars, but that doesn't make it a better film than something that went home empty-handed. FIlms are, or many endeavor to be, art. And art is unquantifiable.

Loving movies and all media like I do, I agreed not long into my university experience to enter into a peaceful truce with most other men my age when it came to their all-encompassing love for sports and my preference for a moving story well-told to any kind of televised sporting event (except for curling, the sight of which I find oddly transfixing). I sit in awe at the feet of those who can regurgitate stat after stat, or who can give me the medical history of any player on the field. In a kind attempt to reach a common ground of understanding with their less overtly masculine counterpart, my friends often referred to the Oscars as my version of the Super Bowl. (Advertisers actually refer to the Academy Awards as "the Super Bowl for women," and man, that did wonders for the ego.) And I saw the parallels between the two events, and thought the metaphor apt.

But it's not, and for one huge reason: Sports are quantifiable, and movies aren't.

Sure, a lot of films aren't trying to be art. They're entertainment, after all, and some of the ones that purely set out to please you can turn out to be the most enjoyable. But some filmmakers are genuine artists, and there have been some amazing American films over the past 50 years that are good, or moving, or powerful, or sad, or uplifting for a thousand reasons you can't measure. On the other hand, you can argue about who "deserves" to win a game all you want, but the winning team is the one that scores more points. I know it's a tautology to say that the winner is the one that wins, but that's the truth. Did UT deserve to beat USC in the Rose Bowl? It doesn't matter; they did. The concept of deserving never enters into it.

I feel this is the best day to bring this up. Nominations were announced this morning for the 78th Annual Academy Awards, and this Sunday is Super Bowl XL (too much fun for L, not quite enough for XXL). Two major television events in American culture, and while one will yield a clear, verifiable winner in the midst of overpriced commercials and bad musical acts, the Oscars will have to pick one among greats to go home with the major trophies.

Walk the Line wasn't nominated for best picture. Does this mean it's not a good movie, or at least not as good as the ones nominated? No. Sadly, Crash was nominated, a disappointing but almost unavoidable turn of events. But when it comes to Capote versus Munich, no one can say that one is measurably "better" than the other.

All that to say: Whoever wins the Super Bowl will claim they deserved the win, while the loser will say they'll be back next year, and the fleeting glories of Sunday's game will be forgotten in a few months by all but the most devout/unbalanced sports fans. But the films nominated today, and the dozens that weren't, will continue to be emotionally resonant long after the awards have been handed out.