"The Academy doesn't like to split the Best Director and Best Film Oscar." Ive heard this again and again over recent weeks, as bloggers argue the case for and against an Avatar/Hurt Locker split this year. But guess what? It's increasingly the norm. It happened only once during the sixties (In The Heat of the Night, Mike Nichols, 1967), once during the seventies
(The Godfather, Bob Fosse
, 1972),
twice in the eighties, first in 1981 (Chariots of Fire, Warren Beatty)
and again in 1989 (Driving Miss Daisy, Oliver Stone). It happened only once in the nineties (Shakespeare in Love, Steven Spielberg, 1999). But then you get to the 2000s, and we get three in a row, like buses:—
— 2000 BEST FILM: Gladiator
BEST DIRECTOR: Steven Soderbergh (Traffic)
— 2002 BEST FILM: Chicago
BEST DIRECTOR: Roman Polanski (The Pianist)
— 2005 BEST FILM: Crash
BEST DIRECTOR: Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain)
And it could happen again this year, making it four.What's happened to the good old-fashioned Oscar Sweep? It's all down to the high metabolism of the Blockbuster economy. Ever since Jaws and Star Wars arrived on the scene, two sorts of films have done very well: extremely large budget movies and extremely low-budget movies. As Spielberg said in 1997,
"It is getting to 
the point where only two kinds of movies are being made, the tentpole summer or the Christmas hits or the sequels, and the audacious Gramercy, Fine Line or Miramax films. Its kinda like India where there's an upper class and a poverty class and no middle class. Right now we are squeezing the middle class out of Hollywood and only allowing the 70 million plus films or the 10 million minus films."
It is precisely this middle-class that provides the Academy with Oscar winners — middle-brow, mid-range, consensus-winning "prestige" pics aimed at the over 30s like Driving Miss Daisy and Amadeus. Of the nominees this year, only the Blind Side and Invictus resemble anything like the kind of Oscar winners your mother used to make and they are both undernourished pieces of work — the product of noncompetitive markets, relics of a dying genre. Instead the stage is dominated by The Hurt Locker and Avatar, a blockbuster and a low-budget indie, the sun and moon around which Hollywood now revolves. Both has what the other one lacks: realism in the case of The Hurt Locker, profits in the case of Avatar. Combine the two and you have an Oscar winner of old. So the Academy must split the vote, as is increasingly the norm. The number of Best Pic Winners which generate Best Actor and Actress Oscars is also going down: they numbered six in the seventies (
Patton, The French Connection, The Godfather, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Annie Hall, Kramer vs. Kramer), went down to five in eighties (
Terms of Endearment, Ghandi, Amadeus, Rain Man, Driving Miss Daisy), down to four in the nineties (
Silence of the Lambs, Forrest Gump, Shakespeare in Love,
American Beauty), while in the 2000s only two Best Pic winners also generated lead actor
awards (
Gladiator, Million Dollar Baby). Best Picture winners are not only becoming untethered from directors, they are becoming increasingly independent of actors, too, while the last film to get all
top five Oscars (film, director, actor, actress, script) was
The Silence of the Lambs in 1991. It raises the question: is the golden age of Oscar over? And if so, is that such a bad thing? The Oscars had a hey-day, I believe, back the seventies and early eighties, when the Academy really hits its stride, lending its weight to such films as The Godfather, French Connection, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Next Annie Hall — big consensus hits, beloved of both critics and public alike which came out of the awards process both enriched and enriching. Everyone looked good. The films looked better with their gold statuettes and the Academy looked authoritative and discerning. But in the early eighties a gulf began to open up between critics and public that came to a head with the infamous show-down between Ghandi and ET in 1982. The Academy went with the British 'prestige' pick, scared off by E.T.'s box office and the fact that it was about a fictional hobgoblin preaching planetary peace (as opposed to the historical sort). It's possible to look at the 'white-linen' period of Oscar winners, from Chariots of Fire to the Last Emperor, as a reaction against the blockbusters that were seating up profits so disgracefully at the box office — snob cinema to counter balance the effects of Mammon. Hollywood wanted reassurance that it wasn't solely in the blockbuster business, but still made great art. The first blockbuster they took seriously was
Forrest Gump in 1993, which paved the way for a new kind of Best Film Winner: big special effects spectacles like Titanic and Lord of the Rings that could, from a certain angle, be viewed in the same light as Gone With the Wind. Here was the difference: they didn't get the acting awards. They typified a new kind of Oscar sweep, which cleaned up in the technical departments instead. The last decade has seen the Academy pulled in two wholly different directions, as the balancing act of profit and prestige has proven harder and harder to square. Do they go with The Departed and No Country For Old Men, critically-lauded but violently nihilistic pics, hardly Ghandi, or do they follow the money, and get into bed with Avatar only to wake up feeling cheap the next morning? All this makes for a queasy spectator sport, a little like watching Wile E. Coyote do the splits across an ever-widening canyon, but let's not mistake it for the confidence with which Hollywood once bestowed its honors.
