The Oscars Are Handed Out Today. First, What Actually Counts as a "Commercial Film"?

There's no clear answer. Every understanding of commercial cinema is rooted in the era it belongs to.

A month ago, the nominations for the 89th Academy Awards were announced. Soon after, the film magazine Iris (《虹膜》) ran an article on its WeChat official account arguing that this might be the worst Oscars since 1983.

The reasoning: the two frontrunners, La La Land and Manchester by the Sea, were merely repeating familiar genre formulas. As for Moonlight, the writer felt that although it had put in the work on the technical side — tone, atmosphere, camera movement — "put together, it still falls well short of a great film."

When the 2016 nominations came out, the mood looked much the same. There wasn't much to talk about, in either topics or films, so everyone just kept chewing over the tired question of whether Leonardo DiCaprio would finally win Best Actor.

At noon Beijing time on February 27, the Oscars will hand out its awards on schedule. Like the ceremony's ratings, which sag further every year, interest in which film actually takes Best Picture keeps shrinking.

No good films in the theaters: this seems to have become a problem worldwide, and especially in the United States and China. Last summer, Hollywood's box office collectively dived, and studio heads came out to say they'd been through a hard summer. China's box office barely grew at all in 2016, which was also blamed on the poor quality of most of the films released. So in recent years people have coined all sorts of nicknames for films made with an ulterior motive: popcorn movies, fan movies, IP movies, or, more bluntly, "blockbusters."

There's another line of commentary you've surely run into again and again while reading film reviews. To take one example at random, the critic Yang Shiyang wrote of The Great Wall: "As a popcorn movie, The Great Wall is undoubtedly competent. It has visual effects that hold up to scrutiny and a storyline with a reasonable give-and-take, containing a tested friendship, a faintly rising romance, selfishness and heroism, individual freedom and collective belonging, and other layers of meaning."

"Of course none of this gets explored in any real depth, because that isn't what a popcorn movie is for. A lot of people feel the film is spiritually hollow, but the question is: why should a popcorn blockbuster be responsible for spiritual substance? Did that many viewers really watch the first trailer for Zhang Yimou's new film and expect an art film?"

Good question. But hold on: is the opposite of a commercial film really an art film? Can commercial films have tiers, can they hold different genres, and can they — at the very least — have ambitions of their own? When did "commercial" become a synonym for simple?

In fact, what counts as a commercial film has never had a clear definition. There's a question on Zhihu asking why the Oscars don't favor commercial films. Among the answers, some people go along with the premise and analyze why the winners aren't commercial films. Others challenge the premise outright, arguing that the films the Oscars picks should still count as commercial films.

Look at this year's Best Picture nominees — Arrival, Hacksaw Ridge, La La Land, Hidden Figures. All of them were developed inside a standard commercial genre system.

Plenty of things have shaped how films get judged over the years, and some of them look bizarre now. In the 1930s, when sound arrived, the master filmmaker Charlie Chaplin publicly opposed the use of sound in cinema: "I have decided to go on making silent films... I am a pantomime artist. In that medium I am unique, and a master."

But from the moment it was invented, film has been a product for widening people's horizons, or simply for passing the time. The zoetrope, a precursor of cinema also known as the peep-show box, was a gadget you could buy to enjoy at home, or pay to watch at a theater.

As the first people to screen films publicly for profit, the Lumière brothers were plainly among cinema's earliest beneficiaries. Demand for their Paris screenings quickly outran supply — the number of showings rose to more than 20 a day, and people still lined up. After that, film studios of all kinds appeared and began turning out films in volume. France's Pathé was one such pioneer: from 1900 to 1907, its revenue shot up from 345,000 francs to 24 million francs.

Seen this way, all early cinema could be counted as commercial film.

The historical split between commercial film and art film actually traces back to the rise of what was called art cinema. In the 1920s, films unlike commercial cinema appeared around the world. The three most visible movements were French Impressionist cinema, German Expressionist cinema, and the Soviet montage school.

French Impressionism began with The Tenth Symphony, made in 1918 by the French director Abel Gance. It was called Impressionist because these filmmakers took their model from the Impressionist painting that was highly fashionable at the time. That school, opened up by painters like Monet and Renoir, stressed the handling of light and of the picture itself, so French Impressionist films likewise paid close attention to light and to visual beauty. As for subject matter, they cared more about a character's divided inner life, using flashbacks, memory, even distorted images to show psychological states.

Painting inspired German Expressionism too. Unlike the French Impressionists, though, the German filmmakers used exaggerated mise-en-scène to carry a film's themes, and leaned especially hard on geometric patterns. To keep the mise-en-scène beautiful, they would even sacrifice the flow of the story itself: actors' movements were slowed down to match the elements within a scene.

The Soviet montage school pushed the power of montage to its limit. By cutting together shots with no connection at all, they conveyed the meaning hidden in the images. In Eisenstein's Strike, he joined footage of workers being massacred to footage of cattle being slaughtered, to express how alike workers and livestock were.

These schools all surfaced in the 1920s, and that was no accident. It was tied closely to one of the greatest disasters in human history: the First World War, which ran from 1914 to 1918.

