There is a story going around about a recent high-priced political fundraising dinner, held in a studio mogul’s house in Beverly Hills, in which a sitting US senator and an international movie star both complained bitterly about the democratic process.
“The problem we’ve got,” the senator was heard to say, “is with the low-information voter. The kind that doesn’t keep up with the issues, knows very little about what’s really going on, is easily swayed by marketing and simplistic commercials, and yet who still votes.”
“Couldn’t agree more,” said the movie star.
“The poorly-informed voter, despite not knowing anything, still has the same voting power of the informed voter. That’s the killer flaw in the democratic system.”
“You’ve really nailed it,” said the movie star.
“I’m glad to see,” said the senator, “that you agree with me about the problems we face in this country.”
“Oh,” said the movie star. “You’re talking about the country? I thought you were talking about the Oscars.”
It was an easy mistake to make. Right now, all over the entertainment business, there’s only one topic of conversation: who’s going to win big – or, as we like to put it out here, who is going to “take home some hardware” – at next week’s Oscar ceremony.
By the time you read this, the deadline for delivery of all ballots for the 2015 Academy Awards will have passed. Academy members will have dutifully sent in their voting packets, and somewhere – no one is quite sure where, exactly – the envelopes are being opened up and the votes tallied.
An Oscar win means an enormous amount of prestige to all who were involved with the project, but more importantly, it means money. (Money, in Hollywood, always trumps prestige.)
An Oscar-winning movie has new life at the box office, has a more lucrative run on video-on-demand, and makes everyone who pitched in significantly richer.
Yet the actual voters – members of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences – are a motley lot of retired television stars, B-movie producers from the 1950s and 1960s, and obscure one-time directors of short films that may have been seen by, at most, a few thousand people.
They’re also mostly old – the average age of the Academy member is around 63 – and they’re mostly male and white (76 per cent and 93 per cent, respectively) which doesn’t, of course, suggest that voters who fit that profile are by definition “low information” voters, but does point to a disconnect between the tastes of the vastly younger movie-going audience and the old white dudes of the Motion Picture Academy.
Two of the most enjoyable, witty, original, and – this isn’t unimportant – financially successful pictures of 2014 were The Lego Movie and Guardians of the Galaxy, but you didn’t see a lot of old white men lining up to see those movies, which is why neither one of them was nominated for a major award.
But just because a movie is nominated doesn’t guarantee it’ll get watched by the voters.
Nearly every year a mini-scandal erupts when entertainment industry reporters reveal that many Academy members don’t even bother to watch the nominated pictures – despite having them all sent to their houses in convenient digital form – but cast their votes anyway, based on advertisements in the industry press, the buzz around town, what their housekeeper liked, or just who seems to “deserve it” more this year.
“I don’t have time to watch all of those movies!” a very old television star once said to a reporter when he asked how she made her Oscar ballot picks. But why does she insist on voting, he asked, if she hasn’t seen the movies?
She looked at him as if he were the stupidest creature alive. “You have to vote,” she said. “You have to participate! I mean, it’s so important to the kids.”
In other words, the people choosing the Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Actress of 2014 are about as qualified to make that choice as the average American voter is to make the choice he is asked to make every four years, which is to say not very.
But like the voters in the presidential election, they choose proudly and with an enthusiasm strong enough to get them to ask around about a movie (or a candidate) or catch an advertisement or two, but not so strong they’ll pop the DVD in the machine and actually do the work.
“We’ve got the same problem,” the senator said. “The low-information voter is ruining both of our businesses.”
The movie star just nodded. He didn’t point out that he had already agreed to do a more serious picture in 2015, something ponderous and slow-moving and sure to appeal to the Older White Male demographic. And the senator didn’t bother to add that he was already sending out campaign flyers suggesting that his opponent in the upcoming election was, possibly, a serious deviant.
If all goes well for both of them in 2015, the formerly low-information voter will suddenly transform – one winning political campaign and one Academy Award later – into a very smart voter indeed.
Rob Long is a writer and producer based in Hollywood
On Twitter: @rcbl