The Oscars to Movie Audiences: We're Doomed

A look back at how Birdman, Jack Black, and Hollywood lambasted Hollywood at last night's ceremony.

At this year's Oscars, Hollywood let 34.6 million viewers know how much it hates itself.

The 2015 Academy Awards opened with a musical tribute to history's magical qualities. Neil Patrick Harris, Anna Kendrick, and a fleet of dancing holograms tipped their hats to cinema in Broadway style, throwing back to blockbusters new and old. The Wizard of Oz, Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest, Field of Dreams, and The Avengers were all part of the showstopper. It was a masturbatory congratulations to and from Hollywood studios, but a snappy one with Harris in the spotlight.

Halfway through the number, comedian Jack Black doused the idyllic tribute with a bucket of 21st-century reality. While the Yellow Brick Road manifested itself behind Harris, Black's lyrics painted a future as dark as the Wicked Witch of the West. But as a goof! As he put in song:

This is what you sound like: "Movies, movies, wow they rock!"
Well, once they did, but listen kids, it's all a big crock.
Now it's market trends, fickle friends, and Hollywood baloney
Believe me, Neil, you're better off just polishing your Tony.

This industry's in flux. It's run by mucky-mucks.
Pitchin' tents for tent poles and chasin' Chinese bucks.
Opening with lots of zeroes
All we get are superheroes.

Superman, Spider-man, Batman, Jediman, Sequelman, Prequelman — formulaic scripts!
And after Fifty Shades of Grey, they'll all have leather whips!
In a world where our brains are becoming machines
The only screens we're watching are the screens in our jeans!"

Ha! Get it? Today's Hollywood is a product assembly line that would do Henry Ford proud! It's an industry living under foreign thumbs, catering with computer graphic carnage, eye-exploding 3-D, and Transformers knock-offs! Soon, humans will serve iDevice overlords, skipping the theaters and plugging straight into the 18th Iron Man sequel via USB! Get pumped for the inevitable future!!!

Solid joke.

This year's winners countered the industry's toxic cynicism with cries for social awareness. Boyhood's Patricia Arquette demanded action for women; Common and John Legend moved audiences with a performance of their Selma song "Glory" and second time with a racially aware acceptance speech; Imitation Game writer Graham Moore related to Alan Turing, citing his own failed suicide attempt as a segue to his real message: "Stay weird." Hollywood's mega-franchise servitude has nothing on the plights of the world. Stars made good on exposing real issues.

Unfortunately, the Oscars are only one night. An acceptance speech makes a five-minute impact, maybe surfacing on YouTube the next day for one more breath of air. Movies, on the other hand, prevail. It's what Harris's "Moving Pictures" number tried to remind us. A movie isn't just a movie. They crystalize ideas  and maintain a temporal moment. They all say something, harrowing or sweet. "Best Picture" winners are even more important. They carry on the legacy each time we catch them on DVD or on cable. They continue to reckon with themes like family (The Godfather), war (The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Deer Hunter), race (In the Heat of the Night, 12 Years a Slave), evil (No Country for Old Men), hope (Schinder's List), romance (Annie Hall), and stair-climbin' human spirit (Rocky). Films influence and shape us—and most of us are watching big Hollywood movies. The movies we parade through the Oscars become more vital than the socially conscious quotes uttered by the stars that fill them.

Which makes this year's pick a downer. On top of Black's "Requiem for Quality Movies," Birdman's Best Picture win was Academy voters throwing in the towel. Truth: The film is deserving. In director Alejandro G. Iñárritu's hands, the existential comedy is as thrilling as Gravity, Michael Keaton's downward spiral accelerated by bright colors, soaring camera moves, and an all-improvised drum score. It's a great time at the movies—a harmonious death knell for Iñárritu's industry of choice.

Iñárritu is not a fan of Superman, Spider-Man, Batman, Jediman, Sequelman, or Prequelman. He told Deadline last October that there's little "truth" in comic book movies. "The problem is that sometimes they purport to be profound, based on some Greek mythological kind of thing. And they are honestly very right wing. I always see them as killing people because they do not believe in what you believe, or they are not being who you want them to be. I hate that, and don't respond to those characters. They have been poison, this cultural genocide, because the audience is so overexposed to plot and explosions and shit that doesn't mean nothing about the experience of being human," he said.

That mentality is easy to detect in Birdman. Michael Keaton's character, Riggan, is an actor who can't escape his superhero moment. Even when prepping his Broadway debut, journalists ask him about a potential Birdman 4. Not that an ambitious theater career imubes him with automatic integrity; As he mounts his Raymond Carver adaptation, Riggan wrangles farcical actor-types, runs in fear from the Twitterverse, and grapples with critics who write him off. He's caught in a sensational ouroboros, where all creative endeavors are doomed to fizzle into comic book shlock. What does it take to make great art? To be a great artist? Iñárritu wonders on screen.

Academy voters have a thing for movies about show business (see: 2011's Best Picture The Artist and 1929's The Broadway Melody). Like Harris's song-and-dance, exalting Hollywood's potential is a theme worth backing if you're one of the people involved with making movies. So Birdman isn't a surprising win, but it's a modern, mildly depressing spin on the grand tradition. The Oscars gave Iñárritu's anti-Hollywood screed the stamp of approval. "We're sick of superhero movies too!" voters seem to say. The honor replaces action, whining by way of golden statues. Really, there's too much money on the table—domestic and Chinese—to embrace Iñárritu's rebellious attack. So they'll keep on pumping them out. Reluctantly.

Which isn't good for anyone—superhero fans included. After this year, the takeaway should be that great films can still be made with the right support. Producers took a chance on spending a little each year and came out with Boyhood. Faith in Wes Anderson to be Wes Anderson and for audiences to respond to Wes Anderson turned The Grand Budapest Hotel into a huge moneymaker. Whiplash is a Sundance movie that beat the drum all the way to the Oscars. "Weird" Al made a Whiplash parody. 

It's zeigeisty. And if the Hollywood elite is going to be a bunch of sourpusses when it comes to comic book movies, fans wind up on the losing end. We can get great superhero movies from people with great ideas. The next batch of Sam Raimis, Christopher Nolans, J.J. Abramses, and Steven Spielbergs, whose Indiana Jones movies are genetically linked to everything Iñárritu rails against in Birdman, are ready to be discovered. We could have Mom-n'-Pop blockbuster directors who deliver thoughtfulness and panache on par with our Oscar movies, if anyone was willing to try.

Before Jack Black could melt into a puddle of self-loathing, Neil Patrick Harris undercut his all-too-true interlude. Together, they could avert apocalypse.

Harris: Yes, greenlit films can stall.
Kendrick: Scripts can hit a wall.
Harris: Stars may pass
Kendrick: …or fire your ass
Harris: and weekly grosses fall. But when they hit, you must admit, they sometimes change your view a bit, in ways both big and small.

The Oscar ceremony is an echo chamber. Voters went in feeling blockbuster-provoked fatigue and came out with Birdman, a wagging finger of shame that's as fantastical as Guardians of the Galaxy, as Best Picture. Harris is right: Sometimes hits "change your view a bit." But sometimes it's easier to make fun of the problem rather than solve it. There's a nine-picture DC Comics slate running through 2020 that needs to be executed, after all. And maybe it would be better with whips…