Oscar Bait: The Academy Awards & Cultural Prestige

The Academy Awards – or "the Oscars" – have held a unique position in defining and enacting "prestige" for film industries and their publics. In evaluating ‘the best’ of film, they wield cultural influence over such cinema practices as consumption and evaluation, filmmaking aesthetics and narratives, and the discursive activity of Hollywood’s industrial agents and audiences. Oscar Bait: The Academy Awards & Cultural Prestige offers a comprehensive insight into how a film or star positions one’s self as a viable competitor worthy of such consecration in new media contexts. Based over three years of ‘Oscars seasons’ (2019–2021), rigorous analysis of film texts, awards telecasts, and circulating discursive media is built through an original scholarly framework for understanding modern cultural awards. Oscar Bait recontextualises the Oscars’ complex legacy into a new media ecosystem, one in which their established value is undercut by declining broadcast viewership, the changing values and demands of global film publics, and influential discourses aiming to progress popular culture beyond its problematic histories. In this new paradigm of film production and consumption, Boucaut explores what the Oscars mean in a contemporary filmmaking landscape and what impacts established stereotypes of Oscar-worthiness – the colloquial ‘Oscar Bait’ – continue to hold over the awards. Oscar Bait captures a dynamic snapshot of the Oscars and Hollywood in a critical era. It advances popular culture scholarship by developing an analytical framework for understanding disparate media texts within an awards season – and it critically updates Oscars knowledges for modern contexts. Readers interested in media and cultural studies, celebrity studies, persona studies, popular culture, and film will enjoy this book.