There Will Be Justice: Why the Oscars are better now than they've been for 30 years

This year's Oscars was a satisfaction 11 years in the making. You may remember that back in 1997, the two main contenders were The English Patient and Fargo. The former was a literary, epic, tragic love story amid political chaos that is now best remembered as almost laughably pretentious and cheesy. Fargo, on the other hand, was an unprecedented, challenging work, one with an unflinchingly bleak view on human nature with a heinous villain who seemed to embody evil for no reasons other than his own personal mantra. If this sounds familiar, it should. If the current climate was the same as 1997, Atonement would have taken home the Best Picture Oscar, and we'd all be begrudging it 10 years from now. As it stands, the real Best Picture won, as No Country For Old Men, arguably even better than Fargo, got the Coen brothers the Best Picture award they've deserved for over a decade. I can think of nothing but positives in terms of what this means for our current cinema.

In my mind, the '70s were the golden age for Oscar fairness, and that's simply because the competition was so good. There's really no way you can lose when choosing between The Godfather Part II and Chinatown, or Rocky, Network and Taxi Driver. In sum, the better the overall quality of films of a given year, the less likely it is that someone will get shafted by default. It's no coincidence, then, that 2007 was one of the better years for movies in quite some time (I'd argue it's the best since 1994, maybe even longer). Not only was Atonement slightly better than The English Patient, but Juno, There Will Be Blood and Michael Clayton were all better than Jerry Maguire, Secrets & Lies and Shine. More choice means more democracy, and that's why the Coen brothers took home more hardware this time around.

More importantly for the future of the Oscars, however, I feel that the the last 5 years have been trending towards the fairer (Crash being the notable exception), and that's because of the changes in the industry. Geeks have taken over the awards coverage, as sensitive Hollywood types face an unprecedently empowered wrath of the population if they make the wrong choice. In the 90s, the Academy could get away with giving awards to Dances with Wolves and Titanic simply because no one could really stop them from doing so. In the early part of the decade, the overall quality of films were so bad that there wasn't really much to be shafted in the first place. But now, with a lot more scrutiny from empowered film geeks then ever before, the criticism of the Oscars is a lot more widespread and prominent than in the last decade. Lord of the Rings: Return of the King was not a good sign since it was one of the few recent movies to unite film geeks and Oscar voters alike. The real sign of change was a year later, when a grandiose but flawed movie in The Aviator lost to a smaller but nearly flawless film in Million Dollar Baby.

The rise of independent films in prominence has also tipped the scale, as easily the most inspiring moment of this year's Oscars was the two separate acceptance speeches for Once's Best Song win, a feat that simply wouldn't be possible 10 years ago. But if one was superstitious, you may look to the lifting of a curse of Babe Ruth-like proportions. The flaws of the last 30 years of Oscars have been symbolically linked to the year 1980, when the flaccid Ordinary People beat out what Hollywood now believes to be the fourth greatest film of all-time, Raging Bull. The Scorsese curse was finally lifted last year when The Departed, in my mind Scorsese's best film since Goodfellas (another film that got shafted), won gold. Hopefully, this means that all the problems started by the Ordinary People win will go away too.