Can Top Gun and Avatar help save the Oscars? Steven Soderbergh thinks so

When acclaimed filmmaker Steven Soderbergh (Ocean’s 11, Magic Mike) was in charge of the Oscars ceremony in 2021, he was plagued by existential questions about how much audiences actually care about movies, and the people who make them.

Steven Soderbergh on the set of his film Logan Lucky.Credit:Claudette Barius/Fingerprint Releasing/Bleecker Street via AP

The pandemic was still raging, hosting a COVID-safe ceremony and broadcast was a massive logistical challenge, and ratings for the broadcast had been steadily declining over the past half-decade. There was serious concern that the show might not have much of a future. The Oscar-winning director, whose latest film is Magic Mike’s Last Dance starring Channing Tatum and Salma Hayek, knew that the future of the Oscars hung in the balance.

“We were discussing at length… if movies don’t occupy the kind of cultural real estate that they used to, how do you get people to care about an award’s show?” Soderbergh tells this masthead, a month out from this year’s Academy Awards.

It was an apt question. After years declining ratings for the Oscars, the rise of prestige TV adding competitive pressure, and a pandemic that shut down theatres and saw audiences become accustomed to watching movies from the comfort of their living rooms, how do you get people to keep thinking of cinema as an elevated art form, whose award’s night is worthy of attention?

“I think this year the Academy is going to learn a lot because you couldn’t ask for a group of movies better designed to get a wide audience watching the show,” Soderbergh says.

He’s referring to the fact that, unusually, both Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar: The Way of Water are nominated for best picture this year – up against much less popular films like The Fabelmans, Triangle of Sadness and Women Talking. Their inclusion is noteworthy because franchise films rarely enter the illustrious category of best picture nominee, let alone two in the same year.

There’s been increasing concern within the Academy about the gap between what it celebrates (CODA, Nomadland) and what audiences are watching in theatres: superhero films and blockbuster franchises like Avatar and Top Gun. Why would people who prefer to watch big action franchises tune in to an awards ceremony that tends to award worthy, but much less popular, films?

The fact two of the biggest movies of the year are being embraced both by the masses and the Academy is building expectations that this year’s ceremony should buck the trend, and see an uptick in viewers. But those expectations come with risks.

“If people don’t watch the show this year, if there’s no spike in attendance, then I think there’s a real serious discussion that’s going to have to be had about what the show is for,” as Soderbergh puts it.

Avatar: The Way Of Water is up for best picture at the Oscars.Credit:20th Century Studios

“I don’t have a problem with Top Gun or Avatar being nominated for best picture. What those filmmakers accomplished in very different ways… that sh*t’s hard. I couldn’t direct 10 seconds of either of those movies. I voted for those movies, among others.”

That fact that a director like Soderbergh is happy to publicly throw his support behind two of the biggest films of the year is indicative of the challenge the industry is facing. At 26, he made his directorial debut with Sex, Lies and Videotape which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1989. He quickly became a leading figure of American cinema’s independent revival in the 1990s, and has regularly criticised the big Hollywood studios.

An alliance an avant-garde indie darling (albeit one who has had commercial success with the Ocean’s and Magic Mike series) and the likes of Tom Cruise and James Cameron shows how seriously all the different factions of Hollywood are taking the current threat facing theatre going.

And while TV ratings for the Oscars aren’t a perfect barometer for the health of Hollywood, they are seen by many in the industry as an indicator of how much audiences actually care about going the movies.

Or, as Sodebergh puts it: “I’m just saying if you’ve got these two humungous hits, if you can’t get people to tune in to see which one of those is going to win… then you’ve really answered the question of whether or not it’s the movies we nominate, or it’s just people don’t care”.

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