Because the war was fought mainly in Europe, the fighting quickly destroyed the region's film industry. The Pathé factory in France that made film stock was turned into a munitions plant, and its studios into barracks. The domestic film industries of France and Italy largely ground to a halt, while the United States, on the other side of the Atlantic, was barely touched. American cinema seized the chance and rapidly took over the world.

"About 60% of the films Argentina imported in 1916 were American, and in the years that followed, South American countries bought more and more Hollywood movies. On screens in Australia and New Zealand, roughly 95% of films were Hollywood productions. Even in France and Italy, the American share was climbing." That is how David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson describe the period in their book Film History: An Introduction.

Taking the world's film market gave Hollywood an enormous advantage. Because it could make money overseas, Hollywood could put more money into every film, and still sell those films abroad relatively cheaply.

Under those conditions, film industries elsewhere could only survive by developing new kinds of cinema, unlike Hollywood's, to draw audiences in. In other words, what French Impressionism, German Expressionism and Soviet montage all had to push back against was the American cinema later regarded as the fullest expression of commercial film: Hollywood.

Many people take it for granted that Hollywood stands for the industrialization of film, which is true enough. But looked at as a cultural map, Hollywood's sweep across the globe was also the process by which American culture reached every corner of the world.

As in other industries, Americans used assembly-line work, a clear division of labor, and an extremely fine-grained grasp of the product and of market demand to turn film into something that could be taken apart into components. It was no longer wholly an act of individual artistic creation but collective work — all the more so once films like Star Wars arrived.

This is the famous Hollywood studio system. Richard Maltby describes it this way in his book Hollywood Cinema: "All decisions relating to studio affairs were made by the parent company: how many pictures to produce in a season, what the budgets would be, what the distribution plan would be."

"The studio boss's job was to make sure those decisions were carried out. He might approve new, creative projects, sign writers and directors, approve film budgets, manage various reports, and lease other personnel. He might also hold final say over the script, and oversee a film's progress by reviewing the dailies, as well as its editing."

In other words, Hollywood at the time was basically one big factory. Directors, cinematographers and screenwriters were essentially workers on the line, while the producers who really controlled the films cared about cost and profit and nothing else.

Maltby was describing the studio system of the 1920s through the 1940s, but all of it has come back. Take the Marvel Cinematic Universe: a creative committee has already mapped out which films will be made over the next five years and what style they will take. What remains is for producers to assemble the teams and shoot them.

By now this Hollywood production line has spread from making films to distributing them, showing them, and every other link in the chain.

Early on, studios use market research to gauge audience taste. At this stage there are at least two methods — concept testing and title testing — for judging whether a film will appeal, which then decides whether a project gets a green light.

Once a project is set, Hollywood runs on its own. Directors and writers are hired by the studio; lighting, makeup, sets and props all come from within a 15-minute drive of Los Angeles.

The visual effects needed in post-production are parceled out by temporarily hired VFX coordinators to effects studios around the world — it might be Weta Workshop in New Zealand, Industrial Light & Magic in Singapore, or Base FX and Original Force in China.

Once a rough cut is done, the studio holds test screenings to measure how audiences react. If viewers object to something or respond badly to it, the studio will recut the film, or even reshoot parts of it.

Then come the release date and distribution. Hollywood studios today may claim a slot three years ahead, and all they announce at the time might be something like "an untitled Marvel film." That also sends a signal to competitors: this date is mine, keep away.

The final product of this industrial system is the "commercial film" that pulls in enormous box office around the world every year.

All of this is of course a result of America's postwar boom, and a small picture of American industrialization inside the entertainment business. The world is besotted with this efficient way of making films. But looking back, that industrialization also gave creativity its ground: without a thriving industry, there would be no individual artistic achievement to speak of.

Hollywood has also made one fatal mistake, the one Richard Tedlow pointed to: it did not see the film business as the entertainment business, which let the rise of television satisfy the audience's appetite for entertainment for a while.

Television spread across America from the 1950s on. In TV's early days, Hollywood and the television business actually worked together. MGM made the Tom and Jerry cartoons and Warner Bros. put out Bugs Bunny, and both aired on television. Seen this way, TV became a new source of income for Hollywood.

But on the whole, Hollywood still treated television as film's enemy. In the late 1960s, MGM stopped making Tom and Jerry, and Warner Bros. shut down its own animation department. As their film businesses declined, the major studios chose not to put their own programming on television, but to lease their production facilities to independent producers and let them make TV shows.

That is how Hollywood handed the market to television. Weekly movie attendance in the United States fell from 98 million in 1947 to 47 million in 1957, and then to 15.8 million in 1971, a year in which at least a third of the 185 films released lost money.

In fact, from an industry standpoint, film and television are both ways of distributing audiovisual programming. Whether what Hollywood makes goes out on television or into theaters, in business terms there may not be much difference at all.

But it was precisely because Hollywood saw itself as the film business rather than an entertainment business that made audiovisual programming that it gave the market away to television. Hollywood panicked. It badly needed a workable model to win the market back. That is why, in the mid-1970s, the arrival of the blockbuster became the lifeline Hollywood grabbed.

