5. Best Picture Rarely Challenges The Status Quo
Returning to our point about the awards being decided by a bunch of white, old men, the prevailing notion is that the Academy doesn't like to be provoked or challenged half as much as a high-brow film collective pretends to or should want to. It's for this reason that some of cinema's more challenging - and critically acclaimed - films such as Shame, We Need to Talk About Kevin, Do the Right Thing and Brokeback Mountain failed to win Best Picture, and in the case of all but the latter, they weren't even nominated. Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, a masterpiece about race relations in New York, incredulously missed out to a far more mild and quaint film about the subject, Driving Miss Daisy. Meanwhile, Brokeback Mountain, a breakthrough film about homosexuality, was pipped by the far more down-pat race drama Crash. It suggests that the voters, old and set in their ways, prefer the simplicity of these winning films, and are either averse to or simply too old to rise to the challenge that these far superior films offer. Take a look at the last 10 Best Picture winners - great films though they are, do many of them really seek to enact something revolutionary or ground-breaking?