It's 7am, and I'm packed onto the MRT. Between the drones of “Please mind the platform gap”, the 98th Academy Awards play on my phone. Every cinephile in Los Angeles is hosting their own Oscars dinner party, and I am chasing after my bus, the names of award winners streaming through my earphones amidst the din of morning traffic.
For most Singaporean viewers, the Oscars have always been a show that belonged to the West, to Hollywood. And each passing year, it tries its best to justify why the rest of us should care. It's a task host Conan O’Brien has taken seriously, as in his opening monologue this year, he sings the tune of international unity: “31 countries, across 6 continents, are represented this evening”. To him, the Oscars are a spotlight for the oft-overlooked.
To give him credit, O’Brien could be right. This year’s Oscars saw the introduction of the new Best Casting category, with a mixed-race woman taking home the inaugural prize (Cassandra Kulukundis). Autumn Durald Arkapaw was the first woman to win Best Cinematography, and Sentimental Value bagged Norway its first Best International Feature, and Wagner Moura was the first Brazilian nominee for Best Actor. Despite all this, the ceremony still made me tense, the way you brace yourself before a twist you can already see coming.
What are the Oscars for?
Here's the thing: the more the Oscars surprises, the sharper the sting of all the times it doesn't. Because, let’s face it, what's the Oscars without outrage?
While I could speak at length about the snubs at this year's Oscars (and there are many), who wins or who loses isn’t the fundamental issue with these awards. The disappointment audiences feel when viewing the Oscars is symptomatic of a larger issue: the lack of a coherent purpose. Being one of the oldest and only peer-voted awards shows in the industry, the Oscars attempts to distinguish itself from other award shows by purporting to be the most prestigious and, perhaps, definitive list of filmmaking feats in that year.
However, the moment you call something the “best” in cinema, you’ve already disappointed at least half the room — and the Oscars does this year after year.
And in no other category is this best exemplified than in international films. The Oscars isn’t necessarily billed as an American film awards, and yet it most certainly feels like one every year. Despite an increasing number of non-American films being nominated for a range of categories, it comes off as a tokenistic gesture instead of genuine change. Jafar Panahi’s Palme d’Or winner It Was Just an Accident didn’t win a single Oscar, but the F1 film did?
Most pointedly, there has never been a Singaporean film at the Oscars. There have been 19 submissions by Singapore in its history, and so far it’s been radio silence. So, it’s understandable that Singaporeans don’t follow these insular award shows. When we watch the Oscars, it’s watching something that doesn’t ever see us.
Though I must pause to acknowledge Nickson Fong, who in 2013 became the first Singaporean to receive an Academy Award for co-inventing an animation technique now foundational to Hollywood blockbusters. He wasn't on the main stage, of course, but at the separate Scientific and Technical Awards. Somehow fitting, that the only Singaporean the Academy has ever recognised was honoured off on the side.
An uncomfortable truth
All these criticisms that I and many others have levied at the Oscars are valid, and Singapore ever having a seat at the Oscars feels like a distant dream. Purely by statistical chance, you'd think at least one of 19 submissions would've caught a voter's eye. We win awards at international film festivals, and we collaborate with major film hubs. We’re by no means a small fry anymore, at least not like we were 20 or 30 years ago…
So what gives?
If you follow the Oscars at all, you would know what an Oscar campaign is — the press junkets, talk shows, and industry profiles in publications like Variety and The Hollywood Reporter that studios deploy to get Academy voters interested in their films. The lengths they go to can be incredible: Sean Baker's Anora spent three times its $6 million production budget on its campaign alone, and walked away with 5 Oscars.
So, here's the irony: the Oscars' biggest flaw is also Singapore's. What reaches Academy voters isn't always the most deserving film — it's the most visible one.
Local films may be great pieces of art, but what’s absent is the conditions that produce Oscar-recognised films — international distribution and big marketing budgets — are conditions our industry hasn't yet been able to meet. Singapore films do well on the festival circuit, but festival darlings and Oscar contenders achieve entirely different feats. The Oscars’ biggest winners may not be the most artistically meritorious, but they are definitely films that balance the tension of artistic and commercial viability the best.
So to brush off the Oscars because they’re just “too western”, or because they don’t award the “best” films of the night, is its own kind of naivety. It would require a belief that cinema is created, watched, and awarded based solely on artistic merit, which will never be possible.
Watching the Oscars, albeit cynically, represents to me a humble admission that cinema exists in a hierarchy in which commerciality is sometimes almost as important as artistry, and the Oscars (perhaps unfortunately) sits at the top of that hierarchy.
What’s Next?
If Singapore wants to evolve, to cast off its position as a footnote in International cinema, it has to reckon with an uncomfortable truth best represented by the Oscars: the best films aren’t just artistically viable. That isn’t to say we should chip away at everything that makes our films unique, or to abandon ambition in experimenting with new techniques and stories. This year's winners proved that you don’t need to do that to make it big.
Filmmakers in Singapore should seek to optimise the artistic-commercial tug-of-war that is inherent in every production. It means appealing to audience tastes without abandoning originality, like how Sinners wholly embraced a unique genre-bending vision without any IP or franchise safety net. It means finding the universal in the specific, like how The Secret Agent tapped on Brazil’s fraught history of political turmoil to tell a story about fear, oppression, and memory.
It means thinking about distribution and accessibility as creative considerations, not afterthoughts. We should strive to do all this not for the Oscars' sake necessarily, but for the sake of a local industry that can sustain itself, grow, and inspire future talents.
Of course, simply acknowledging that commerciality is important won’t do. When filmmakers here struggle to get any idea financed, there’s often no room to consider big marketing or collaboration budgets. None of this is simple, and none of it happens overnight. But the conversation has to move from lamenting to understanding.
Though, there is definitely room for some cautious optimism. Parasite's Best Picture win in 2020 was the obvious landmark, and, this year, a film rooted in the K-pop phenomenon won 2 Oscars. Asian stories aren't waiting at the door anymore. It's time Singapore walked in with them, but we still need to learn how.
So, maybe that's reason enough to keep watching, even when the Oscars makes itself very difficult to love.