"The fun of Oscar season comes not just from cheering for a favorite movie. For those of us who love to be aggrieved, just as much enjoyment can be found in rooting against a certain film. When a critical mass of people on the internet all select the same nominee to dump on, that concept has a name: The movie has become an Oscar villain."
"Our modern concept of an Oscar villain is a vestige of a specific cultural moment in the late 2010s, when online cinephiles processed their Trump-era anxieties by turning one contender each year into a stand-in for the sitting president. First, it was , then Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, then , and finally . This was a troubling time, and the Oscar villains offered a psychological security blanket. On a subconscious level, if those movies could be vanquished, maybe Trump could be too."
Oscar villains are films singled out by online communities for collective dislike and rooted in long-standing Oscar-era grievances. Instances trace back to 1970, when liberal viewers booed John Wayne's Best Actor win for True Grit, and to later resentments when Ordinary People and Dances With Wolves beat Raging Bull and GoodFellas. The late 2010s intensified the phenomenon as cinephiles used one yearly contender as a stand-in for the sitting president. Changes in the media environment—Twitter's decline and the rise of Substack, Letterboxd, and TikTok—have fragmented Oscars conversation, and heightened political stakes have dulled some of the previous catharsis.
Read at Vulture
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