And the winner is ... in The American Conservative

"And the Winner Is..." -- My movie column in the Feb. 28th American Conservative reviews the Best Picture race. It is available to electronic subscribers. An excerpt:

This year's Oscar nominees for Best Picture comprise one of the weaker slates in memory, yet an enormous audience will no doubt tune in February 27 to watch the Academy Awards.

That the public still cares about the Oscars, or films in general, is curious. Now in its second century, going to the movies is almost as old-fashioned as such one-time rivals for the entertainment dollar as vaudeville and brass band concerts. Yet, although the average American spends over 1,600 hours annually watching television, compared to just 13 hours at the movies, they remain at the top of the pop culture food chain.

Popular music strongly challenged cinema for supremacy in the Sixties and Seventies, but has since splintered into micro-styles. In contrast, movies have gotten so expensive that only a few are released each week, allowing the studios' expert marketers to concentrate (albeit briefly) the national attention.

Despite television's pervasiveness, it lacks the prestige of film because, to be frank, as an advertiser-supported medium, TV aims primarily at women. A back-of-an-envelope calculation suggests that American men transfer about one trillion dollars annually to women to spend, so television networks (subscriber-supported HBO, the most prestigious network, excepted) pursue female viewers.

In contrast, males buy the majority of movie tickets, so films cater to them. And, as feminists have been known to complain, in our society (as in all societies), renown accrues mostly to things guys like. Men just care more than women do about constructing vast hierarchies of fame, such as the Oscars.

Although female studio bosses are common today, the Academy Awards are still extraordinarily male-dominated. For example, women have picked up only three of the approximately 385 nominations for Best Director, and (alert Nancy Hopkins!) none at all for Best Cinematographer.

Female screenwriters have become scarcer over time. Frances Marion was the highest paid writer in Hollywood's first two decades, but among the 86 individuals with three or more screenwriting nominations, only eight are women, and just three are from the liberated post-1970 era.