Monica Sandler is a film and media historian at Ball State University, currently completing her book manuscript, *The Oscar Industry, based on her doctoral research at UCLA with unprecedented access to the Academy’s internal archives. We’ll have her back when the book is published.The Oscars at 100 – Taste, Power, and the Future of Film

On Sunday night, the film industry will gather in Los Angeles for the 98th Academy Awards. It’s a moment of glamour, spectacle, and—if you dig beneath the surface—a fascinating window into how American culture defines artistic value, who gets to define it, and what that means for the rest of us.

In the latest episode of the Explaining History Podcast, I’m joined by Monica Sandler, film and media historian at Ball State University, to explore the Oscars as a cultural institution. Her forthcoming book, The Oscar Industry, draws on unprecedented access to the Academy’s internal archives to tell the story of how these awards became what they are.

Why Don’t Superhero Films Win Oscars?

It started with a question from my 11-year-old son: “Do superhero films win Oscars?” The answer—not really, not in the major categories—opens up a much larger conversation.

Monica explains: “There are not very many instances of superhero movies being successful at the Oscars. The really big and only example, at least in the major categories, is Black Panther, which was more of a cultural phenomenon that helped propel it into Best Picture consideration.”

The Dark Knight‘s failure to get a Best Picture nomination in 2008 was so controversial that the Academy overhauled its rules the following year, expanding the category from five to ten films. There’s a constant tension between rewarding movies that people actually watch and maintaining a certain standard of “artistic merit.”

But there’s also an economic dimension. Smaller films depend on Oscar success for profitability. A superhero movie doesn’t need a Best Picture win to make back its budget. An indie film bought at Sundance might need that validation—and the marketing boost it provides—to find an audience. As Monica puts it, “This is how you ensure those films become profitable, and frankly, that they continue to get made.”

The Founding Paradox

The Oscars began in 1929 as an industry awards show—a way for studio employees to celebrate each other’s work. But from the beginning, they served a dual purpose. The film industry in the 1920s faced a legitimacy crisis. A 1915 Supreme Court decision, the Mutual Decision, had declared that movies were “plain and simple” commerce, not art—and therefore not entitled to First Amendment protections.

The Academy was part of a deliberate attempt to reframe film as an art form. This included reaching out to universities to create film studies curricula, shaping how the medium would be understood by future generations. Will Hays, the first head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, gave a speech at the 1930 ceremony describing the awards as “an educator of public taste.”

Yet almost immediately, others challenged the Academy’s authority. The New York Film Critics Circle launched its own awards in 1936, explicitly positioning itself as better suited to make judgments about film quality than industry insiders. The discourse that still surrounds the Oscars—that they’re out of touch, that they get it wrong—has been there from the start.

Harvey Weinstein and the Industrialisation of Campaigning

No discussion of the modern Oscars can avoid Harvey Weinstein. As Monica explains, he didn’t invent awards campaigning, but he “took a structure that already existed and accelerated it up to 11.”

His campaigns for Miramax films in the 1990s—most notoriously Shakespeare in Love—involved tactics no one had thought to use before: whisper campaigns against competitors, negative ads, individual solicitation of voters by phone, screenings at retirement communities known to have high concentrations of Academy members. Each year, the Academy would add new rules to prohibit whatever Weinstein had done the previous year.

This matters because Weinstein’s dominance of the awards season created a structure where he was effectively untouchable. His power as a kingmaker meant that allegations against him were suppressed for years. The #MeToo movement, when it finally broke, was in part a reckoning with the system he had built—a system that had protected him because the industry needed him.

The Long Struggle with Race

The Oscars’ relationship with race has always been troubled. Monica points to the Production Code’s ban on “miscegenation” (interracial relationships on screen) as a structural barrier that relegated actors of colour to supporting roles. If you couldn’t be a love interest, your opportunities were fundamentally limited.

