In August 2018, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced a new category would be premiering at the Oscars: Best Popular Film. After significant backlash from critics and filmmakers, the Academy renounced the award, but the anxiety remains of an antiquated institution and equally prehistoric awards show falling increasingly out of step with the medium and the creators it supposedly celebrates.
Year after year, the Academy Awards recognize the same narrow category of films — “Oscar bait” has practically become a genre in itself. Along with its limited scope, the Academy prefers to stack awards vertically rather than horizontally: In 2019 and 2020’s ceremonies, across 21 feature categories, 38 films were nominated each year. A handful of films earn 10 nominations every year, and in 2020, Joker got 11. This year, there are 41 features nominated across 20 categories, but a lack of formal and artistic diversity in the films represented prevails, as well as the consistency with which noms are heaped on some films (cough cough, Mank).
One of the oldest film awards shows in the world could do with a renovation, and the introduction of new categories would be a welcome change that allows for a greater variety of films to be recognized, perhaps along the way solving the Academy’s issues of racial representation and its narrow conception of what should get an Oscar.
Best Action Choreography and Performance by a Stunt Ensemble
The Screen Actors Guild and the Emmys already recognize stunt work in films and television, so a stunt ensemble Oscar isn’t too out of left field. Lumping in action choreography is optional but would guarantee action choreographers and stunt people get due recognition for their craft. These awards would be, in lieu of a Best Popular Film award, a rational way to celebrate higher-budget productions and feature underrepresented action and superhero fare at the awards. In the past three years, SAG’s stunt ensemble award went to Avengers: Endgame, Black Panther, and Wonder Woman.
Potential contenders: Birds of Prey, Extraction, The Old Guard.
Best Performance in a Voiceover or Motion Capture Role
Since Andy Serkis’ performance as Gollum in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy radically changed the role of motion capture characters in films and TV, the technology has been improving rapidly. We’ve been seeing more complicated, realistic CG characters, like Caesar from the Planet of the Apes trilogy, Thanos and Rocket from the Marvel films, and Alita from Alita: Battle Angel, to the point that fans have petitioned to get mo-cap performers, especially Serkis, awards recognition. (This is really the Andy Serkis Award.)
To prevent this from becoming a three-contender category, I’d also like to give credit to the voiceover actors who have long gone undervalued in light of their live-action counterparts. Many career voice actors express disappointment that high-budget animation regularly ignores them in favor of casting stars, so hopefully, this category could highlight the actors who do voiceover work for a living. Voice actors and mo-cap performers seldom appear on-screen, concealed behind animated characters.
Potential contenders: Cathy Ang in Over the Moon, Phylicia Rashad in Soul, Bruce Davis in The Vast of Night.
Best Debut Feature
Many award shows recognize debut films, and the Oscars could follow suit, awarding up-and-comers in their own category. In past years, A Star Is Born, Lady Bird, Get Out, and Lion were all debut fiction features that were nominated for the top prize. This year, Sound of Metal marks director Darius Marder’s first feature-length fiction film, and it’s nominated in six categories, including Best Picture. And on the documentary side, Daniel Lombroso’s White Noise and Lulu Wei’s There’s No Place Like This Place, Anyplace (neither of which is nominated for Best Documentary) represent strong debut works from 2020.
Potential candidates: Radha Blank for The Forty-Year-Old Version, Channing Godfrey Peoples for Miss Juneteenth, Darius Marder for The Sound of Metal.
Best Debut Performance
Designed to celebrate nonprofessional actors or young up-and-coming performers, a Best Debut Performance category would celebrate stars like Barkhad Abdi and Yalitza Aparicio, whose Oscar-nominated turns in Captain Phillips and Roma, respectively, were also their first film roles.
Potential candidates: Radha Blank for The Forty-Year-Old Version, Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn for Lovers Rock, Sheyi Cole for Alex Wheatle.
Best Documentary Screenplay
Documentaries aren’t found in the edit. Every documentarian collects their interviews, footage, and audio, and then composes a script, plugging in the pieces to create a narrative and forge a unique point of view. The Writers Guild of America rewards documentary screenwriting (one of the only organizations that does so), but it’s sort of becoming the Alex Gibney Award, as the WGA gives it to him practically every year he makes a film (which is most years).
Rather than the Best Documentary prize being the sole award for the form, having a second category allows recognition for the craft of documentary screenwriting and lets the Academy broaden the kind of documentary films that get recognition. Perhaps a side effect would be that the documentary crowd becomes a little more experimental and stylistically diverse.
Potential contenders: Werner Herzog for Fireball, Alex Gibney for Totally Under Control, Nels Bangerter, and Kirsten Johnson for Dick Johnson Is Dead.
Best Lighting Design
OK, this is a Tony Awards thing. I stole it. Literally, nobody does this award. I checked. Not even cinematography guilds award overall lighting design. The reason is probably that there’s no credited lighting designer on a film the way there is in the theater. With film, it’s amorphous. Lighting could be the work of the gaffers or the director or even the production designer, but more likely, it’s the cinematographer working in concert with these individuals. But a lighting category should still be distinct from the cinematography category.
I thought of Steven Soderbergh‘s Let Them All Talk, lavishly filmed and evocatively lit… but he didn’t do any lighting at all! It’s all done in-camera using lights that the cruise line already had in place. So that’d be a case where the cinematography is awarded rather than the lighting design. Ideally, this would be a home for more wild, inventive lighting in films that, sadly, otherwise don’t have an especially compelling shot design or camera placement.
Potential contenders: Color Out of Space, Possessor, Ema.
Best Casting
If you ask most directors what Academy Award category they want to see introduced, they’ll tell you Best Assistant Director or Best Script Supervisor. And while that’s incredibly cute, it’s virtually impossible to judge them without visiting the set personally. So besides them, the only role in a film’s opening credits without its own Oscars category is the casting director.
While I think it’s a little silly to award casting when the Oscars already award the director, the actors, and the picture, it’s the SGA’s highest honor. Casting would be especially challenging for a film like Nomadland, where local, nonprofessional actors are favored over stars, or for Ham on Rye, which aims for a very specific wrinkled-Americana in its performers, who, as an extra compilation, are all high-school age. The benefit of any Academy Awards category is it gets casual audiences to think more about the individual parts that together make up a film, and casting, particularly regarding newcomers, bit roles, and ensembles, is something that deserves more praise.
Potential contenders: Da 5 Bloods, Ham on Rye, Nomadland.
What categories would you love to see the Academy introduce? Comment below and let us know.
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