The power of guilting people into watching movies

When the Academy announced that, starting next year, Oscar voters will actually have to watch all the movies in a category before making their final-round picks, there was a lot of surprise in my social media world that this wasn't already a rule. Who would vote without seeing everything? How could your vote have any integrity if you didn't?

Unfortunately, much Oscar voting has little-to-no integrity, as the embarrassing "honest Oscar ballot" anonymous interviews with voters have demonstrated in recent years. In March 2023, an anonymous producer explained his vote for best actress in part by saying, "Cate Blanchett [of Tár] and Michelle Williams [of The Fabelmans] were good but a little irritating." His other comment on Williams was that she reminded him of his mother. So if you're looking for people to be focused on art rather than vibes, you're already destined to be disappointed.

Furthermore, the biggest hurdle for lower-profile movies is going to continue to be getting a nomination in the first place. Sure, voters might see them if they make it all the way to final voting, but it will always remain true that nobody sees everything, and that will always, always put an asterisk at the end of something like "best picture." The field begins to narrow not only before nominations, but before anybody sees the movies. Variety put out sight-unseen guesses about next year's Oscars in March, a year before the ceremony and long before most movies will be out. They add lots of caveats saying it's all in fun, but still: Oscar votes are never, never made on a blank slate.

The other problem, of course, is enforceability. According to the Academy, they will be tracking what voters watch in the digital screening room, and then there will be a form to fill out about films seen in theaters, festivals, or private screenings. So it's essentially the honor system. How likely it is that people will feel bound by an honor system if they don't vote for actresses they find "irritating" remains to be seen.

But! With all that said, this rule is best understood as an aspirational statement, and as an aspirational statement, it's hard to argue with. People who get an Oscar nomination should be able to expect that they will have a real chance to compete. Voting for the Oscars should mean enough that people are willing to spend some time seeing the work that is, after all, already being named as some of the best of the year. What would it mean if people in the movie industry didn't want to spend their time ... watching movies?

This isn't going to fix all the woes of the process, to say the least. Even if followed, this rule would not prevent the Oscars from being ridiculous, as they often are, or Oscar wins from aging badly, as they often do. But there is something to be said for at least forcing people to explicitly lie if they're going to refuse to watch everything. Perhaps the next anonymous Oscar voter will say, "I didn't watch all the documentaries, even though I signed something that says I did," and it will lay bare some tomfoolery that people end up suspecting anyway, based on the results.

It's not a sea change, but it's something. There exists, probably, some slice of the voting pool that will either (1) look at this rule and decide not to vote in categories in which they don't see everything; or (2) take advantage of the opportunities to watch things that they wouldn't otherwise watch, because the nudge is enough. It thus seems likely to be an incremental improvement in fairness for lower-profile films and categories, and if it is, it's worth doing. After all, you can't call yourself "brutally honest" if you're lying to the Academy.