The first person of colour ever nominated for an Oscar was Merle Oberon in 1936, for her role in Dark Angel. Oberon was of Indian descent, but she presented herself to the public as British—she passed. As Monica notes, “The first person of colour who was ever nominated was an instance where she would not have been able to play the role she was playing if she had been open about her identity.” Under the Production Code, an interracial romance would have been impossible.

The #OscarsSoWhite movement in 2016 forced a reckoning. At that time, the Academy’s membership was 90% white, 75% male, with an average age of 65. The Academy committed to doubling diversity by 2020—and it met that goal. But as Monica notes, the Academy responded by becoming “more global” rather than fundamentally transforming Hollywood. The result has been more international films in contention—Parasite winning Best Picture in 2020 was unthinkable before these changes—but the deeper structures of the industry remain largely intact.

#MeToo and the Weinstein Legacy

The #MeToo movement is inseparable from the Oscars because Harvey Weinstein built the modern awards season. His fall from power—he was expelled from the Academy and is now in prison—marked a moment of reckoning. But Monica cautions against assuming that the industry has fundamentally changed.

She recalls her own experience working at the Sundance Film Festival: “I was told by an advisor, ‘If you see Harvey Weinstein, go in the other direction.’ It was unsaid, it was said, but unsaid. Everyone knew, but no one was willing to see it or say it.” The hope is that protections are now in place—intimacy coordinators, reporting mechanisms—but there are questions about whether these exist to protect workers or to shield productions from liability.

The Future of Film

We ended with the future—and it’s not a pretty picture. Monica describes an industry in “real disarray”: the pandemic, the strikes, the California fires, AI, streaming, media consolidation. The Writers Guild and Actors Guild are up for contract negotiations again this year, and the same battles over AI and job security will be fought again.

The concentration of media power is also concerning. The old antitrust rules that broke up the studio system in the 1940s are long gone, and we’re back to a world of media oligarchies—with the added twist that the new owners increasingly sit in the White House or visit it regularly.

Yet Monica also offers reasons for optimism. The economic model of the Oscars still works: last year’s Best Picture winner, Anora, was a small low-budget film bought at a festival that became profitable because of its awards success. And while broadcast ratings are declining, social media visibility is exploding. Michael B. Jordan’s emotional SAG Awards win a few weeks ago was seen by far more people on social media than watched the ceremony itself.

The infrastructure of awards—the recognition of creative labour, the ability to pick up work, the validation of craft—remains essential to how the industry functions. As long as that’s true, the Oscars will matter. Even if the way we watch them changes.

---

*Monica Sandler’s book, *The Oscar Industry, is based on her doctoral research at UCLA with unprecedented access to the Academy’s internal archives. We’ll have her back when it’s published.

Tune in to the Oscars this Sunday—and if you’re buying any film books, please support your local independent bookshop. Your local bookshop needs you; Amazon doesn’t.

---

Transcript

Welcome again to the Explaining History podcast, and I’m delighted today to be joined by Monica Sandler, film and media historian at Ball State University, currently working on a new manuscript for a book, The Oscar Industry, which is in process.

But perhaps more topically, we are approaching the Oscars on Sunday, the annual awards ceremony for the film industry. And it gives us an opportunity, I think, to talk about the Oscars and film in a broader way that helps us explore the kind of social tensions that we can examine through film and through how we reward film.

And I want to start with a question. My son is 11 years old and currently fixated with all things superhero. On our drive to school in the morning, he bombards me with endless questions on the subject. But he asked me, do superhero films win Oscars? And I thought, well, that’s a good question and probably not really. I mean, perhaps for the special effects or soundtracks. And I thought, actually, there’s something really interesting in that, in that there is a certain formation of film, a bit like the way we imagine literary fiction. There is a certain Oscar winning films have to have certain things in them. I know, for example, Lord of the Rings won Oscars, but that’s quite an outlier.

So the first question I wonder is what are the almost invisible criteria that make an Oscar worthy film?

