Peter Bart: Academy’s Decision To Trim Oscar Show And Promote “Fan Favorite” May Stir Voters, But Not Ratings

Gregory Peck was angry. As president of the Motion Picture Academy, the star announced he would veto the admission of a new voting member on grounds that he lacked professional qualifications. The Academy was becoming too populist in 1967, he argued. It must retain its elite status.

The individual he wanted to veto was me. In retrospect I wish his ban had been successful but it was soon overturned (details below).

I wonder how Peck, as a stickler for his profession, would respond to recent Academy decisions about its show, its awards and its membership. Witness the new campaign to create an #OscarFanFavorite — a popular film to be selected by Twitter and presented by an Oscar fan. In addition, eight of the 23 awards will be presented prior to the show, then edited for later use on a streamlined live Oscarcast.

With its ever-expanding list of 10,000-plus members, these moves would suggest to Peck a growing populist shift; also a certain paranoia over Oscar’s vanishing TV ratings, and its shrinking film audience overall.

Indeed, the 2022 Oscar season as a whole has been defined by an uneasy quiet. Those who have been around Hollywood for a while remember the spirited arguments annually waged over Best Picture favorites. Was Gandhi really more deserving than ET? Or Shakespeare in Love more than Saving Private Ryan? Was the noise of promotion overwhelming the quiet mission of cinema?

This year the drumbeat of a few elite critics combined with the omniscience of Netflix has lent momentum to one favorite: The Power of the Dog, which, according to Manohla Dargis of the New York Times, represents “A dazzling evisceration of one of the country’s fundamental myths.” Still, some observers like Jimmy Kimmel predict that Power of the Dog may be this year’s Mank, a Netflix film that “wins one nomination for every person who sees it.” Skeptics also point out that actual ticket buyers seem more energized by Channing Tatum’s new movie Dog than Jane Campion’s Dog.

Indeed, the praise heaped on Power of the Dog has re-ignited the pro-populist chorus denouncing the snub of a Spider-Man or James Bond contender. Some awards gurus had theorized that so-called audience films would again infiltrate the winners list thanks to the Academy’s vastly expanded membership.

In the Gregory Peck era, some semi-genre films like To Kill a Mockingbird or In the Heat of the Night seemed to satisfy the appetites of both ticket buyers and cineastes. In his zenith, Peck himself represented a unifying presence in the industry – a gifted actor who brought a dignity to his roles in contrast to the James Dean “angry rebel.”

Peck and I had never met prior to his opposition to my Oscar membership in 1967 – an obscure detail first reported to me by Michael Schulman, the New Yorker’s astute pop culture correspondent, who is writing an Oscar history. At that moment I was serving as West Coast correspondent for The New York Times, only to find myself recruited by Paramount Pictures to become production vice president under Robert Evans, the studio chief.

Paramount’s aim, I was told, was to assemble a program of movies that would potentially appeal both to ticket buyers and Academy voters. Four months into that assignment the Academy invited me to become a member. I resisted, pointing out that I had been serving as a journalist, not a filmmaker, but the Academy argued that I was already assembling some possibly important movies. Besides, they needed young members to balance a geriatric constituency.

For that reason, Peck finally dropped his veto and, in subsequent years, we seemed uniformly in accord on film preferences and policies. Peck made remarkable statements with films like Gentleman’s Agreement and On the Beach. Meanwhile, Paramount developed and released such movies as The Godfather and Chinatown. All of us were benefitting from the fact that cineplexes were opening, festivals were thriving and the machinery of film promotion was being reinvented to feed the broad new markets of cable and video.

I believe Peck, who passed in 2003, would be discomfited by the issues presently facing the Academy and by its proposed solutions. Indeed he would likely cast a veto on the #OscarFanFavorite. Or on the streamlined show.

Remember, he was smart enough to veto me.