A lot of things start small. Film academies are no different, I suppose. With these Alternative Awards, Kirsten and I want to address some specific weaknesses of existing award structures. Primarily this is a response to the sidelining of television and film works by marginalized people, but it’s also intended as a remedy to the biased voting within the existing academies. We have to start somewhere, so that leaves us figuring this out on the fly for media released in 2019.
First, let’s look at the sidelining of the works of marginalized groups. Encouraging diversity in the nominations is an obvious first step, but what rules and constraints should exist? Is anyone specifically excluded from consideration? We are staying away from any prescribed rules for individual qualification in order to give flexibility, since a non-obvious entry might have an explanation for why it should be included. Instead, we will bring a large number of categories in order to present a bigger collection of works. We will also include “honourable mentions” so that suggestions which don’t make the cut are not reduced to invisibility. As I have made an effort to watch all Oscar-nominated films in ALL categories over the past 15 years, I go on an intense binge for 4-6 weeks every winter, to the complete exclusion of anything which didn’t make the cut. I’m aware of dozens or hundreds of films which are not nominated, and they simply are not visible at all. Honourable mentions in the Oscars could expand the anointed list of 30-40 films to perhaps 100, increasing the chance that more diverse voices will be heard, so we will try this technique.
This is why we are encouraging a wide range of nominations for the Alternative Awards. You do NOT need to have seen the works in question in order to nominate them. What we want is more along the lines of constructing a “want to see” list, based on recommendations from others, including lists and reviews and other sources which are also trying to bring visibility to stories by and about people who are not white men. Thus, we will end up with several categories with a handful of nominations in each (keep reading for more on that), and several honourable mentions within the categories. This technique explicitly acknowledges widely varying tastes among viewers, the overwhelming selection in the current media landscape, and the practical reality of reducing selections to a shortlist of nominees in order to present awards.
A limited number of nominations is essential to stepping away from biased voting. Looking at the Oscars as an example again, nominations in all categories except Best Picture must come from people who work in the applicable field. Only editors nominate films for Best Editing, etc. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has a membership base which can support this, and it makes sense. Expanding the diversity of the membership in the different branches is the next step for the Academy to widen the diversity of nominees, and they are (slowly) taking that step. Our Alternative Awards cannot do this because we are asking consumers of media, rather than creators, to submit nominations. Our aim, to highlight titles which might otherwise go unknown, can be achieved through our technique. Voting, on the other hand, is where the Oscars have a weakness. Once the nominees have been established in each category, ALL members in all branches can vote on the awards, regardless of whether they have seen ANYTHING. This leads to the heavy Oscar marketing campaigns by studios, and the swamping of Academy members with screener DVDs as each of the nominees in a category tries to make itself visible to members who might know nothing about that particular craft.
With our Alternative Awards, while we love the idea of NOMINATING based on “what people have heard,” we want to avoid the pitfall of VOTING based on this. This is why we haven’t previously announced how the voting would work – we haven’t figured it out ourselves yet! Obviously we don’t have enough experts in given fields at this point, so we’ll lean instead on the reality of our academy members as media consumers.
Our thinking is that in a given category, an individual needs to have “seen” ALL of the nominees in the category. I put “seen” in quotes because it’s not quite as simple as this. For television, with a larger membership base it would be fair to expect a voter to have seen the entirety of the current season of all nominated shows in a category in order to vote, which likely means they would have needed to see all previous seasons in order for the current season to make sense. That’s a lot of TV! So for television, a representative sample should be viewed, perhaps suggested by someone familiar with the show (some people nominating will be experts on the show and can help out here!) so we have good guidance. For movies, watching all of the nominees in a month seems reasonable. This is why we need to keep a category’s nomination list SMALL, supplemented by honourable mentions. This bumps the number of highlighted titles way up overall, but keeps the voting manageable. Again, we have to start small, but a larger academy would have the volume of people to require such rigour instead of random voting.
-Mike