Australasian Cinema > awards
2024 AACTAs. A horror film won Best Film. The best film, Limbo, won Best Indie Film: wtf? The second-best film, The New Boy, won four awards, but none of the top four, because it isn't going to make as much money as the horror film.
There was no 2023 AACTA Awards event.
2022 AACTA. Elvis (!) was the Australian Academy's best film, winning nine awards. In 2013 was The Great Gatsby (!)
2021 AACTA Best Film Nitram (Justin Kurzel, 2021) won eight awards.
Nitram won most of the awards (eight) in 2021 as The Sapphires (Wayne Blair) did in 2012 (eleven), and, even more overwhemingly, Somersault (Cate Shortland) did in 2004, when it won all thirteen awards for which it was nominated. There seems to me to be a tendency for voters to pick their 'best film' and then give it all the prizes. The Sapphires wasn't the best film in 2012: that was Burning Man. But The Sapphires had an Aboriginal director and subject. Nitram might have been best film in 2021 (in a mediocre year) but Anthony LaPaglia wasn't the best supporting actor. In my opinion, he was Michael Caton (in Rams).
The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2014) won the Byron Kennedy Award in 2020. >
Awards have more to do with making money than anything else. Not only will an award-winning film make more money, the reverse is also the case: the more money a film makes, the more likely it is to get an award. Not only that, but money can buy awards - in the American context, Harvey Weinstein provides an example.
Cinema is (also) an industry (as well as an artform). Profit depends on the number of people paying for the film, which logically depends on its popularity. Which in turn depends on the extent to which it conforms to the expectations (of a film) of a large number of people. Their mores include things they really care about (sport, money, life and death, nationalism—perhaps in that order) and things they think they should be seen to care about because of political correctness (indigenous issues, feminism, environment, animal welfare). See Ride like a Girl, which has several of those things going for it, and one big one against. They shoot horses, don't they!
Garry Gillard | New: 13 December, 2010 | Now: 12 February, 2024