I do love the Oscars. As long as I can remember, I’ve watched them. The first ceremony I have any memory of was the one held in 1982, just days shy of my sixth birthday. I had only seen one of the films in contention, Raiders of the Lost Ark, of course, but all I really remember is the theme song from Chariots of Fire. We watched the show every year, whether we’d seen any of the movies or not (my mom would race home from work to catch the beginning (back when the show used to be on a Monday so that it wouldn’t compete with weekend theatrical movie business, remember when that was a thing that mattered?) and I’d have to fill her in on any awards she’d just missed (Supporting Actor or Actress, always). I remember ET inexplicably losing to Gandhi (though mom raved about Ben Kingsley’s performance). I remember The Right Stuff (a very popular film among the grown-ups I knew; though I’d seen it, it was too slow and boring for me at that point) being upset by Terms of Endearment and mom’s love of Out of Africa (big Redford fan) and Amadeus. I remember someone on television claiming that Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man was one of the best performances ever. I remember rooting for Dead Poets Society or Field of Dreams and being as baffled as anyone by Driving Miss Daisy‘s win.

1990, when I was 14, was the first time I saw all of the nominees for Best Picture. I can’t say if I saw them all before the ceremony, but I made the effort to see them as soon as possible (Goodfellas had to wait until HBO, for sure). I loved Dances with Wolves that year, and Silence of the Lambs the next (HBO again, I read the book too), though I was rooting for JFK. Unforgiven was my favorite in 1992, a movie I saw multiple times, once in a drive-in even, on a double bill with Terminator 2. Schindler’s List I saw three times in the theatre, I was convinced that, as I kept hearing, it was indeed the greatest movie ever made. The Oscars, as long as I could remember, were for big movies, important movies, great movies. And then, in 1994, the year I started college, Forrest Gump beat Pulp Fiction and the Academy Awards, or at least, my relation to them, have never been the same.

I’ve often referred to 1994 as Year Zero for cinephiles of my generation. Growing up in the hinterlands, a world of chain video stores and zero repertory film, our exposure to the films of the past, especially foreign and art films, was severely limited. Every video store had a foreign film section, of course, but those usually consisted of a few Kurosawa epics and a handful of Gerard Depardieu spectacles. The classic film sections were better stocked, but without a reliable guide, no one knew where to begin. The film sections of the local bookstores mostly consisted of Leonard Maltin and his imitators, and when I was in college my friends and I would spend hours pouring through his guides along with the Video Hound Golden Movie Retriever (which rated everything on a scale of “Woof” to “Four Bones”). So we had a passing familiarity with Hitchcock, Welles, Scorsese, and the Best Picture Oscar winners, but not much else. But then Quentin Tarantino came along, bursting with big city video store knowledge, urging, demanding that the kids like us who loved his movies seek out in turn the films he loved. (An example, in June 1995 Tarantino presented Jackie Chan with the Lifetime Achievement MTV Movie Award, which was accompanied by a greatest hits reel of Chan stunts. I had never seen a Hong Kong movie, I’d never heard of Jackie Chan. But that award led to a wide US release for Rumble in the Bronx, so wide it even played Spokane. I saw that and the few other Chans I could find on video (dubbed, badly, of course), and when I moved to Seattle, I dived headfirst into Hong Kong cinema, an obsession that has yet to subside.)  Reservoir Dogs, True Romance and Pulp Fiction (the first two I watched back to back one weekend afternoon, after my friends learned I’d never seen a Tarantino film; I had heard he’d won the Palme d’Or, but didn’t know he’d made any other movies) demanded we familiarize ourselves with their influences: film noir, Howard Hawks, Jean-Luc Godard (one of our favorite pass-times was driving around to all the video stores in town looking for a copy of Breathless. After years of searching, when finally found it for a $10 rental at a short-lived Jazz record store downtown). Movies with Christopher Walken and John Travolta and Harvey Keitel. We sought them all out, and each new discovery led to three more must-see films. Around the same time, Turner Classic Movies launched, opening a whole new front in the war on limited distribution. I’d always been a movie fan, going to the theatre was the one thing my mom, my sister and I ever did as a family, but 1994 was the year I became a cinephile, and Pulp Fiction was the spark.

And then it lost Best Picture to Forrest Gump. A fine movie, sure, one we’d all liked when it came out that summer. But it looked positively ⃞  next to Pulp Fiction. The divide was cultural, political, generational. That was their movie and this was ours, and we’d been robbed. The pattern continued, year after year: our favorites always just losing to something bigger, blander, more mainstream. I don’t know if that was new, I suspect it wasn’t, but it seemed like a new development. Like there really was a generational war at play in Hollywood, between the old guard of respectable spectacle and a new wave of independent, Alternative to use the word of the times, cinema. The consensus of the 1980s, where every couple of years it seemed everyone agreed that the Best Picture really was The Best, and would therefore reward it with a multi-Oscar sweep, were gone. But it would take a few years for this split to play itself out, the big sweeps would continue for the rest of the 90s, though the rhetoric around the Oscars and their wrongness would grow with each middlebrow choice.

