As we prepare for the 97th Academy Awards this weekend, here’s a reminder of the Oscars Cheer Moment, and the weirdest year in the body’s history.
On Valentine’s Day 2022, the American Academy of Motion Pictures unveiled a pair of awards so prestigious they could only be accurately communicated via hashtag.
#OscarsFanFavorite and #OscarsCheerMoment were the latest in a string of attempts from the world’s most famous awards body to stay popular and relevant. The last was in 2018 when, in an attempt to reverse the ratings freefall the ceremony had found itself in over the last decade, Film Academy president John Bailey proposed an official Popular Film category – the first new competition since Best Animated Film in 2001.
Months later, the award was slipped quietly into the organisation’s back pocket, after Academy members and the public at large united to declare the idea a silly one. Making a popular film, wise heads said, was its own reward (the definitional truckloads of cash they produced weren’t a bad thing either).
Despite the about-turn, the idea hadn’t really gone away. Some kind of extra recognition “for best picture [sounds familiar] or best general release is very much on our minds,” Bailey told the EnergaCamerimage Film Festival in Poland later that year.
As Bailey pointed out, the move had precedent. The very first Oscars ceremony way back in 1929 gave out two top prizes: Outstanding Picture for William A Wellman’s Wings, and Unique and Artistic Picture for FW Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. The Academy soon realised the distinction made no sense at all and ditched the second category, effectively celebrating the best ‘popular’ film at every ceremony since.
Read more: Oscars 2025 | The nominations are in
By the 21st century, of course, everyone had forgotten all that, and with the box office and the Academy increasingly at odds over the films they wanted to celebrate (the last Best Picture winner to also top the global box office charts was The Return Of The King in 2003), the powers that be decided something had to be done. The Best Popular Film debacle was a setback, sure – but it was nothing a tiny global pandemic couldn’t put into perspective!
And so, after Best Picture was granted to a day-and-date Hulu release in which Francis McDormand voided into a bucket (that’d be Nomadland), the time seemed ripe for something to bring audiences and Academy voters together. Eyes firmly on the future, the organisers partnered with 2013’s hippest social media site to announce two awards to be voted for entirely by the sane, rational people of Twitter.
#OscarsFanFavorite would celebrate their favourite film of 2021; #OscarsCheerMoment would hunt down the “most cheer-worthy moment” in the history of the moving image. Voters in each would be entered into a prize draw to win a year of free cinema tickets or “an all-expenses-paid trip to Los Angeles to present an Oscar at the 2023 ceremony” (this second prize, inexplicably, never materialised).
The vote was far from a free-for-all, though. To ensure only legitimate candidates were put forward, users were restricted to a perfectly sane 20 votes per person, per day, from the 14th February announcement through to the closing of the window on 3rd March. Despite these safeguards, both categories were quickly overtaken by absolute weirdos. The nominees, presented as written on the Academy’s Twitter account, were as follows:
#OscarsCheerMoment
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#SpiderManNoWayHome: Spider-Man Team Up
#TheMatrix: Neo Dodging Bullets
#Dreamgirls: “And I’m Telling You”
#AvengersEndgame: Avengers Assemble
#ZackSnydersJusticeLeague: Flash Speed Force
#OscarsFanFavorite
Army Of The Dead
Cinderella
Dune
Malignant
Minamata
The Power Of The Dog
Sing 2
Spider-Man: No Way Home
The Suicide Squad
Tick, Tick… Boom!
Yes, in a move genuinely nobody saw coming, Cinderella fought its way into Twitter’s top ten films of the year. If you’re wondering what the hell Minamata was (and you were – exactly eight people have seen it), it starred the recently ‘cancelled’/labelled-a-domestic-abuser-in-a-court-of-law Johnny Depp. Parts of the internet have a frightening parasocial relationship with that man.
The announcement that both awards would be presented live – the same year eight more traditional categories were to be announced off-air to save time – went down better than the Academy may have expected (i.e., they weren’t forced to change their minds again). And so, even as a selection of movies never mentioned in the same sentence together before or since battled it out for that awards season’s least appetising hors d’oeuvres, Twitter’s last Musk-free moment on the world stage trundled ever closer.
Sadly for Sing 2 and Dreamgirls, as soon as the shortlists were announced at the end of February, the victors of both #awards were all but assured. Not even the popularity of three friendly neighbourhood Spider-Men could compete with the ‘passionate’ fanbase of a man who makes sort-of-okay-and-occasionally-quite-bad action movies. From that point on, #OscarsFanFavorite and #OscarsCheerMoment became Zack Snyder’s to lose; and lose them, he did not.
Read more: Batman at the Oscars | Its wins, nominations and ‘snubs’
So it was that on a fateful Sunday night in March, Army Of The Dead was crowned Twitter’s film of the year live on ABC, and “Flash enters the Speed Force” was declared the most cheer-worthy moment in all of cinema. Announced by a disembodied voice to a room of bemused A-listers and (of course) a conspicuous lack of applause, the fiasco’s only saving grace came minutes later when Will Smith tried to slap the memory out of Chris Rock’s head.
The next day, Zack Snyder’s double-barrelled triumph was tragically forgotten; Judd Apatow was warning the world that Rock “could have [been] killed”, and Smith was banned from the ceremony for the laughably ominous period of “ten years”. Soon, no one would remember that the Oscars’ biggest format change in two decades was hijacked by incels and robots (the Academy later insisted the poll results had not been hijacked by robots).
But even now, the legacy of cinema’s strangest pair of awards lives on – though perhaps not in the way their conceivers intended. Since then, the idea of creating a popular film category has more or less vanished; the most cheer-inducing moment in the history of cinema (pre-2022) has been definitively found; and the entire #OscarsFanFavorite moment was such an obviously ill-conceived multi-storey bus crash of a debacle that no one will be able to suggest anything like it with a straight face until Will Smith is allowed back in the Dolby Theatre.
So thank you, #OscarsFanFavorite and #OscarsCheerMoment. You might just have saved the Academy Awards after all. Just not entirely how you were supposed to.