"The Academy doesn't like to split the Best Director and Best Film Oscar." Ive heard this again and again over recent weeks, as bloggers argue the case for and against an Avatar/Hurt Locker split this year. But guess what? It's increasingly the norm. It happened only once during the sixties (In The Heat of the Night, Mike Nichols, 1967), once during the seventies (The Godfather, Bob Fosse, 1972), twice in the eighties, first in 1981 (Chariots of Fire, Warren Beatty) and again in 1989 (Driving Miss Daisy, Oliver Stone). It happened only once in the nineties (Shakespeare in Love, Steven Spielberg, 1999). But then you get to the 2000s, and we get three in a row, like buses:—
awards (Gladiator, Million Dollar Baby). Best Picture winners are not only becoming untethered from directors, they are becoming increasingly independent of actors, too, while the last film to get all top five Oscars (film, director, actor, actress, script) was The Silence of the Lambs in 1991. It raises the question: is the golden age of Oscar over? And if so, is that such a bad thing? The Oscars had a hey-day, I believe, back the seventies and early eighties, when the Academy really hits its stride, lending its weight to such films as The Godfather, French Connection, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Next Annie Hall — big consensus hits, beloved of both critics and public alike which came out of the awards process both enriched and enriching. Everyone looked good. The films looked better with their gold statuettes and the Academy looked authoritative and discerning. But in the early eighties a gulf began to open up between critics and public that came to a head with the infamous show-down between Ghandi and ET in 1982. The Academy went with the British 'prestige' pick, scared off by E.T.'s box office and the fact that it was about a fictional hobgoblin preaching planetary peace (as opposed to the historical sort). It's possible to look at the 'white-linen' period of Oscar winners, from Chariots of Fire to the Last Emperor, as a reaction against the blockbusters that were seating up profits so disgracefully at the box office — snob cinema to counter balance the effects of Mammon. Hollywood wanted reassurance that it wasn't solely in the blockbuster business, but still made great art. The first blockbuster they took seriously was 
Forrest Gump in 1993, which paved the way for a new kind of Best Film Winner: big special effects spectacles like Titanic and Lord of the Rings that could, from a certain angle, be viewed in the same light as Gone With the Wind. Here was the difference: they didn't get the acting awards. They typified a new kind of Oscar sweep, which cleaned up in the technical departments instead. The last decade has seen the Academy pulled in two wholly different directions, as the balancing act of profit and prestige has proven harder and harder to square. Do they go with The Departed and No Country For Old Men, critically-lauded but violently nihilistic pics, hardly Ghandi, or do they follow the money, and get into bed with Avatar only to wake up feeling cheap the next morning? All this makes for a queasy spectator sport, a little like watching Wile E. Coyote do the splits across an ever-widening canyon, but let's not mistake it for the confidence with which Hollywood once bestowed its honors.
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