 Editors Note: We thought you’d enjoy a preview of our just-launched Critics newsletter. Sign up to read the full version and to get future editions. “When the Planet’s a Dried-up Husk, I’ll Point to Your Review!”  Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photo by Niko Tavernise/Netflix Earlier this week, the day before the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced its nominations for the Oscars, Alison Willmore published a piece called “Don’t Get Mad at Me When ‘Don’t Look Up’ Wins Best Picture.” Her prediction had nothing to do with whether she actually liked Don’t Look Up, a celebrity seven-layer dip that’s also a climate-change parable. It had everything to do with Don’t Look Up checking the boxes that the Academy wants winners to check — like the fact that people have actually heard of it and it’s social-issues-minded, kinda. Also doesn’t hurt that it’s got famous people goofing on fame culture. In the world of Don’t Look Up, Alison writes, “Celebrities are … simply so compelling that they’re indirectly ruining the world, and how better to atone for that distracting fabulousness than by saluting the work that makes this claim with the biggest award Hollywood has to offer.”
I was convinced by this. It helps that I’m not a fan of the Oscars, which I find to be loose with the word “best.” (Two words: Green Book.. Okay, five more: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri..) The awards are pretty much a vote for who the industry wants to make more money. Beyond that, I’m not sure why we put stock in the Academy’s judgments at all, debating noms and snubs as if this were the final word in quality. As if it were all going down, forever, in God’s special movie book.
Alison thinks critics see themselves as “more principled in their opinions” than the Academy — but she allows that critics do play a role, occasionally voting on other, smaller awards that pave the way to Oscars. Sometimes, though, they’re just a convenient foe. “Part of my gut feeling about why Don’t Look Up is going to win Best Picture is because when the reviews were not effusive, you saw the filmmakers pushing back on Twitter like, ‘When the planet’s a dried-up husk, I’ll point to your review of this movie!’” she told me. (Did I mention it’s a climate-change parable?) Perhaps we all think we’re David, our haters Goliath. The truth is that critics’ opinions are less likely to ruin the Earth than they are to ruin careers, probably their own.
We were speaking a few days after Don’t Look Up had officially received its Best Picture nomination. I asked Alison if she thought the Oscars had anything to do with what was good. She was diplomatic. “I think the Oscars are an indicator of what Hollywood thinks is good.” No one at New York knows more about those indicators than Vulture’s Nate Jones. Nate writes the Oscar Futures column, scrutinizing the landscape of new releases for months in the run-up to predict which films are most likely to place, using a complex equation of historical wins and other “buzz.” This week, Nate turned his learnings into a ranking of plausible “Oscar villains” — by which he means movies whose awards success would make you go, “Ugh! What did they see in that?” His rather spicy list runs downhill from critic-good (Drive My Car) to Hollywood-good (Being the Ricardos). And it taps into the real reason why many follow awards: so they have something low-stakes to be pissed about. I asked Nate whether he thought Hollywood really needed the Oscars to survive. The whole thing seems so … arbitrary? Blinkered? Expensive? He replied no, not really. But he could see the value in them. “The Oscars are how Hollywood tells the story of itself,” he said. “It’s how it advertises itself to the country at large.” Ah, PR — now there’s something Hollywood does know how to do.
Anyway, Ruth Negga was robbed.
—Madeline Leung Coleman 
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