In 1975, Steven Spielberg's Jaws came out of nowhere. It cost a mere $7 million — just over $30 million in today's money — yet took $470 million at the worldwide box office, about $2.1 billion today. Star Wars, released two years later, proved the power of the blockbuster all over again: it cost $11 million and grossed $775 million worldwide.

These films made big-budget productions loud enough, for a time, to drown out everybody else. But if commercial films feel cheap and everywhere today, the reason is the decline of the film industries outside the Hollywood world relative to Hollywood, and the death of the independent studios.

It makes you a little nostalgic for the New Hollywood movement that began in the late 1960s. 2001: A Space Odyssey, financed and released by MGM in 1968, is one of its emblems. Beyond the three minutes of darkness at the start, the symbolist imagery packed through the whole film showed it was nothing like a traditional Hollywood commercial picture.

And yet 2001: A Space Odyssey was still a huge commercial success. It took $68 million in North America, first among all films that year. A worldwide box office of $190 million gave the $10.5 million production a very high return.

Besides 2001, Hollywood in this period produced many films people can still name — Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now and The Conversation, Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven, Robert Altman's Nashville, and more. It's fair to call these years the most creatively fertile in Hollywood's history.

Even into the 1980s, after New Hollywood had ended, films like this still had room of their own. On one side, TV networks wanted more content and started funding small studios. On the other, videotape and later VCD and DVD raised the demand for films — they were sold on the shelves at supermarkets like Walmart, and with enough films you could sell enough discs, which gave a label more say.

By the late 1980s, 200 to 250 independent films were being released every year, more than three times the number the major studios put out. A crop of mini-majors appeared: Miramax, Quentin Tarantino's longtime partner, and New Line Cinema, which released My Own Private Idaho, among others.

Even so, these mini-majors have shown signs of decline in recent years.

Miramax was bought by Disney in 1993, but the two companies clashed badly in culture. When Miramax's founders, the Weinstein brothers, wanted to release Fahrenheit 9/11, Disney chairman Michael Eisner blocked it on the grounds that it didn't fit Disney's brand image. The Weinsteins left, and Disney eventually sold Miramax to a Middle Eastern group, beIN Media Group.

Focus Features, the sub-label Universal Pictures set up specifically for independent film, once released Brokeback Mountain. But in 2013, Universal put Focus Features through a strategic overhaul, and the films it picked shifted in style as a result; Fifty Shades of Grey was one of them. By 2015, Focus Features announced it was reviving the Gramercy label for action, science-fiction and horror films, including London Has Fallen.

From 2000 to 2004, the Hollywood Big Six's share of the whole market averaged around 68%. From 2012 it climbed fast, going from 74.2% to 84% in 2016. The share left to the mini-majors and independent films was squeezed hard.

If you knew none of this history, today's Hollywood really does look like a fallen thing. In that sense "commercial film" has turned into an insult: it means formula, it means limited box-office ambition. Film reduced to a product no different from shampoo.

But Hollywood today faces a second kind of crisis.

After the wave of mergers that started in the 1980s, the Hollywood Big Six are no longer only film companies; they are pieces of vast media corporations. Take Time Warner: besides Warner Bros., it owns the Cinamerica theater chain, TV networks such as CNN and HBO, Warner Music Group, the Six Flags theme parks and a whole range of other media businesses.

In that situation, Hollywood wants a film itself to work together with its other businesses and bring in as much money as possible — as Disney does, developing a line of toys, games, clothes and park attractions once a film succeeds.

This model has also deepened Hollywood's dependence on blockbusters. Only a film like Star Wars, with a stock of iconic characters and props, really lends itself to being turned into toys, games and other merchandise. It has also walked Hollywood into the "trap" of sequel blockbusters: stop making new Star Wars films, and the merchandise already developed won't sell.

Globalization has hurt Hollywood as well. American audiences no longer care much about big stars, but audiences in other countries do, and serving the global market means casting big stars. On top of that, to accommodate different cultures in different countries, the stories films tell have had to be simplified again and again, which is why superhero movies and action blockbusters keep coming one after another. Hollywood's own creativity has been taken hostage in the process.

Broadly speaking, plenty of shining, first-rate films have been commercial films. But the times they belonged to were so different: people asked film to carry more of a sense of mission, and even when what it was finally about was profit, it was still a mixture of technical invention, the symbols of its era, and storytelling.

Where have those films gone? One answer is that they move into narrower channels. America's Sundance Film Festival has become the world's largest independent film festival, screening films in the thousands each year. Digital platforms like Netflix and Amazon have also begun investing in independent film, giving these movies new chances.

They also take other forms. David Fincher got involved with House of Cards; Steven Soderbergh, after announcing he was done with movies, went and directed The Knick; the Coen brothers are about to make a Western TV series, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

At bottom, the entertainment business depends on gifted directors, writers and cinematographers. Wherever those shining people are, that is where creativity is. Commerce has never been the excuse for why a bad film is bad.

Cover image: Manchester by the Sea