Yeah, and certainly there are not very many instances of superhero movies being successful at the Oscars. The really big and only example, at least in the major categories, is Black Panther, which was more of a cultural phenomenon that I think helped propel it into Best Picture and other categories. They do, as you indicated, do well in the technical categories—special effects types categories—because they’re so heavily reliant on special effects.

So that is one of those constant debates over why doesn’t the Academy reward more movies that people actually watch? That comes up a lot almost on a yearly basis. We’re fortunate this year, Anora was a very financially successful movie. Last year, Wicked was a frontrunner—it got zero nominations, part two this year. So you kind of go back and forth between that.

But there is a tendency to overlook really mainstream movies and not see the merit in them historically. Then also notoriously, The Dark Knight did not get nominated for Best Picture when it came out in 2008, which had to—because they have such a problem—they overhauled their policy on the Best Picture category a year later and expanded it from five to ten films. They’ve done different variations of that because there is this view that mainstream cinema isn’t necessarily what’s going to be celebrated, or it doesn’t get seen as having artistic merit. And it’s paradoxical because the Academy needs people to watch the show. And if you reward films that people actually watch, they’re more likely to tune in.

I was going to say with this, there is the economic model that’s involved in this that I always think is important. When you have smaller films that are going out for awards consideration, they’re part of these really long and frankly expensive campaigns that they’re going through. But this is how you ensure that those films become profitable. So a superhero movie doesn’t necessarily need the Best Picture victory in order to be financially successful, but these smaller films—the ones that are pretentious or don’t have as large of audiences—this is how you ensure they’re financially profitable. And then also, frankly, that they continue to get made or bought at film festivals, depending on where they come from. So there is this sort of who’s being economically supported and what’s viable.

There’s a huge voluminous literature written when you’re exploring mass culture on the gatekeepers and the arbiters of taste almost. If you go all the way back to the birth of mass culture in the 19th and then its apogee in the 20th century, you find all sorts of people when you’re talking about mass publishing or later on television explaining to the common man what is good. And I know the Oscars began life as a sort of in-house industry backslapping, an inter-industry dialogue almost. But now do you have people who exist to give awards to discern what is good taste, what is the bit of mass culture that we think of as being high culture? Is that what’s happening here?

Yeah, that really takes me back to the founding of the Academy, actually, and what the Oscars were originally intended to do. They’re sort of twofold on that front. The first is, as you kind of indicated, this is an award show that is celebrating workers in an industry. So there is this workers’ award component where you’re singling out individuals who are studio employees at that time. There’s a small selection of studios and they are across different companies, but it’s a very select group of people in a very specific field, most of whom are in Los Angeles and a little bit in New York, basically.

But really what the Oscars become is they’re the first mass culture award show. There are little iterations before this, but taking the full force of what Hollywood and popular entertainment is really starts with the Oscars in 1929. And there’s this great speech where the awards are talked about. There’s this big problem in Hollywood where the film is being viewed as lowbrow at that point. It’s not labeled as an art form. This is a big problem also, particularly in relation to censorship, because there’s a decision in 1915 called the Mutual Decision, which labeled the film industry “plain and simple” and declared that the industry was not entitled to First Amendment protections. This is the beginning of Hollywood’s existence for most of the studio era until 1953.

But at the center of this is the launch of the Academy—it’s this direct attempt to redefine film as an art form. There are a number of other elements of that, actually. I am a professor in Film and Media Studies. Film and Media Studies is a byproduct of Hollywood directly reaching out to universities and trying to create curriculum to be like, “Hey, we’re important enough to be studied in universities. We should be seen as an art form.”

But one thing that immediately came into my mind when you were talking about arbiters of taste is this amazing speech that Will Hays, who is the head of the Production Code Office that is sort of regulating censorship in the industry, gives at the 1930 ceremony where he talks about the awards. He refers to them as “an educator of public taste.” They’re designed—the so-called best in the industry, which is what the Academy membership composed of—to sort of make annual declarations to the public about what good taste looks like in the industry and how great cinema is. There’s something very elitist about all of that, as though they are arbiters of taste.

