By Cooper Parson ’20

THE ROUNDUP

The Oscars have become an award show that favors movies according to how obscure and “indie” they are rather than if they are actually good movies.

In recent years, the Oscar nominees for awards such as best picture have been movies that have little to no press.

Not only do these movies have almost no press, but they sometimes aren’t the best movies either.

The 2017 winner of best picture was “Moonlight”. “Moonlight” is a film about the life of a black man growing up in Miami and personal discovery.

When the film was named best picture, I hadn’t yet seen it because it wasn’t playing in any theaters near me.

So, when the film was available to buy I decided to watch it.

I have to say that I didn’t think “Moonlight” was a film worthy of winning best picture. While it has a powerful message and interesting way of showing us Chiron’s life, it was generally boring.

That’s when I went back and took a look at the rest of the best picture nominees.

Most of them were movies that had received a lot of praise, but then there were movies like “Lion”.

Even though “Lion” was a great movie, it wasn’t being played in many theaters. People couldn’t see it because it wasn’t available in many places.

I wanted to know why these out-of-the-blue movies were nominated and then even won.

This isn’t a one time occurrence either the same thing is happening this year with movies like “Lady Bird”, “Call Me By Your Name” and “The Shape of Water” being nominated for different awards.

Even though all of these movies are critically acclaimed, they aren’t really in any theaters. The general public didn’t really seem to be familiar I with most of the nominees.

If these movies are that good, why do we hear nothing about them? Maybe its because they are independent and don’t have much funding.

This irritates me because there are good movies out there that everyone is able to see but don’t get the same recognition.

Movies like “Blade Runner 2049” and “Logan” received little to no recognition.

It almost seems like major award shows are making a point out of picking these more unknown movies as opposed to big blockbusters that are just as good.

I think that the Oscars need to nominate movies that are known for best picture.

Going back to “Moonlight” again, Moonlight took the award for best picture over a movie like “La La Land”.