Academy members voted for 12 Years without watching it

Two members felt obligated to vote for the film because of its social relevance.

In the lead up to the 86th annual Academy Awards, one prevalent meme on social media was that some Oscar voters simply didn’t want to watch the film 12 Years a Slave. There was the lurking suspicion that the film’s triumph might have had as much to do with its subject matter as its actual quality. A recent report by The Los Angeles Times revealed that that was actually true. Two anonymous members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences apparently never saw Steve McQueen’s eventual Best Picture winner, despite placing the film atop their Oscar ballots.

As host Ellen DeGeneres put it, to equal laughs and winces from the audiences: “Possibility number one: 12 Years a Slave wins best picture. Possibility number two: You’re all racists.”

Worse than the chance that some Academy members bypassed their critical faculties after viewing Steve McQueen’s film and voted for it out simply as a sense of duty though, is new reports claiming that some plumped for it without even having watched the movie.

One anonymous voter admitted to the Hollywood Reporter that the reason she did not watch the film was to avoid “more terrible stuff to keep in my head.” The voter claimed that they “never liked movies with severe violence”.

Putting aside the fact that grown adults couldn’t bring themselves to watch not a snuff film but a historical drama, in spite of that being their one job, the report lends weight to the view that cinematic excellence does not always come first at the Academy Awards. These voters are a worrying statistic but they are, so far, in the minority. There are more than 6,000 members in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and only two voters categorically confirmed that they chose not to watch the film before voting for it.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 12^th, 2014.

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