Oscar Bait: Exploring Links Between an Academy Awards Institutional Persona and Perceptions of Oscar-Worthiness

Abstract

The Academy Awards – or ‘the Oscars’ – and their large-scale television production have historically occupied a unique position as a taste-making apparatus and gatekeeper of prestige stardom. In evaluating ‘the best’ of the (American-centric) filmmaking field, they wield cultural influence over such cinema practices as consumption and evaluation, filmmaking aesthetics and narratives, and the discursive activity of Hollywood’s industrial agents and engaged audiences. This research recontextualises the Oscars’ complex legacy into a new media ecosystem, one in which their established value is undercut by declining broadcast viewership, the changing values and demands of a global film culture, and influential discourses aiming to progress popular culture beyond its problematic histories. In this new paradigm of film production and consumption, I ask what the Oscars mean in a contemporary filmmaking landscape, and the value or influence that established stereotypes of Oscar-worthiness – the colloquial ‘Oscar Bait’ – continue to hold over the awards. I first argue for the Oscars’ position of power within filmmaking production cycles. Using a Bourdieusian framework of ‘taste-making’ and ‘capital’, the Oscars are identified as a site upon which industrial agents negotiate the demands of the cultural terrain. Beyond a theoretical setting, however, the Oscars also occupy the position of an agent – itself vying for prestigious attention in a tumultuous media landscape. As such, I also conceptualise ‘Oscar’ as a mediated industrial persona. To investigate Oscar’s contemporary meaning and its position as a persona, I conducted a textual analysis on a three-year sample (2019-2021) of cultural texts that, combined, contribute to the Oscar persona. This included the televised awards ceremony of each year and their associated paratexts, the core film texts of each year’s competition, and the broader discursive activities of film awards culture. From this methodology I extracted three key thematic contests that courted significant attention, thus speaking to a perceived ‘meaning’ of what the Oscars are for. Firstly, representation within filmmaking endures as an unsettled concept, whereby Oscar constantly must reassess its own values of inclusivity, diversity, and merit. Secondly, Oscar serves as a vital organ of Hollywood’s celebrity mythmaking, whereby individual celebrity narratives are enacted and negotiated for the sake of symbolic capital. Finally, Oscar continues to assert particular ideals, aesthetics, morals, and individuals as the best of the filmmaking field, simultaneously recreating and drawing from such power to present itself as a quality television product. Through these analytical threads, my research impacts current conceptions of cultural prestige and mythmaking within film, interpreting the Oscars as a mediated phenomenon for its power implications and as an institutional persona navigating the demands of its public.