#MediaMonday: Teaching the Oscars
Good Morning Everyone,
Last night was the Academy Awards: potentially the most influential awarding system in our country and arguable, in our world. In its essence, it is supposed to exposé the greatest achievements in filmmaking from the previous year.
If any of you are film teachers, this is something that you might want to discuss or even add into your curriculum. The entire notion of ranking films, in general, is one that is interesting in film studies. What makes one film better than another? What classifies one film to be immortalized and another to be forgotten? This is a complicated issue, with various social and political reasons that are a lot of fun to discuss with the students.
While this could easily turn into a conversation about that slap...there are many ways that you can incorporate this interesting night of film into your classroom, so today's topic is: teaching the Oscars.
First, most of our students do not know how Oscars are chosen. A great start is to explain the Preferential Voting System of the Academy. A simple video can be found at this link as explained by the LA Times that is a great place to begin: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/awards/story/2022-03-27/oscars-2022-best-picture-voting-explained. I also recommend having the students read the accompanying article and discuss it.
Next, I always get my students involved in the process of voting themselves. When Oscars are announced, I create an online quiz for the students to vote on each Oscar nominee category. Then, whichever student gets the most right typically gets a Fandango gift card or something. This is a great way to get students exposed to all of the categories in the Oscars and to give them a motivated reason to take an interest in the outcome of the Oscars.
Further, try to watch as many Oscar-nominated films together as possible. I always show as many of the shorts as I can, as many of them are online or on streaming platforms. This gives students an awesome opportunity to engage with the films and specifically in this case, it shows them films that they probably would not seek out on their own. Some of this films that are still available for viewing are:
Lead Me Home (Netflix)
Three Songs for Benazir (Netflix)
The Queen of Basketball (winner)
Now, I highly recommend watching these first (like with any suggested video) to make sure they are appropriate for your class. However, I have found that kids really enjoy watching these shorter pieces because they can be viewed quickly, they are awesome, and they are fairly unknown and make for a fun discovery.
Lastly, Oscars are fun to play time traveller with. You can make this into a year-long activity. Once a month, take an older film that won a best picture Oscar and screen it for your class. Then, have the discussion: did this deserve an Oscar and does it still stand up? These conversations are amazing and kids love to debate the lasting merits of cinema.
Oscar season can be an exciting time in your classrooms and bring the topics that we all love so dearly into the collective conversation of our society. Try some of this out and see if you can plug the Oscars into your lesson plans this week.
Talk to you soon,
Josh Cantrell
STN Education Coordinator
Central High School-Springfield, MO.
josh@studenttelevision.com