Why is an industry mired in remakes and sequels aghast that its
annual awards show came across as well past its sell-by date?
“The whole night looked like an AARP pep rally,” the
New York Times remarked of this year’s Academy Awards
broadcast. TMZ’s Harvey Levin dubbed the ceremony “stale.”
Television critics panned the movie critics for giving an atavistic
silent film the big award. They noted that Billy Crystal had
already hosted the show eight times, that 62 is the median age for
a member of the academy, and that the theater that hosted the
shindig is named for Kodak, a bankrupt film company left behind by
digital. John Anderson declared at CNN.com that “someone —
producer Brian Grazer, perhaps — should answer for why a show
celebrating an industry in so much trouble chose to cast itself as
something so profoundly passé.”
Don’t blame the industry awards show. Blame the industry.
The Oscars aren’t living in the past. They’re living in Tinseltown,
which lives in its past. It’s Hollywood, but even an awards show
can’t act as though throwback movies are cutting edge. Such a
performance would simply demand too much.
Hollywood is in its Sunset Blvd. years, living
off the fumes of its past. Consider the retread rubbish that ruled
the box office last year.
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part
1, the first installment of the fourth
Twilight book to hit the big screen, earned more at the
box office in 2011 than all but two films. Transformers: Dark
of the Moon, the third live-action film based on a toy that
had long since spun off a cartoon series, a comic book, and an
animated movie, placed second. Harry Potter and the Deathly
Hallows, Part 2, the latter half of the seventh installment of
the film franchise, earned the top spot by grossing $381 million in
the United States.
Do you sense the pattern here?
The top ten domestic receipts of 2011 belong exclusively
to remakes, sequels, and films based on ancient comic-book
characters. Reruns are supposed to be for television.
One has to go all the way down to the 13th spot to The
Help, a movie that everybody says they like but nobody really
likes, to find something new (and technically, it’s based on a 2009
book, so purists might contend that it’s not totally new).
For the first time in the history of motion pictures, the annual
cash leaders wholly excluded original movies.
There is a dearth of creativity in a town built on
creativity. Marketing rules. People lacking imagination decide what
films get green lighted and which films get red lighted. It’s
easier to sell the known but weak commodity than it is to sell the
unknown but strong commodity. There’s safety in numbers — as in
part 3, part 4, and part 6. But doing the “safe” thing isn’t always
safe. The best commercial arts are a risky business.
It’s tempting to judge a bestseller list frontloaded with
stagnant superheroes and silver-screen second helpings of mediocre
television shows as market validation of rerun cinema. But 2011’s
sequel-heavy Hollywood closed 4 percent down from 2010, which was
down 5 percent from the previous year. Fewer people went to the
movies in 2011 than in any year since 1995.
The industry points to a down economy, piracy, and
improvements to in-home theaters as handicaps. Those factors
certainly haven’t helped. But neither has the recycled content.
It’s easier to blame external factors beyond one’s control. It’s
more constructive to identify the internal impediments that can be
fixed.
Hollywood can make dinosaurs walk the earth again and host
visits from cute candy-eating extraterrestrials who befriend
children. But can they feed people stale and convince them that
it’s fresh?
That’s a problem with this year’s Academy Awards. More
importantly, that’s the problem with the movies that the academy
had to sift through. At least the Oscars didn’t honor the films
with statuettes that the public had honored with cash. Fast
Five, Mission: Impossible, Ghost Protocol, and
Captain America cleaned up at the box office but left the
Kodak Theater empty handed.
But it’s not as though the movie industry has learned its
lesson from a dismal few years, especially with rehash reaping
cash. March offerings include John Carter, 21 Jump
Street, The Lorax, and Wrath of the Titans,
a sequel to the remake of Clash of the Titans. We may not
have seen these movies before. But we’ve been there, done
that.
It’s lamer than you think.
