Accordingly Asia, with 62% of the world’s population and home to India and China (the world’s top film markets with a combined sale of almost 3.6 billion tickets in 2017), rarely finds proportionate representation on a global stage. The nominees for this year’s Academy Awards carry forward the same trend while offering some surprises even within Western films.
At the same time, cinephiles and cineastes must ask questions of their own. No film remains well-made or good by the time the Oscar ceremony ends; as last year’s winner The Shape Of Water, cast aside by contrarians as ‘that fish-sex film’, can attest. How can one claim to love films while engaging in a process which seeks to make complex, collaborative pieces of art into vacuous props of cultural fights?
The clueless Academy Awards will seek to sweep these existential inquiries under the rug, hoping that a majority of the Americans who do tune in on 24 February like the winners while global audiences should just be grateful for the digital live stream and the fact that ‘their category’ will not be given away during a commercial break.
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