A week or two back, it was announced that a new prize was going to be brought to the stage of this year’s Academy Awards. Not another Oscar, but a special award for the Most Popular Movie.
This is something the Oscars has wrestled with for a while – at one stage actually putting forward an Academy Award for the most popular film (an idea that was very quickly retired). However, what’s been announced is a prize to be given as part of this year’s Oscar show, voted for by the audience.
There are history books to be written on what happens when you let the wider audience take part in social media polls. Who, after all, can forget the unifying joy of Boaty McBoatface?
What AMPAS – the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organisation that hands out the Oscars – elected to do was allow users of Twitter to vote for their favourite movie of the year. That, combined with a vote on its website, will determine who gets a prime-time prize in the Oscar show. It was widely assumed that this would be the Spider-Man: No Way Home prize. But the internet has other ideas.
Because whilst the latest Spider-Man movie has indeed been attracting no shortage of votes, the surprise front-runner – according to research from Deadline – is, er, Cinderella.
If you’re not familiar with this particular venture, it’s the not-very-well reviewed live action telling of the classic fairy tale from last year, produced by and co-starring James Corden. Camila Cabello took the title role in the film, with Kay Cannon directing. It earned perhaps the most notoriety for a flash mob promotional stunt that became a Twitter moment in itself.
Voting remains open, but the early takeaway from AMPAS’ latest dalliance with Twitter is that if it expected things to go calmly and sensibly, it might finally have learned its lesson.