And there’s a direct distinction in that and the rise of other awards, particularly the first kind of critics award, the New York Film Critics Circle Awards in 1936. When they announce, they literally are like, “We’re better suited to make statements about what good films look like than the Academy is, and they’re constantly wrong.” And that is sort of how the awards season starts—the Academy starts, and everyone’s like, “No, you’re just completely out of touch.” And that’s the tradition of the Oscars and the discourse.

And that kind of taste gatekeeping, that sort of elitism—wherever you look in this modern age in which we live of mass culture, there is a version of that. There are film critics, literary critics, TV critics. The birth of the restaurant critic was about massive numbers of people being able to afford to eat in restaurants and reading in newspapers what good eating is like. So mass culture and that arbiter, they go hand in hand, really. Audiences become more sophisticated every time. And I suppose things like now Rotten Tomatoes and the internet have democratised film criticism to such an extent that probably if you’re trying to put a bad film forward for an Academy Award, the audience has already decided.

But has the internet and things like that changed the Oscars?

I think it has. At first I was like, how does it work? And then there’s a very blatant example of that literally happening, which is the #OscarsSoWhite controversy in 2016, where after two years where there are no people of colour nominated in any of the acting categories, the Academy overhauled its membership because it was such a backlash and outcry, particularly coming directly from social media movements. So the entire basis of how the Academy has reorganised itself is directly coming from a reaction to the discourse online and to this exact democratisation of media that you were just talking about. And so that’s been really transformative.

That was 10 years ago exactly when they announced they were going to double diversity in their membership by 2020, which they did accomplish. Should be noted, at that time they were 90% white and they were about 75% male as well. And the average age was about 65. So there are multiple dimensions to why they were out of touch at that particular cultural moment. So that in and of itself—there’s perhaps been nothing that has impacted the Oscars more than that particular social media movement.

On that very topic about whiteness and the Oscars—throughout most of its existence, the Oscars has been, for want of a better word, a white institution. It has been a predominantly white celebration of white artists and white directors. There are notable exceptions like Hattie McDaniel and others, but does that reflect a broader institutional racismInstitutional Racism Full Description:A form of racism expressed in the practice of social and political institutions rather than by individuals. It refers to the way laws, policies, and unwritten rules produce racially inequitable outcomes, regardless of whether the individuals within those institutions hold racist beliefs. Institutional Racism shifts the focus from “prejudice” (an individual moral failing) to “power” (a structural reality). It explains how a school system, a criminal justice system, or a housing market can consistently disadvantage a specific racial group even without explicit discriminatory laws. Critical Perspective:This concept is crucial for understanding the post-Civil Rights era. It argues that removing “Whites Only” signs is insufficient if the underlying structures remain unchanged. It highlights that a system designed for inequality will continue to produce inequality on “autopilot,” requiring active anti-racist intervention rather than just “colour blindness.”
Read more that’s always existed within Hollywood?

Yeah, I think that it does. There’s a lot of exclusionary policies, particularly in classic Hollywood, that are directly codified into the industry. So it’s not just that it’s an exclusionary industry in terms of opportunity, but it’s also exclusionary in terms of content.

One thing that the Production Code did that is really significant and that directly affected content and opportunity for people of colour was that the Production Code barred miscegenation on screen. So you could not have interracial romances in film. But how many classic Hollywood movies don’t have a romance at the lead, basically? That essentially relegated minority groups to every type of supporting character because they couldn’t be a love interest if there was going to be an interracial relationship overall.

