Candy and Vegetables

Breaking down an irritating misconception about "Oscar" movies.

April 10, 2022

On March 27th, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah’s Twitter sent Film Twitter into a tizzy (which, admittedly, is frighteningly easy to do) with Noah’s hot take on the Oscar nominees. Here’s the video, and I’ve transcribed it below:

I always feel like that’s when it’s like, movie homework time for me. ‘Cause it’s never the movies I’ve watched. Do you know what I mean? Like, the nominations are always like, “And the nominations are, ‘Man in an Old Place,’ ‘Woman Doing a Thing a Long Time Ago’, ‘Black Person Suffering.’” And I’m like, I haven’t watched any. I should, I should. And then we all walk around, “Have you seen it?” “I’m going to. I’m going to. Of course I’m going to.” ‘Cause, like The Oscars, it’s never, like, shit that I’ve seen. They’re never like, “And the nominees are ‘Transformers.’” “Seen it.” “’Fast & Furious’” “Seen it!” “’Matrix.’” “Unfortunately seen it.” Do you know what I mean? Like, the Oscars always feel like they do it on purpose. It’s almost like they go to the box office, then they’re like, “What are the people watching?” Then they’re like, “These ones. What are they not watching? Alright, these are the ones we’re gonna…” It’s, like, a disconnect, you know? And I’m not saying the movies are not good. Please don’t get me wrong. I’m just saying there’s a disconnect, clearly, between, like, what we want to watch and what we should watch. It’s like these movies are the vegetables of movies. Very good for you, powerful for the soul. But when you’re high on some shit, you’re not craving these movies.

I’m not here to single out Noah as much as I’m fascinated by his perspective. It’s observational comedy, and yet his observation is detached from reality. It’s what his Daily Show predecessor Stephen Colbert dubbed “truthiness,” something that feels true. The Oscars, on the surface, seem like they’re work. That they’re the “vegetables” of cinema.

Objectively, this is false. The Academy has been pushing more popular movies into the Best Picture category ever since 2009. After receiving huge backlash for failing to nominate The Dark Knight for Best Picture in 2008 (and I agree that it deserved a nomination far more than The Reader), the Academy expanded the category—allowing films like Avatar, Inception, Toy Story 3, Silver Linings Playbook, Gravity, and others to be nominated. And even before then, the Best Picture category consistently included such hit films as Beauty and the Beast, The Fugitive, Forrest Gump, Babe, Titanic, and the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy.

But I’m not even perturbed by Noah’s brazenly wrong assessment of the Best Picture nominees as much as the belief—which I know is shared because Noah didn’t care about the reality as much as the sentiment—that anything outside of movies like Transformers or Fast & Furious films is “homework.”

Does the Best Picture category include some tougher films? Yes. My favorite film of 2021 was Best Picture nominee The Power of the Dog, and it’s not an easy movie! It’s about masculinity, loneliness, kindness, and cruelty.

But remember: the Best Picture winner this year was CODA! It’s an uplifting, feel-good dramedy about a high school senior who loves to sing but feels torn between her passion and supporting her deaf family. And it’s worth noting that in recent years the Academy has diversified its Best Picture winners with stranger selections like The Shape of Water, a movie where a mute woman has sex with a fish man, and Parasite, which is a scathing satire about capitalism, and the first foreign-language film to win Best Picture.

Where I take exception with Noah’s argument is that anything outside the broadest blockbusters must be hard work—even though the Academy, to its credit, has tried to nominate a solid representation of different genres for Best Picture. I’m sorry if Spider-Man: No Way Home didn’t make the cut, but it’s not like the Academy is anti-comic book movie. Don’t forget, we’ve seen Best Picture nominations for Joker and Black Panther. But there’s this bizarre notion that anything that’s not an expensive franchise movie must therefore be “vegetables,” and I reject the notion that the Oscars are out of touch because they failed to nominate enough candy.

The Oscars, by their very nature, will always be out of touch (the people who make movies for a living tend to be different than someone who watches 10-12 movies in an entire year), and that’s okay! I don’t understand this need to have an award reinforce what’s already proven to be popular. For the sake of argument, let’s say Spider-Man: No Way Home had been nominated for Best Picture. Let’s go one step further and say it then wins Best Picture. What does that do other than pat the audience on the head, as if the members of the Academy are obligated to sign off on the film that made the most money? There will always be viewers who are insecure about their taste, but I don’t think rewarding that insecurity with a trophy is what’s best for audiences or for movies in general.

I don’t like that we’re fracturing along this ridiculous line that there are “serious movies” and then there are “fun movies,” and never the twain shall meet. I know I’m an outlier as a viewer because I’ll watch anything, and most people have preferences. But I also think we need to start giving people more credit, and not say that any film that makes even the slightest demand of the audience is somehow a “vegetable.” When we start walling off art because it feels like work, we undercut its breadth and character, and we also diminish ourselves. I agree with Noah that not every movie is right for every mood. But we should at least be honest about what movies are before we start qualifying them as “work.”

An exhilarating musical like West Side Story or a sports fable like King Richard or a crowd pleaser like CODA only look like vegetables if we’re feeding exclusively on candy.