Here are the Best Picture winners from 1980-1993, along with their total number of Oscars won:

1980: Ordinary People – 4
1981: Chariots of Fire – 4
1982: Ghandi – 8
1983: Terms of Endearment – 5
1984: Amadeus – 8
1985: Out of Africa – 7
1986: Platoon – 4
1987: The Last Emperor – 9
1988: Rain Man – 4
1989: Driving Miss Daisy – 4
1990: Dances with Wolves – 7
1991: Silence of the Lambs – 5
1992: Unforgiven – 4
1993: Schindler’s List – 7

That’s an average of 5.7 Oscars per winner, with 6 films out of 14 winning 7 or more awards. The average would actually go up over the next 10 years, with 4 big sweeps leading to 6.9 Oscars per winner:

1994: Forrest Gump – 6
1995: Braveheart – 5
1996: The English Patient – 9
1997: Titanic – 11
1998: Shakespeare in Love – 7
1999: American Beauty – 5
2000: Gladiator – 5
2001: A Beautiful Mind – 4
2002: Chicago – 6
2003: Return of the King – 11

But that was the last time there was any real consensus, and one could argue the Return of the King number is a fluke, driven by three years of wonder at Peter Jackson’s epic trilogy. The next 11 years show a striking break with tradition, with an average of only 4.3 Oscars per Best Picture winner:

2004: Million Dollar Baby – 4
2005: Crash – 3
2006: The Departed – 4
2007: No Country for Old Men – 4
2008: Slumdog Millionaire – 8
2009: The Hurt Locker – 6
2010: The King’s Speech – 4
2011: The Artist – 5
2012: Argo – 3
2013: 12 Years a Slave – 3
2014: Birdman – 4

There are any number of possible explanations for this trend, most probable simply being the increasing split between blockbuster “entertainment” films that dominate the technical categories while low-budget (in)dependent films, driven by strong acting, directing and writing, dominate the more prestigious awards, making a 7 Oscar win relatively rare (in order to reach that number, a film has to do well in either the effects or design categories, areas which favor big-budget spectacle). But is there in fact some more ideological, something like my (perceived) generational split at work?

Oscar season has increasingly come to be defined as a race, with the contenders and dark horses defined long before any of the films in question have been seen, and then adjusted up and down the odds tables throughout the fall festival season and into the end-of-the-year awards deluge, with critics’ groups routinely seen as mere precursors to the main events, and therefore their relevance defined by their relation to the established narrative (thus the cries of anguish from the awards bloggers when the National Society of Film Critics awarded Adieu au langage their Best Picture this past year: the Godard film wasn’t part of the defined race, and therefore the group was marginalizing themselves by choosing to acknowledge its existence, a decision that could only be made by obstinate refusal to play the game by the rules, or, in other words, snobbery). The Race is good for business: people like gossip and they like competition, awards commentary provides both in spades. Driven in no small part from the ad revenue from studio’s Oscar campaigns (the ubiquitous FYC ads you see on every major film site during voting season), there’s a vested interest in heightening the controversy, in making a compelling story out of a bunch of people getting together and voting on their favorite movies of the year.

The awards season is now a narrative-driven event, and the simplest narratives put two things in opposition to each other, thus most years, the Oscar race seems to come down to two films, and everyone is encouraged to align themselves with one camp or another. These are the years 1994-2003 of the Best Picture race, the years of heavy consensus, with the winner and the runner-up listed. Note that some years there wasn’t a clear runner-up, in which case I’ve picked the film that seemed like the #2 to me at the time. I could have been wrong. We’ll never know for sure as the Academy doesn’t release voting results.

Here we have chaos. The “edgy” film wins in 2004, 2006-09 and 2013-14, while the more traditionally appealing film wins in 2005 and 2010-12. Though the distinctions between camps are harder than ever to define. Take this past year for example. Boyhood was the consensus critics choice, which would lead one to assume it was the “artier” movie. But its style, aside from the unique method of production, is resolutely traditional, a coming of age story/family drama of the type that has broad mainstream appeal. Birdman, on the other hand, declares itself Edgy with an ostentatious pseudeo-single-take visual style, jarring tonal swings and a deeply cynical screenplay. It is most certainly a film descended from Pulp Fiction (though, I’d argue, one that learned all the wrong lessons from its forebears, but that’s not relevant here). If there is a generational war at play within the Academy, this is what one would expect the Oscar results to look like: pendulum swings back and forth, with neither side gaining enough momentum to push the consensus in one unified direction. Thus we have the significantly lower average totals of wins by Best Picture winners. Whether that represents an actual conflict or one manufactured by journalists pushing a story, I can’t say: the two feed off themselves in such a way that one can only expect further polarization and less consensus as time goes on, absent structural change of some kind.