And the first person of colour ever nominated for an Oscar, her name was Merle Oberon, she was nominated in 1936 for her role in a film called Dark Angel. She’s of Indian descent. However, she presented herself to the public as being British. And basically, she was passing in Hollywood, so no one knew about her racial identity. So the first person of colour who was ever nominated was an instance where she would not have been able to play the role she was playing. It’s a movie about a love triangle. Under the Code, if she had actually been open about her identity, she wouldn’t have been able to play that role. I think she’s a really important figure that often gets lost in the conversations.

With the kind of—we can’t predict what’s going to happen on Sunday, but we now exist on the other side of the #OscarsSoWhite movement and we exist on the other side of the #MeToo moment as well. To what extent do you think that the Oscars and the broader film industry have actually changed in a meaningful way in response to these things? And to what extent has the film industry absorbed that moment and resisted it? It’s a big question, I know. But where do you think it stands?

In terms of #OscarsSoWhite, the answer I would say is it’s really complicated. I think we can see that there have been transformations to the opportunity, to the types of stories that we see regularly—Centers being a really good example of that this year. However, did the Academy drastically transform Hollywood? No. Do they have the power and influence to actually do something like that? Absolutely not. The main thing that they did do after #OscarsSoWhite was rather than looking for diversity in Hollywood, they became a more global organization. And that led to a film like Parasite winning Best Picture in 2020, which was unheard of at previous moments in history. But that is a different issue than what was being drawn attention to.

I think you brought up the #MeToo movement, which I’m really glad that you did, because the Oscars are so centrally connected to the #MeToo movement, yet they don’t necessarily get talked about in that context. Because really, the rise of the modern aggressive film campaigning around the ceremony all really comes back to Harvey Weinstein and the work of Miramax in the 1990s on films like—notoriously—Shakespeare in Love. But usually, and I’ve taught this in my classes, I literally put up a map of films that he was releasing, their awards campaigns, and sexual assault allegations and when they were occurring. And essentially what happened was he became the kingmaker in the industry. He built up the modern awards season campaign—these aggressive millions and millions of dollars campaigns that now define how films are successful.

That legacy—he, of course, has been barred from the Academy. He is in prison. But that built the economic model of how the modern season used to exist. And because he was a kingmaker, he was untouchable for years. And so many people who came forward with allegations rather faced career setbacks. And that is intertwined with the legacy of what the Oscars are. Ultimately, that was his thing. He was the awards guy.

He’s in some ways—this is not to go on a tangent, but he’s slightly analogous to Hollywood’s Trump almost. He sort of sees institutions that are relatively malleable and assaults them, you know, and people as well, obviously. But the Oscars, as this strange amalgam of originally an industry institution that becomes again this gatekeeper of good taste, becomes something that’s really sought after. Harvey Weinstein is able to—setting aside all his other vile crimes—bombard it with these sustained campaigns to influence outcomes. I’m guessing that hadn’t happened before. So there hadn’t been somebody like that before. Was he sort of the progenitor of that sort of influence campaign?

So he takes a structure that already existed and accelerates it up to 11, basically. So awards campaigning really starts in the 30s and 40s. The Academy puts in place what’s referred to as the Academy Awards ad code because people were doing blatant false advertising in the 40s about films that hadn’t won awards, that they were Oscar films and things like that. So the structures of using the awards in inappropriate ways for false advertising, that had already existed, and the idea of campaigning for an award existed. And what Weinstein did was just turn it up. He basically built these brutal campaigns, whisper campaigns, negative ad attack ads against other competitors.

Generally, if you go to the Academy website, there’s a list of rules for what you can and cannot do. A large portion of them was like “Weinstein did this last year and now we have to put a rule in place” because no one had ever thought to do that before. At one point he was individually soliciting voters by phone, his team, for at one point the Shakespeare in Love campaign being really significant, holding screenings at retirement communities that were known to have a large number of members. So this is the extreme degree that he’s directly targeting voters with why you should vote for his film specifically. And you can’t do that anymore—or you’re not supposed to, your film can get disqualified if you do things like that.

