It’s hard for movies to be good & popular
There’s the old joke about the best music came out when you were personally between the ages of 16 to 24.
It was something most people kept up with in their teens and 20s when they felt a heavy creative interest, had few responsibilities and more time.
I like to think I’ve kept up pretty well with new bands (well at least my on repeat songs are only 6 to 10 years old songs lol).
For me, movies fit that joke better than music.
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I used to watch all the Oscar movies, I especially remember the year 2019 when a friend of mine got a bunch of screeners and we passed them around.
I think that was the heyday of MoviePass right before the great shutdown.
Now, I’m much more interested in the movies that are essentially crossover hits, the ones that are critically acclaimed but are also popular.
As I grow older, that intersection is more interesting to me — maybe my tastes have changed, or I’m just not as snobbish, or both.
I like to think of this as the TNT test: it’s a movie that is:
- rewatchable
- has a broad enough audience that it could be replayed on a TV channel and if you’re flipping through you may stop for a few minutes and watch your favorite part.
Sub in AMC or TBS or Comedy Central if you prefer.
This doesn’t quite work as in the streaming era, you don’t really flip through in the same way, but mybe you can think of it as what has the potential to crack the top 10 most watched on Netflix, though I think that’s a high bar to clear, and even Netflix’s Oscar movies don’t scale it.
With that in mind, 2023 had a lot of good best picture candidates for the TNT test— rewatchable yet critically acclaimed.
I haven’t seen all the movies, but you’d definitely go with Oppenheimer (big visuals), Barbie (bright colors), and The Holdovers (more niche, but a good forced-into-awkward-situation at the holidays movie that feels like something you can turn on every year.)
I wanted to include American Fiction on this list because it’s mostly about this tension. But I don’t think arguing about this tension makes a good movie.
2022 had another year like that, with best picture nominees like Top Gun: Maverick, Elvis, and the Way of Water, along with possibly Everything Everywhere All At Once.
What other best picture winners fit the TNT test like Oppenheimer?
If you start going through all the Oscar best picture winners and nominees over the years, you’ll notice that the best picture winner isn’t usually the one that meets the TNT test.
In 2021, the winner was Coda, the year before that was Nomadland. I haven’t seen Coda, but I don’t feel like there’s much continuing the discourse about it as it‘s not the favorite of too many.
Definitely the same with Nomadland. It’s a movie about a problem that I get, but it’s not something I want to dwell on.
2021 included movies like Don’t Look Up and Dune, which at least Dune is rewatchable.
I think Parasite is fairly rewatchable; it seems like it pops up on the channels and streaming services more so than Green Book in 2018.
Looking through the winners before that, you have to go back to 2012 and Argo for another film that’s rewatchable and passes the TNT test — it’s a spy thriller with a big movie star and at the time, it was a surprise winner.
I’ve been going through Great Expectations and though it’s not read as much now, it was a big hit at the time and a critically acclaimed at that.
What about books…
Thinking through this, I realized one of my favorite writers — David Foster Wallace — never really made it “big” even though he was acclaimed when he was alive. Yet, he didn’t seem to be popular, not in the Oppenheimer since. Hee wasn’t financially secure enough to not work at a university — perhaps he preferred this however.
I’m sure there are lot more writers like this, George Saunders, Mary Karr, and a myriad of others I’m not thinking about right now, where the critical praise is separate from the commercial side.
There are some of course, I’m going to look at a few and put together a list. The Pulitzers might be the best proxy for this, in the same way as the Oscars, but they still feel a bit tilted towards the “literary” side.
I think books could pull this off, but perhaps cultural forces outside of their control (people reading less, less book culture) makes it more difficult.
A version of this was first published on my Substack. Get it here.