The True Oscar Winners Were the Internet Trolls Who Awarded Both Fan Votes to Mediocre Zach Snyder Projects

Not that it's relevant to the subject at hand, but just by way of full disclosure, I didn't watch The Oscars. For the first time probably since I was in preschool, I skipped it. Intentionally. I just was simply in no mood for virtue signaling, indignant speechifying, and assorted celebrity circle-jerkery. Award shows are pretty much like Saturday Night Live now in that you can save yourself hours of forced laugher and boredom, and should you miss anything worth seeing, your phone will let you know within a minute. Which is what happened when Will Smith went full Best Actor Winners Just Don't Understand on Chris Rock. 

So I don't regret choosing to watch 1982's Diner (Certified Fresh on Thornton Tomatoes) over seeing that person who won for that movie you didn't see thank those people you never heard of for three hours. The only moment I do wish I'd caught was the first ever fan votes. Because presenting those awards had to be a special moment. 

By way of background, the Academy Awards broadcasts have been rapidly bleeding viewers for a decade now. The show that drew over 40 million in 2010 was down to 28 million in 2020 and tanked to less than 10 million last year. And the fact this year the major nominees tended toward period pieces with limited appeal and obscure art house films that have only appeared on streaming services with small subscriber bases didn't help any. So they came up with this idea to let the internet choose a couple of fan favorites in non-official categories. The idea being that it would give the fanboys a chance to honor the first popcorn movie that truly brought the public back to the theaters, Spider-Man: Far From Home. And then, presumably, get their nerdy, vision-corrected eyes tuned in to the broadcast. 

And as they did so, the Academy made it painfully clear they are onto the internet's shenanigans, and they were not about to allow the kind of ballot box-stuffing that goes on whenever you ask the great unwashed to vote for something. Like the time Howard Stern listeners voted Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf People magazine's Sexiest Man Alive. Or any of our national elections. 

And the Academy's efforts worked about as well as you'd assume:

Source - Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead has won the fan-favorite award at the 2022 Oscars, besting other popular picks like Tom Holland’s Spider-Man: No Way Home and Camila Cabello’s Cinderella.

The unofficial award, which was announced Sunday during the Oscars ceremony, came as part of a partnership between the Academy and Twitter to give recognition to a popular film released in 2021, regardless of whether it received a nomination for the Academy Awards. Users were allowed to vote up to 20 times a day during the voting period for their favorites. …

Snyder fans also descended onto Twitter to crown a scene from Zack Snyder’s Justice League, aka the “Snyder cut,” for the #OscarsCheerMoment award, which gives a nod toward a fan-favorite scene from a 2021 film. Chatter about the Snyder cut increased 77 percent during the voting period, according to Twitter, compared to the previous 18 days. Justice League star Ray Fisher also cast a vote on Twitter for the scene, which sees the Flash (Ezra Miller) enter the “speed force.”

This is why, for all its flaws, social media has to exist. If for no other reason than to give regular people an outlet for spoling the party for the elites. To take a needle to the Beautiful People bubble they try to put themselves in. By all accounts, the hall was dead silent when these awards were announced. Which was the intent of the gag.

The thing is, I like a lot of Zach Snyder's work. While Man of Steel and Batman v. Superman give me debilitating nerdrages, his 300 and Suckerpunch more than make up for it. But even I say that in no known universe should his movies be getting awards of any kind. Except Razzies. So to take the biggest night in Hollywood, pack an auditorium with the movers and shakers of  the film industry and then honor Army of the Dead, which isn't even  an especially good zombie movie and which makes no sense whatsoever:

And while the Snyder Cut of Justice League was a vast improvement over the disjointed, atonal, narrative mess off the original theatrical release, Flash is by far the least interesting character, and the scene that won might have been his fifth of sixth best moment:

So well done, Twitter. I'm sure you've just seen to it there will never be fan voting allowed in an Oscars ever again. But it was worth it. You gave the show the hardest slap it saw all night.