We all live in a sort of post-#MeToo moment. I don’t think the #MeToo moment is in any way over. I just think perhaps the media focus on it has dissipated. But there are still very famous and high profile people whose crimes and misdemeanours against women are being revealed. Not to go too broadly into how #MeToo has transformed societies across the world, but to focus on Hollywood: is there a sense that Hollywood and the American film industry exists in a kind of post-#MeToo era, that the horrible, awful things that are being revealed have led to fundamental changes so that life for women on set and all the way down to people working in the cafeteria is safer, or is it still really rather precarious? What’s your sense?

I mean, my sense is that it has gotten better to a certain extent. I think there are questions about people who had allegations against them—how has that affected individual careers? How it’s changed day to day, I don’t think there’s the same level of fear. However, I can speak to—I used to work in the industry. I don’t work in the industry anymore. And so I don’t know what it is like currently on the ground. I will say in my own experience when I worked my first Sundance Film Festival, I was told by an advisor, “If you see Harvey Weinstein, go in the other direction.” It was unsaid, it was said, but unsaid. And everyone knew, but no one was willing to see it or say it. I experienced that directly.

And I can’t speak to what it’s like on the ground now because I’m an old, fogey professor now who spends time in archives. So certainly the hope, at least, is that there are more protections that are in place. And there have been additions and things like intimacy coordinators to try and combat that, though there is some question about is that to protect the people who are in the scenes or is that to protect the production from legal liability?

Well, often two things can be true at once, I suppose.

In the era that we’re in now with streaming TV and declining cinema audiences, do you see the Oscars’ relevancy declining? I mean, will we be talking about the Oscars in 20 years time, or is this a hangover from the popular culture of the 20th century?

So it’s kind of two things that I think about in this. One is, what is the future of film as a medium? And the Oscars are intricately tied to that. And there’s the future of just prizes more broadly and what’s going to happen with that.

So one thing that can be really seen—Best Picture winner last year, Anora, basically was a small low budget film that was bought at a film festival, became financially successful because of its success at the awards. And so that really showcases that this is a system that still works and it allows for that opportunity for a film to find a market for it. So the economic model still stands, at least in terms of how the industry is working today.

There’s still declining theatrical and that’s kind of omnipresent. So there is the questionability about how relevant is film? And one thing I always say with the ceremony is that traditional television is on the decline. Broadcasting the ceremony is on the decline. Social media moments from award shows go very, very viral. So if we equate them very differently, like Michael B. Jordan winning at the SAG Awards a couple of weeks ago, that was incredibly visible. How many people were watching the SAG Awards? Not necessarily the same number of people that saw that particular moment, which was really powerful. And Viola Davis’s reaction, because she opened the envelope, was very emotional. It was wonderful. So there is sort of how do we translate our understanding of the cultural impact of awards, and I think they still exist.

The final thing in that conversation, though, is the role that awards are playing for honoring creative labor in the industry. The SAG Awards for the Screen Actors Guild, the Directors Guild Awards, the American Cinema Editors’ Eddie Awards—they’re given out to so many different sectors of the field. They’re rewarding a workforce. And the way individuals work in film production, they’re working as independent contractors job to job. And that form of recognition is very significant in terms of picking up work and, more importantly, picking up work for the rest of your team. So if you’re a cinematographer, it’s not just you, it’s a group of people who work for you. And that baseline is why the awards become so vital to the role of the industry.

And I think that’s the thing that’s always going to be present within the structures—what role they’re playing for those on the ground who are actually working in Hollywood. So as long as that’s going to be essential, which I think is just so fundamentally a part of how the industry works, there will continue to be—well, how do we profit off of them simultaneously coming from producers? Which is also the paradox of the workers’ awards: they’re singling out workers in the industry, but those who profit most off of it are the executives and the producers on the films because they’re using it to market and promote their films. That’s essentially how capitalism is structured. So that is true, but that is omnipresent in there.

