MOST working people are in marketing, one way or another, whether or not their department is called ‘Marketing.’ Also, most people are not in the arts. Yet, art has some of the world’s best marketing, though it is not known as marketing. Like its awards or ceremonies of ‘recognition.’ Who is ‘recognising’ the artist? A small group of people who are considered more discerning than most of the world. Yet this ‘recognition’ impresses most of the world. Though not as forcefully as before.
Many awards have lost their influence as the world has lost its reverence for pundits. The Academy Awards for films are not chosen by them, which is perhaps why they have endured. Thousands of the Academy’s active members vote, and those members are mostly people who have written, directed, produced or edited films or acted in them, or participated in filmmaking in other ways. These Awards, also known as the Oscars for reasons lost to history, are the world’s most useful awards. Yet, even they are in decline.
Last month, the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences implemented a rule change for the next awards—that members must watch all nominated films in a category to be eligible to vote in the final round for that category. This means many of them have been voting without watching all the films—or perhaps any. This points to something charlatan. But it is not the most important or interesting reason why the Academy Awards have lost some of their mojo.
A criticism of the Academy Awards in recent years has been that they now champion films that are dull, with no wide audience appeal, or are just ordinary. I have a theory why this may be happening. It has something to do with the crooked nature of peer-review, and how people tend to compensate for their mental frailties.
In the past, the power of Academy Awards came from the fact that they were the only major awards that did not celebrate pure art; Oscars were a tribute to middlebrow work. Art is easy. Those who are horrified by this statement are likely to be those who have no artistic gifts. Art is easy for those who have talent. What is hard is for the gifted to reach out to a wide audience. And that was what the Oscars celebrated most of the time—the triumph of the middle-ground and the mainstream. The films they amplified, chiefly through Best Picture award nominations, were also mainstream or could go mainstream with some push. Like Forrest Gump, which had artistic heft and also entertaining. Most prestigious awards tend to celebrate what they deem high art. In India, as a child, I used to associate art cinema with a dejected woman combing her hair as water boiled.
Today, the Best Picture Oscars have drifted into the ambiguous terrain of ‘art cinema.’ This sometimes gives us a spectacular film, but more often holds up insipid works that are assumed to have artistic merit because they are dull. As a result, some Oscar picks today are not popular films. So, why is this happening?
One reason is that when a notable person in any industry is asked who is the best in his field, he usually does not name a remarkable peer; he would rather name a celebrated veteran who is not competition or a debutant. When cricketers are asked to name the all-time great, they almost never pick a contemporary but someone from history. Or someone who is so obscure that he poses no direct competition. (Recently, Australian great Ricky Ponting said that the best player in history was Jacques Kallis, citing statistics.) This is also why when you ask present-day actors who the greatest actor is, they are likely to name someone from an earlier era.
This is also the reason why it is fun to ask Indian writers in English who their favourite Indian writer is—they are most likely to name R.K. Narayan, even though most of them won’t have read him seriously. Kiran Nagarkar, too, featured very often before he was disgraced by the allegations of three women that he made passes at them when they interviewed him. Indian English writers also champion regional writers, like Perumal Murugan, because it is safe to promote them.

The Oscars are the world’s most influential peer-reviewed honour. It would be absurd to think that bias does not seep in. That is why obscure and ‘diverse’ films and filmmakers surface from time to time.
The other reason for the influx of films with no wide appeal, especially in the Best Picture nominations, is that a disease that usually affects small-jury awards has begun to afflict the Oscars. The assumption that more dreary a work is the more artistic merit it carries.
A work of pure art need not be entertaining, but it is also true that the chief artistic merit of most things being passed off as art is that they aren’t vulgar enough to entertain. This is what happens when intellectually frail minds are asked to choose something ‘worthy.’ They go in search of gravitas—and they find it only in what doesn’t entertain. It’s like a class of people who rate Rahul Dravid as the greatest Test cricketer because his cricket was not flamboyant (like them).
But then why did the Oscars feature more mainstream films before? Surely, if peer parsimony is human nature, as I claim, it would also go back a long way in time.

I feel that many times in the past, peers did champion obscure films and filmmakers in the name of artistic value or diversity, but the world was so simple and the Academy Awards so powerful that those films instantly became mainstream. Take The English Patient in 1996. It became mainstream because it won an Oscar for Best Picture.
Today, as the Academy may discover, ordinary viewers are too empowered—and distracted—for old institutions to herd them towards films they don’t enjoy.

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