Oscars and Comedy?

http://www.avclub.com/articles/undaunted-by-rape-jokes-and-jaws-music-oscars-hire,96620/

Investigating the Oscars as a tool for analyzing both public and industry perspectives on genre is interesting. For someone like me, who hopes to develop quirky and absurd comedy into a career, a la Coen Brothers or Wes Anderson, this ceremony can often be depressing. Rarely do comedies even get nominated for the Best Picture award, and more often than not, the reasoning we assume for this is that the Academy takes itself too seriously.

After all, the Golden Globes has a category for Best Musical or Comedy (already an interesting grouping to investigate), so the Oscars might as well be saved for the more high brow emotional films, right? It's not an Oscar movie if the music does not sweep, and the melodrama does not lead half the audience to tears. Here and there, this pattern is broken, but all-in-all there is little variety.

To me this makes the article by the AV Club all the more interesting. Here, The Onion team is teasing the Academy for rehiring last year's producers, who it criticizes for allowing there to be jokes about rape, the Jaws theme as a sendoff song, and for choosing Seth MacFarlane as host. All of these are reasonable criticisms considering the level of prestige with which the Oscar ceremony expects to be viewed. With its teary-eyed tributes, service as a pulpit for Michael Moore, Jodie Foster, and more, and its proud history, perhaps the seriousness is appropriate.

It does, after all, send two very different messages in its presentation and its choices. Perhaps the perspective of the Oscars is comedy is useful to make what is boring interesting, but not to tell anything important. They cater to their audience with an attempt to appear neutral; after all, foreign language films have their own category since most Americans never watch them.