And the thing—again, if we talk about those workers, obviously life is becoming increasingly precarious for many of them in the age of AI. And you’ve seen a periodic outburst of militancy amongst them with writers’ strikes and studio strikes and things like that. And you have the odd kind of A-list person—I think Margot Robbie took to the picket lines, which I hugely admired her for, and Mark Ruffalo. And then there’s a few people like that. But for the most part, those are real outliers. Is the future for film industry rank and file workers looking particularly bleak, do we think?

It’s not a great time to be working in the industry. I mean, this is something I talk to my students about when I teach media industry classes—it’s just incredibly competitive and it’s rapidly transforming at the moment. In addition, the industry since 2020 has had really extreme setbacks: first the pandemic, then the strikes, the fires in California as well, and then AI on top of everything else and attempting to make things as financially efficient as possible or the view that they can eliminate things. And that was at the center of the Writers and Actors Guild strikes in 2023. But they’re going up for contract negotiations again this year. And this is about how do we maintain job opportunities for people? So it’s a time of real disarray in the industry.

And one of the things that gets often lost in this discussion is, where are people watching content? And I know amongst my students, it’s on YouTube. They’re not necessarily watching Hollywood content. So there are direct competitors with this democratization of media that are just people who are creative at home, perhaps using their phones, using Zoom, things like that to make content.

And I guess if you are the head of a major Hollywood studio, there are probably not many easy answers to that other than possibly license your IP to YouTube and let people do what they want with it, and hopefully that’s the moneymaking model of the future. I think Matthew McConaughey has recently signed a deal with Eleven Labs to license his voice. And he said ominously that this is the last paycheck anyone’s going to get from movies. People in five years time will just be making blockbuster movies on their phones. Which maybe that happens. Maybe it doesn’t. I don’t know. And maybe that’s not in any way desirable. Is there just a sense at the moment that the future is completely unknown?

Yeah, it is really unstable. And you also have to bring in factors like the way the media conglomerates are merging, things like the Paramount merger, Warner Brothers being up for sale and now being bought by Paramount—and it was Netflix before. But there’s consolidation happening. And with that comes a lot of layoffs as well. So it’s a really turbulent time in the industry. And who knows if other media conglomerates may go for sale? There may be more consolidation. What does all of that mean, basically?

And with that, the thing that changes Hollywood was the antitrust law right at the very beginning that stops these vertical integrations from studio all the way down to theatre on the street. But we seem to have gone with these gigantic media conglomerates. We’re almost going full circle back to that moment of media oligarchies or almost. And the alarming thing, of course, is that the new owners of these vast conglomerates almost exclusively sit in the White House or visit the White House to see Donald Trump for his various propaganda wheezes. So it presents—again, this is a wholly different conversation—but that concentration of media power is a very troubling development.

And before we finish, I know it’s not completely written yet, but perhaps we could talk a bit about the book, about The Oscar Industry, and we’ll give it a pre-launch plug here. So tell us about the book, about the thesis behind it.

Yeah, so the book I’m adapting from my dissertation. When I did my doctorate at UCLA, during that time I wrote specifically about the Academy. I was given access to internal files that had previously been classified at the Academy and just looked at thousands of documents and internal records that allowed me to see not just what happened, but why it happened. So you have meeting notes where people get into a random argument and suddenly this is policy and it feels really arbitrary. And when you look at the meetings, it’s like, oh, it really was—the conversation just veered and now this is why they do the things that they do. And so that was what was really fascinating about it, but it helped to build up the project.

My way into it—I’ve been fascinated with the Oscars for really as long as I can remember. It was always just my thing, even as a kid. So if you asked me in high school, “You’re going to write a book someday,” I know I would have said it was going to be on the Academy Awards. So it’s just sort of compounded and built from there.

