The Big Six conglomerates (Comcast, Sony, Time Warner, 21st Century Fox, The Walt Disney Company, and National Amusements) are vertically integrated entertainment giants that control assets in film and television production, theatrical distribution, television distribution, home media distribution, and various other entertainment fields such as theme parks, music production, publishing, video games, and many others. Of the categories we looked at for the 2015 Oscars (all except the short film categories), 78 of 106 nominations (74%) went to the Big Six. While these awards - which give more attention to so-called “independent” and “art” films, music, and television than the general media-buying and -watching population - do allow for some diversity, they’re nothing more than a product of an industry that is dominated by a handful of giant companies. The point is, rather, that they don’t have to. I don’t mean to suggest that these companies are involved in backdoor, under-the-table, or any other manner of shady dealings in order to get their films nominated. I’m not sure to what extent these results will be surprising. Broadly, it shows that these awards disproportionately reward eight multinational media conglomerates: Time Warner, National Amusements, Sony, The Walt Disney Company, 21st Century Fox, Comcast, Vivendi, and Access Industries of the 398 award nominations we looked at, 290, or 72%, went to these eight companies.
PERIPHERY HAS IT LEAKED TV
So in order to try to define what these awards are, rather than add to the speculation on what they might mean, The Periphery has put together an infographic that shows which companies are responsible for the distribution of the movies, music, and TV shows that were nominated for the three major media awards - Oscars, Grammys, and Emmys. What’s necessary, however, is an economic explanation, or at least a cultural explanation based on the economic realities that drive the system. Whatever side of the debate arguments about the Oscars fall on, they all propose cultural explanations, with perhaps a vague air of frustration at Greedy Hollywood. The Times in 2010 published the responses of several film critics, scholars, and writers to the question “ Do The Oscars Undermine Artistry?” which outlines the typical discourse around the awards. On the one hand you’ve got uncritical supporters of middle brow entertainment who treat the Oscars with the seriousness and uninterrupted news coverage they assume it deserves (the New York Times, for example, devotes a daily-updated blog to awards season called The Carpetbagger) on the other hand, you’ve got detractors who claim that the Oscars, among other things, don’t award the best films, are unfairly Americentric, are a giant marketing ploy, etc. The basic debate surrounding the Academy Awards is simple enough. There are those, would you believe it, who aren’t so convinced of the significance of these awards. Of course, it’s not so simple as all that. It’s a sacred time, when the hallowed streets of Los Angeles are filled with papal white smoke billowing from the Academies of Motion Picture, Television, and Recording Arts and Sciences, monolithic institutions of cultural excellence. It’s awards season, that interminable stretch of time when the various media industries deliberate on the quality of their products from the past year, and decree with empirical and democratic certainty which were the best.