The Masters' Lessons in Swagger: Awards Shows, Are You Watching?
The Masters' Lessons in Swagger: Awards Shows, Are You Watching?Golf's greatest event reminds me why the Academy needs to own its showbiz supremacy. Recognizing stunts is a good start
With apologies to Sean McNulty, who is usually the Ankler’s sole correspondent to the world of sports, I’d like to start this newsletter by talking about The Masters. I promise this is a one-time digression, and that my knowledge of golf is exactly as limited as you might imagine. But I attended The Masters over the weekend, apparently in the company of Josh Allen and Eli Manning, though with phones prohibited and everyone wearing hats and sunglasses it’s a great place for pretty much anyone to go incognito. The Masters, as you may have heard on television once or twice, is a tradition unlike any other, upheld by Augusta National Golf Club’s obsessive attention to detail and keeping things exactly the same, from the price of the pimiento cheese sandwiches to the fireplace in Butler Cabin. When you’re actually there year after year, you notice the small changes — bleachers where there was once grass, much nicer bathrooms — but they all align with Augusta National’s extremely strong brand of being a place where time stands still.
The Masters matters because Augusta National boasts a uniquely challenging and beautiful course, but also because the tournament says it matters, and everyone from players to patrons enters the club’s gates each April convinced they’ve crossed into some kind of earthly nirvana. You maintain that kind of reputation with consistent quality, sure, but also by never conceding for a moment that you are anything but the most important event in the world. This is something I found myself yelling a lot about the Oscars in the past decade or so — see, now I’ve pivoted us back to more familiar territory. Sure, all awards shows, including the Emmys and Grammys, have their struggles with relevance and ratings. But the Emmys has smartly tapped into nostalgia in recent years with its onstage reunions, and the Grammys this year went big on spectacle to create viral moments. The Oscars, meanwhile, are the only show as old as the Masters — older, actually! — and with the same legitimate claim to upholding valuable tradition.But between ratings stunts, smarmy hosts and gambits that made it seem like the show was actively uninterested in its own winners, too many modern Academy Awards telecasts have lacked the swaggering confidence required, leaving room for the audience to have its own doubts. If the Oscars are so convinced they’ve overstayed their welcome that they roll out a jet ski onstage, why wouldn’t the audience agree? In recent years the Oscars have walked back from this kind of self-own, embracing more reverence for the awards’ legacy and offering some old-fashioned Hollywood spectacle, like Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo’s show-opening performance this year. These moments, I swear to you, really do make a difference. As the Oscars approaches 100 I’d love to see it acting even more, yes, like The Masters: two old, slow-moving institutions that can embrace change when it really matters but maintain the traditions and grandeur that make everyone revere them in the first place. And one more thing: The Oscars, and every other live television event on earth, should do everything in their power to replicate the cinematic, incredibly moving tracking shot of winner Rory McIlroy as he exited the course on Sunday evening, celebrating his first win at Augusta after 17 tournaments there. I know oners are all the rage on television these days, but nothing even comes close to this.  The Academy’s Amazing StuntSpeaking of change that really matters: The Academy announced late last week that it would be adding a category for stunts, following years of lobbying from stunt professionals. Much like the casting Oscar announced a few years ago, it’s an addition that actually puts more attention on the part of the awards show that should actually matter most: the awards, duh! The Academy’s announcement on Thursday kept the details about this new category, which won’t be awarded until the 2028 Oscars, pretty vague. It’s still unclear who will be honored by the “Achievement in Stunt Design” category. By mentioning that “the specifics of this award’s presentation will be determined at a future date,” they left room for this new statuette, as well as the new casting Oscar (debuting next year), to be awarded outside of the main ceremony. (Get ready for a whole new round of hand-wringing if that actually happens.)
But this still feels like unadulterated good news and is being received accordingly. Just a few years removed from the embarrassing Oscars cheer moment that allowed the public to vote, the stunts Oscar is another, far less sweaty way to bring attention to the kind of big-budget spectacles that often miss out on awards consideration. This time they’ll do it with an authentic nod to excellence, by acknowledging the underappreciated cohort of film industry professionals who make those big-budget spectacles possible. Awards won’t fix most of the issues facing below-the-line workers, from the stalled production pipeline to the threat of AI. But just as it has for nearly 100 years, a gold statuette doesn’t hurt. Even better, as John Wick franchise director and former stuntman Chad Stahelski told Vulture, the Academy was proactive in reaching out to the stunt community, even though it seemingly took forever for the category to actually happen. “Don’t underestimate this — the Academy came to us,” Stahelski said last week after the category was announced. “I had some people from the Academy contact me. ‘Hey, we’re here, you’re doing this. We love your stuff. What can we do?’ Everyone I talked to seemed very, very game to learn a lot more. They wanted to be educated.”
Stahelski also pointed out the complication that might explain why it will be three more years before the statue is actually awarded. “Okay, thank you very much for the award. Now who’s going to decide who should get it? You need an educated electorate! You need an educated panel of people that know it’s a little trickier than you think. It’s a collaborative effort, so maybe let action design and the stunt department along with the Academy decide who gets it.” Whenever I speak to people who’ve worked within the Academy about its bylaws and procedures, it’s stunning to realize how much variation there is among the branches, and how many seemingly pointless rules are put in place to make every Oscar as meaningful as it should be. As much as some of those processes remain flawed, they represent the work of a lot of people who know that, in order to remain the gold standard, the Academy absolutely has to get it right. Still recovering from the messy fallout from their tepid support of an Oscar winner detained by Israeli forces, the Academy has gotten something right this time and will have industry stakeholders’ (and action fans’) goodwill on its side as it heads into the spring period when it usually pauses to tweak rules and consider new members. The first Oscar ceremony where the stunt category will be rewarded will be the 100th — a pretty good moment, I’d argue, to celebrate a craft that spans from Buster Keaton to John Wick. Closing Credits
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