OSCAR fever is in season again. The Oscars are the crown-jewel of filmmaking awards and ceremonies, formally known as the Academy Awards which has been presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the past 94 years (this year is the 94th instalment).

For movie lovers and film freaks, ‘tis the season to dig into the gossip and predictions leading up the nomination announcement which happened this past week.

For the wider general public, news of the eventual winners will fly over their heads when the awards kick off on 27 March, which surprisingly won’t require attendees to be vaccinated.

As a teenager, I dedicated myself to the Oscars every year since the film bug hit me when I was a kid, thanks to VHS tapes, VCR players and the Star Wars trilogy.

As with any technology of its time, the youngest in the family tends to be the one who picks up the know-how to operate the gadgets of the day and as a 9-year-old, I was “the one” in our household which included my late grandparents.

I diligently recorded all the evening cartoon shows from television onto whatever VHS tapes were available (most of the time taping over older episodes).

My love for moving images, not just movies or cartoons per se but also anything that was on the idiot box, was my window to the world and would eventually shape my worldview in an insular kind of way.

Films, and cinema culture as a whole, are ideological in nature. Some might not intend to be but the process of making a film, from ideation and fund-seeking to production and distribution, inadvertently shapes the story being told into an ideological form.

I’m sure I lost you, dear reader, at cinema culture, but what I’m trying to say is films are powerful tools that are the most complete art form in our contemporary world. Films are indeed “windows to the world,” of which version of that world is equally as important.

Malaysians are generally fed on a steady diet of Hollywood films, which carry exported ideals and ways of living that may seem global in nature but distract from the underlying messages and meanings any particular blockbuster (a Hollywood phenomenon, by the way) may be selling between the lines.

This is where it gets interesting and begs the question, are we brainwashed by the films we watch? The answer is no.

Nobody gets “brainwashed” by films but one can continuously be made to be distracted from the real power of the medium, empathy.

The Oscars is not representative of all films and cinema cultures around the world. It is merely the biggest hype machine that harnesses the power of consumerist culture through entertainment.

Films don’t exist in a vacuum, nor do the Oscars, just because a film wins a lot of Oscars doesn’t make it the best film of that year. The Oscars, like all things human, has its own biases and one must deal with it like censorship.

To get the attention of the Academy, the group of people who determine what films qualify to the Oscars (they too are not infallible and rightly so), one needs to know what bait for the beast to bite.

There are many types of bait but some common things that tickle the Academy’s fancy are epic period dramas and lavish productions that are highly technical in nature.

2004’s Puteri Gunung Ledang was probably the closest we got to, but sadly it didn’t take.

This aspect alone negates any potential of low-budget films making their mark although for non-American films, the category of Best International Feature (which used to be called Best Foreign Film) is the only option. Malaysian films usually don’t make it further than the submission stage.

Malaysia won’t get to the Oscars just yet (although individuals have) and that to me is a good thing, we can’t even sort out things in our backyard let alone the region, so we have the advantage of “projected growth”.

One thing that could happen is for us to discard the dream of making it to the Oscars because it distracts us from what film as a medium can serve, an instrument of empathy, not entertainment.

Empathy does not need a big budget nor lavish ceremonies, it’s little everyday stories baked in realism that do the job.

I’m a reformed Hollywood and Oscar film freak who discovered that there are other cinema cultures outside of Hollywood (read world cinema) that have greater depth and possibilities for empathy, I still partake in this seasonal indulgence because one cannot simply boycott things because of some supposed high moral ground.

It is important for humans to indulge but with the knowledge that it is merely in the moment and moments are all we have as temporary citizens of this world.

As Roger Woo (played by Pete Teo) in Tan Cui Mui’s excellent 2021 film Barbarian Invasion (my personal pick for our submission for the Oscars) quipped: “When I was younger, film was everything… Now, everything is a film.” – February 11, 2022.

* Azmyl Yunor is a touring underground recording artiste, and an academic in media and cultural studies. He has published articles on pop culture, subcultures and Malaysian cultural politics. He adheres to the three-chords-and-the-truth school of songwriting, and Woody Guthrie’s maxim “All you can write is what you see”. He is @azmyl on Twitter.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.