The 2024 Best Picture race came down to two films: Oppenheimer, a three-hour historical epic backed by Universal's full awards machinery, and The Holdovers, a smaller character study from Focus Features. Oppenheimer won, as most predicted it would. But the more interesting story wasn't which film took the trophy — it was how the race itself determined which actors, directors, and below-the-line talent would see their quotes rise, which studios would leverage the win into more prestige deals, and which narratives about "what cinema should be" would dominate the next development cycle. The award was the least important part of what happened.
Awards season is sold as a meritocratic system: the best work rises, excellence is recognized, and the industry celebrates its finest achievements. That story is not just incomplete — it's a distraction from what's actually happening. What is being offered as recognition, as Hyperallergic recently observed, often operates as a way of organizing power, determining not only what is seen, but who is positioned to benefit from that visibility. Awards don't reward excellence. They manage access to the infrastructure that turns work into wealth, influence, and control over what gets made next.
The Oscars, the Grammys, the Emmys — these aren't neutral arbiters. They're gatekeeping mechanisms that consolidate power within a small group of decision-makers while performing the aesthetics of democratic recognition. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has 10,000 members, but the vast majority of Oscar voters are white, male, and over 60. Their taste is not universal — it's demographic. And that demographic determines whose careers get elevated, whose stories get financed, and whose creative visions are treated as culturally significant.
Consider what happens after someone wins an Oscar. Their salary increases — sometimes doubles. Their ability to greenlight projects expands. They gain access to rooms they couldn't enter before. A Best Director win doesn't just validate past work; it determines future opportunity. And because the industry operates on precedent, that expanded access compounds. The director who wins gets to make bigger films, which get more visibility, which position them for future awards, which grant even more access. It's a closed loop that benefits the same small group of people while maintaining the fiction that it's all about merit.
The same logic applies to which films even enter the awards conversation. Studio campaigns for major awards cost millions — sometimes tens of millions. Screeners, FYC events, trade advertising, strategist fees, and the entire apparatus of awards season lobbying are only accessible to films backed by major studios or well-funded distributors. Independent films without that infrastructure don't just lose the race — they never get to the starting line. The system isn't designed to find the best work; it's designed to reward the work that can afford to compete.
This isn't a conspiracy. It's a business model. Awards generate publicity, which drives box office and streaming viewership, which justifies higher budgets and more favorable deals. The studios understand this. That's why they pour resources into campaigns for films that are already commercially successful or strategically important to their slates. The award itself is secondary to the value it creates: market positioning, talent retention, and leverage in negotiations. When a studio wins Best Picture, it's not just celebrating a film — it's cementing its reputation as the home for prestige projects, which helps it attract top-tier talent for the next cycle.
The same power dynamics play out in who gets nominated in the first place. Oscar voters operate under a veil of anonymity, which shields them from accountability but also from interrogation. There's no transparency about why certain performances or films are recognized while others are ignored. The result is that patterns of exclusion — along lines of race, gender, nationality, and genre — persist without explanation or consequence. When the Academy finally recognized a Korean-language film with Parasite's Best Picture win in 2020, it was treated as a breakthrough. But it took 92 years. That's not an oversight. It's a structural feature of a system built to center a specific kind of work and a specific kind of creator.
The myth of meritocracy is essential to the system's legitimacy. If awards were openly described as tools for organizing industry power, they would lose their cultural authority. The emotional weight of an acceptance speech, the narrative of an underdog victory, the aesthetics of celebration — these are what make the system legible as something other than what it is. But strip away the pageantry and what remains is a mechanism for determining who gets resources, who gets visibility, and who gets to shape the culture going forward.
This matters because visibility is not neutral. When the industry consistently elevates certain voices and sidelines others, it doesn't just reflect existing power imbalances — it reproduces them. A Best Actress win for a white woman in her 30s playing a complex, flawed character sends a message about whose stories are worth telling and whose humanity is worth exploring. A Best Director snub for a woman of color working in genre film sends a different message. Both are decisions about what the culture should value, and both have material consequences for whose work gets financed in the future.
The frustration with awards season isn't that it's imperfect — it's that it refuses to acknowledge what it actually is. The industry clings to the language of merit and excellence because admitting the system's true function would undermine its authority. But the evidence is everywhere. Look at whose careers explode after a win and whose stall out. Look at which genres and which stories are consistently rewarded and which are dismissed as "not Oscar material." Look at how much money it takes to compete and who has access to that money. The system is working exactly as designed. It's just not designed to do what it claims.
There's a version of awards season that could function differently. Transparent voting. Campaign spending caps. Expansion of voting bodies to reflect the actual demographics of the industry and its audiences. Structural changes that would make the system more accountable and less extractive. But those changes would require the people who benefit from the current system to voluntarily cede power, which is why they won't happen without external pressure.
Until then, awards season will continue to operate as it always has: not as a celebration of the best work, but as a system for managing who gets to benefit from being seen. The trophies are just the cover story.
