“Why Criticism” is a film criticism-themed Vague Visages column featuring various contributors.

As someone with no interest in sports, awards season is the closest thing I get to the thrill of watching teams battle it out for the big prize. I may roll my eyes at the very idea of a calendar moment when films are reduced to being mere competitors in a seemingly never-ending game, divorced from their individual artistic merits, but I can’t pretend I don’t secretly love the drama of it all. Very few films emerge from the season unscathed, as the culture is forced into a binary argument between whichever two forces are most dominant at the start. Sometimes, this is a debate on the two frontrunners (La La Land vs. Moonlight), while it also becomes a reductive argument about whether populist art has a seat at the table (the Joker vs. The Irishman debate between the superhero movies dominating contemporary Hollywood, and the auteur driven 70s era of New Hollywood). 

When treated as a pure sideshow — a silly season where studio campaign finances speak truth to any lie that this is solely about the merits of the films nominated — this much maligned time of the film calendar can be appreciated as the spectacle that it is. But recently, and with great frequency, the lines between criticism and awards season prognostication are becoming increasingly blurred in a manner that is proving increasingly harmful when it comes to writing about film. To be clear, I’m not talking about the number of awards bloggers having their say on the films in the race — every televised sporting event welcomes a number of pundits to give expert opinion at crucial moments in the game. Instead, I’m talking about the reactive ways that thoughtful pieces of criticism have instead been greeted as mere “backlash” designed to harm a film’s Oscar chances, rather than an attempt to analyse a film’s merits on its own terms, and not that of the Academy’s.

Why Criticism: Chasing Restorations, from Wong Kar-Wai to Wonder Woman

This was the undercurrent in the responses to Wilfred Chan’s excellent Vulture essay “What Nomadland Gets Wrong About Gig Labor.” The piece articulates the concerns many have about how Chloe Zhao’s film depicts what is arguably a Hollywoodised view of working for Amazon, the central character study of her film feeling sufficiently neutered when compared to those in the non-fiction book it is loosely adapted from. But with Nomadland viewed as an awards season darling, most recently picking up the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture — Drama, such an articulation of these widely shared concerns has been treated like an obstacle in a wider game, the most prominent piece of “backlash” the film has received on its way to the big prize. Chan briefly alludes to Nomadland being an “Oscar favourite,” but this is mere context, the sport of Oscar watching an irrelevance to his articulation of the film’s perceived flaws. The response with which the piece was greeted by many (i.e. the assumption that this was a mere “takedown” piece designed to hurt its Oscar chances) has wide-ranging ramifications, but few have been clearer than the suggestion that it is a near impossibility that thoughtful arts criticism can’t peacefully co-exist with the loud distractions of awards season.

Of course, this need to analyse art on its own terms does become difficult if a film is being released into a context where it’s only being discussed in terms of its awards prospects. As a critic, I will hold my hands up and profess guilt to having recently reviewed both Hillbilly Elegy and The Mauritanian with an eye on their positioning as prestige, would-be awards darlings. In cases like the former, in which a previous Best Director winner, Ron Howard, cast Hollywood’s most famous Oscar bridesmaids (Glenn Close and Amy Adams) in the two showiest roles, it is hard to separate the film from a more cynical intent, the anticipation surrounding its awards chances proving central to how it’s being discussed. The role of a critic isn’t to offer Oscar prognosis, but films created with the main artistic intent of getting some new gold statues for the mantelpiece do need to be called out as such. There’s a reason films like Nomadland or Promising Young Woman (to name another frontrunner accused of receiving a critical “backlash”) are being analysed outside of this most reductive of framings, while more uninteresting middlebrow works can only be assessed in the context of the race. For a critic, it’s often hard to ignore the sideshow when some films only appear to be made in the hope of being included in it.

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This leads to an equally important question: how invested should film critics be in the Oscar race? Although the tastes of film critics and predominantly western film industry professionals can often overlap, the annual outrage that comes with the reveal of each year’s Oscar “snubs” suggests that while critics may outwardly roll their eyes at the very nature of awards season, there will always be an inner desire to reform it. Just look at the enthusiasm afforded to this year’s BAFTA nominees, where many frontrunners were shut out in the main categories in favour of independent British films such as Rocks (which tied with Nomadland with seven nominations) and His House, as well as unexpected international nominees such as Quo Vadis, Aida? and Another Round. That the films initially pinned as the season’s biggest darlings had underperformed compared to smaller films with enthusiastic critical support was considered a major cause for celebration. Instead of reducing the assessment of art to the overarching competitive nature of the awards race, the fact that many under heralded films received nominations was considered the win in and of itself — and therefore, has the potential to open up the critical discourse surrounding these films to a wider, more engaged group of film writers, without the likelihood of criticism being reduced to “backlash.”

Part of the fun of awards season is, of course, watching narratives unfold with each ceremony, underdogs rising to the top and early frontrunners getting quickly sidelined. The boldness of the BAFTA nominations and how they deviate from preconceptions seems like a first step towards dismantling this entirely — a step towards creating a film culture where criticism and awards season can co-exist without one constantly negating the way we write about cinema. If other awards bodies follow BAFTA’s lead and install small expert juries to determine the nominees in each category, we may begin to see the end of a conventional race, which can only be a positive thing for films released at this point every year. Art is more than the sum of its awards chances, and without endless discourse on films receiving backlash if written about less than favourably, any film perceived as being “in the conversation” can finally receive thoughtful critical analysis without prompting a reductive argument as to how this affects its standing in the larger Oscar race. Many of us may miss the drama of awards season, but there are untold benefits to criticism if it continues to evolve away from its current state.

Alistair Ryder (@YesitsAlistair) has been writing about film and TV for nearly five years at Film Inquiry, Gay Essential and The Digital Fix. He’s also a member of GALECA (the Gay and Lesbian Entertainment Critics Association), and once interviewed Woody Harrelson, which he will probably tell you about extensively, whether you want to hear about it or not.