"Best Popular Picture"...

Is a new category being introduced by the Motion Picture Academy of Arts & Sciences (AKA "The Oscars") in a attempt to improve the TV broadcast's ratings and hand a statue to a profitable film production with a high recognition factor. The critics have pounced on the proposal and mocked it as a "dumbing down" of the Oscars, which is ironic to me, because the Academy Awards are hardly "movie night" at your local Mensa chapter. There is also some criticism to the effect that this is a transparent ploy of obscure the heavy round of allegedly partisan politics that overshadows the balloting. There is a shit ton of politics in the lead up to the Academy Awards but it isn't always a bicoastal liberal caricature, there is definite "block voting", notoriously by British Artists working in Hollywood, how else to account for Eddie Redmayne's sudden vault to the A-List? And then there is Hollywood's ongoing exploitation of women In Front and Behind the Cameras, everyone sweats and tugs their collars about it, then hands a golden statuette to Judi Dench or Meryl Streep to ease the collective anxiety...for one night anyway. No...I'm guarded FOR this idea, I know it sounds like half baked pandering, but hear me out. Correctly deployed, this might finally get American Comedies they recognition they so desperately deserve, comedy remains the USA's best and most reliably self regenerating genre, it is overlooked almost every single year during "Oscar Season". Science Fiction and Fantasy (once Hollywood's "Red Headed Stepchild") gets a friendlier reception from The Academy that the hard work of Kate McKinnon or Seth Rogen or even James Franco... Granted the whole premise of the Oscars is bullshit from start to finish, anxiety wracked creatives and certain technical guilds none of whom have a strong sense of job security all voting themselves awards down to laughably obscure categories without any critical or outside input of any kind. I say the comedians and the comedy writers in Hollywood, who get Academy Ballots" ought to do some "block voting' themselves, how else to finally grab off what Jim Carrey has called "The Ultimate Tchotchke"? And who knows, this might be Gal Gadot or The Rock's Once Chance to Get Up on that Podium...or (dare I say it,) Bobcat Goldthwaite?