Two Oscar voters admit to voting for ’12 Years a Slave’ without seeing it

Will Perkins
·Blogger

Trying to recommend a movie to someone without actually having seen the film is a bit like telling a person to buy a car without driving it first. You can’t really vouch for the quality of something unless you’ve experienced it for yourself.

Now, you’d think that the people responsible for choosing the Best Picture winner at the Oscars (essentially the ultimate movie recommendation) would have seen all the films they were nominating for the prize before voting. But it seem that that assumption would be wrong.

Two anonymous members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) recently confessed to the Los Angeles TImes they didn’t actually see Best Picture winner “12 Years a Slave,” despite voting for the film to win the coveted Oscar. The two AMPAS members said they avoided seeing director Steve McQueen’s harrowing slavery drama because they feared it would be upsetting. (You think?) The pair said they felt obligated to vote for the film based simply on its “social relevance.”

The L.A. Times article delves into the finer points of race relations in Hollywood, the lack of diversity in the Academy (it's mostly white, male, and elderly), and what role they may have played in “12 Years a Slave's” historic win. Though McQueen may have lost out to “Gravity's” Alfonso Cuaron for the Best Director prize, “12 Years a Slave” is the first-ever Best Picture winner to have been directed by a black filmmaker. That's a very big deal.

What the article fails to address is the other elephant in the room: the inherent flaws in the Oscar voting system. How many more members of the 6,000-strong Academy were in the same boat as those two voters -- voting for but not watching "12 Years a Slave"? Every member is eligible to vote for Best Picture, so the two mentioned in the article cannot have been the only ones. Why are AMPAS members even allowed to consider a movie for the Oscar honour if they haven’t seen it?

Studios and producers do their best to make sure that all voting AMPAs members have a chance to see the films under consideration. DVDs with screener copies of the films are delivered to as many voters as possible, and countless special screenings of the nominated films happen between the holidays and the end of Oscar voting.

We get it: Watching nine or ten Oscar nominated films is a 20-plus hour commitment, and Academy members are busy people in the entertainment industry. But in this day and age, surely some kind of simple system of viewing confirmation could be put into place.

Should Academy voters be required to see all the nominated films in order to vote for them? If they want to vote for Best Picture, then yes, they should have to see all the movies up for the gold trophy -- even if it takes up a full day of their lives.

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