And a lot of it is that there’s very little writing in academic literature about the Academy Awards. There is a ton of non-academic writing—like so much—but very little in academic literature. So when I was thinking about going back for my PhD, I started looking at what existed and it wasn’t there. Wait, I can actually fill the hole about the Oscars. I get to do it. Oh, my gosh. So that was the baseline for it.

And it is surprising that that hole was there because if you look beyond the ceremony itself, and look even beyond when I walk past a movie poster and it says “Winner of seven Academy Awards,” you think, oh, probably go and watch that then. What it does is like getting a Michelin star for a restaurant. It shapes our conceptions of what is good and our conceptions of not just what is good, but how I relate to it is really, really fascinating. And therefore, what I choose to associate myself with, what I view as taste—it gets really deep into how we judge the cultural world around us. So there should be more academic works on the Oscars, not less.

I agree. I’ll say that much. What you’re going to get again—I immediately thought of Pierre Bourdieu talking about symbolic capital, which he refers to as a collective misrecognition. So we’ve created value around these things. And the way I’ve always kind of seen it is there’s something very silly about the entire act of these institutions and the glamour, the awards, the red carpet and all of it. And even the act of giving out these prizes. But there is so much very real infrastructure and impact that exists around them. And I really like that dichotomy of the events being kind of ridiculous and then exposing how those have really real impacts on the industry, on culture.

I’ll give you an example from my perspective of where that happened. I think it was in 2004, there’s a film and it’s so bad that I can’t even—you’ll know what I’m talking about. It’s the film that should have been called Racism is Bad. But we knew racism is bad. We’ve had that conversation throughout the 20th century and fought at least one world war over it. That’s been answered. And it’s an abysmally awful, terrible, hammy, lazy, stupid film in which in every scene we conclude that racism is still bad. And yet there was intense lobbying for it. And at the Oscars, the gist of that Oscar season was racism is still bad and we need to be reminded of this. Well, I suppose we kind of do. Generationally, perennially—this is quite the good fight, etc.

And I thought, OK, well, I’ll watch this because I agree racism is bad. And I watched the film and it was agony. It was such an awful film. And there’s some really great people in it as well, which is always the real shame. And I just thought, hold on. I’ve watched this. I’m sure I’ve watched this as a result of some intense lobbying effort and lost two hours of my life which I’ll never have back. But that lobbying effort reaches several thousand miles around the world to where I am here in Wales and convinces me to give up that time. So a personal example there, but it still does have that huge capacity to influence and shape taste and attitudes.

Yeah. And Crash here is notorious because it was up against Brokeback Mountain, which is an actually really good film. And it is focused on queer representation. And it’s just an all around powerful, actually good film. I teach an awards class and we’ll talk about absolute worst moments in Academy history. And I actually show a clip from Crash. I would never show all of Crash because the way you described it—never getting two hours of your life back.

I showed this scene where there’s this police officer who early in the film sexually assaults a woman while pulling over her husband. He pulls both of them out of the car and he actually assaults her. And then she’s in a car accident and the car is flipped over and she’s trapped in the car and he arrives at the location and he pulls her out from the car. At first she sees him and is horrified. And then he saves her. And there’s this swell of music that’s really emotional. And you watch it back and you’re just like, what is this movie saying right now?

Never judge a book by its cover, right? It’s being really, really emotional about it. This is rather offensive. And you get the gist of the film just from that scene. It’s despicable, absolutely despicable.

Well, we must finish, Monica. It’s been a genuine delight to talk to you today. And I would absolutely love it if when the book is ready, please do come back and we can talk about the Oscars and the film industry in general some more, because I think we barely scratched the surface today.

Tune in to the Oscars on Sunday night. And again, if you’re buying any Oscar related books—I’ll put a little list of some good ones below—do remember to buy them from your local retailer. Your local bookshop needs you. Amazon doesn’t. And the happier the world will be if we can keep those places going. Thanks so much, Monica. And look forward to speaking to you again about movies at some point in the future.

Yeah, absolutely.