There are 6?404 of them, mostly living in the Los Angeles area, with further pockets in northern California, New York and London.
They are, by a small majority, male. Their average age is about 57. Rupert Murdoch is one, as are Pedro Almodovar and Sasha Baron Cohen. George Lucas, Woody Allen and Dwayne ‘The Rock” Johnson are not. And last week they announced to an audience of more than 30-million people the results of a secret ballot that will determine the course of careers, cause corporate stock prices to rocket and induce howls of outrage in office pools and viewing parties around the world.
‘They”, of course, are the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Ampas), the group of entertainment industry professionals responsible for handing out the Oscars every year. The academy’s headquarters are housed in an impassive, mirrored-glass structure on Wilshire Boulevard, suggestive of the fact that Ampas does not like to reveal much about its inner workings.
Membership is by invitation only, requiring sponsorship by two existing members and the approval of a board of governors; but once in, you’re in for life, a fact that has been used by the organisation’s critics to conjure up an image of doddering retirees, too entangled in their oxygen tanks to fill out their ballots. When Henry Fonda and James Garner admitted their wives filled out their ballots for them, there was uproar.
Then there is the case of Dolores Hart, the actress who smooched with Elvis Presley in 1957’s Loving You, only to retire from showbusiness altogether and become a Roman Catholic nun at the Benedictine abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut. Now 72, Mother Dolores still retains her academy membership and every year receives copies of the latest Oscar-nominated films from Ampas, thus making her the only fully ordained nun to adjudicate on the oeuvre of Quentin Tarantino.
‘She’s still voting, as far as I know,” says Ann Thompson, a columnist with the Indiewire website, who recently attended the governor’s ball thrown by the academy in honour of Jean-Luc Godard. ‘One of the things I noticed is there’s a huge bubble of baby-boomers at the academy. They’re all very knowledgeable. They’re very liberal.
They’re over 50 for the most part, but it’s a fairly hip demo[graphic]. It’s that group of people who grew up in the 1970s and were shaped by a filmmaker like Godard. They voted for Silence of the Lambs for best picture, they voted for Traffic, for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. But it’s not a monolithic body. You can almost track the fate of any one film by tracking its course through the different branches.”
The academy comprises 15 branches, of which the biggest and most powerful voting bloc is the actors, with 1?205 members, 22% of the total; they are the ones who ensured a win for The Hurt Locker last year, after they remained unconvinced the blue people in Avatar were delivering real performances. They are closely followed by the producers (452 members) and executives (437) who, with the publicists (368), says Thompson, tend ‘a little more to the mainstream, for movies such as The Green Mile, The Cider House Rules, Chocolat. They’re the group Harvey Weinstein knows how to play to.”
Finally you have the various craft guilds — sound, effects, sets, costumes and so on — who tend to get more male and red-blooded the further down the credits you go. Thompson calls them the ‘steak-eaters”: the set-builders and property-masters who are attracted to ‘large-scale solid narratives such as Braveheart and Saving Private Ryan, The Town, True Grit. Even Inception plays to the steak-eaters. It’s a big group. It probably describes most of the academy.”
It’s this group that bailed on Ang Lee’s gay cowboy drama Brokeback Mountain in 2006, thus ensuring a win for Crash — one of the biggest upsets in Oscar history — and this year helped keep the nominations for Lisa Cholodenko’s same-sex marriage drama, The Kids Are All Right, down to a minimum.
‘The steak-eaters are the reason Annette Bening keeps losing,” says Jeffrey Wells, who runs the Hollywood Elsewhere website. ‘Call it the steak-eater vote, call it the old-geezer vote, call it the babe vote. They always vote for the babes.”
More recently, though, Wells has detected signs of a fresher breeze sweeping through the academy’s ranks. ‘For most of the history of the academy, going back to 1927, the film that wins best picture tends to be the one that makes you cry, that gets you where you live. It says something that’s true and recognisable about the state of our lives that gets you on an emotional level.
But [Ampas president] Tom Sherak has been aggressively bringing in newer members and over the past few years the emotional gut-punch movies have not been winning. Except when Brokeback Mountain lost: that was the last surge, the last stand of what I call the ‘geezer vote’. That was basically the people like Tony Curtis, the 70-plus crowd who couldn’t abide the idea of two sheep-herders getting it on. That was the last time.”
Certainly in recent years the best-picture winners have bucked the profile of your typical Oscar winner; the Coen brothers’ nihilistic western No Country for Old Men, Martin Scorsese’s blood-spattered thriller The Departed, Kathryn Bigelow’s adrenalised Iraq war drama The Hurt Locker.
They were far from the costumed message movies the academy has traditionally gone for. It’s also true the academy has streamlined the membership process for younger actors, waiving their traditional three screen-credits qualification to allow Dakota Fanning to join, for example, in 2006. They have also started trumpeting their newest additions to the press every year, among them Michelle Williams, Tyler Perry, James Franco, Michael Cera, Emily Blunt, Anne Hathaway and Seth Rogen.
‘It’s changing, definitely,” says Guy Lodge, a commentator at the Oscar website In Contention. ‘Just look at this year’s nominations. Jesse Eisenberg was nominated, Robert Duvall was not. That’s a sign.” At the same time, however, Ampas has been actively trying to keep its membership at about the 6?000 mark, after a spike in membership in 2003, which means that the sole cause of new memberships is the death of existing members and the fastest way to get to the top of the invitation list is to get nominated.
‘The academy tends to change as they age out,” Thompson says. ‘Jon Landau, who produced Titanic, didn’t get in until after Avatar was in contention. This is the guy who produced Titanic. It really is tough to get in, I’m telling you.”
The alleged hipness of the academy’s choices in recent years may be a trick of the light. For one thing, Hollywood’s changing economics have caused a dearth of decent Oscar bait. As Steven Spielberg noted in 1997: ‘It’s getting to the point where only two kinds of movies are being made. It’s kinda like India, where there’s an upper class and a poverty class and no middle class. Right now, we are squeezing the middle class out of Hollywood and only allowing the $70-million-plus films or the $10-million-minus films.”
That middle class was precisely the patch in which Hollywood used to grow its prize marrows — its Driving Miss Daisies and Dances with Wolves. The kind of middlebrow period entertainments with a liberal social message, aimed at an adult audience, that used to win Oscars are now almost a defunct genre. — Guardian News & Media 2011