Nothing happens in a vacuum. As anyone who has studied film history will tell you, films are often created with what came before it in mind, as well as recent events in history. That’s not a huge surprise, is it? Even public reaction to these things is affected by what came before. Just look at the rise and fall of the Western, a genre that went through many phases before petering out altogether.

The same can also apparently be said of awards consideration, including the granddaddy of all film awards, the Academy Awards. For many years now, they’ve eschewed more popular films of the year in favor of smaller, more intimate movies that arguably had little to no audience, including films like Moonlight and Spotlight. There was recent talk about a potential film category, but that has since been shelved.

But what does a big Hollywood director think about this? Specifically, Mission: Impossible – Fallout director Christopher McQuarrie. Here’s what he told Collider.

“I think that there’s a point at which we’ve lost sight of the fact that what we’re here to do first and foremost—sorry if this sounds offensive to anybody—is to entertain people and to move people. A part of me looks at that and says, ‘Well, there are big movies that do that too.’ I was reading online the back and forth, the arguments of how certain films didn’t qualify because they’re just not Academy Award movies. This one guy had this unbelievably articulate seven-paragraph argument for all of the things that qualified a movie, none of which were Titanic. It wasn’t that long ago that a film like that was both commercially successful and won all of those Academy Awards. I think some of what we see now is a little bit of a backlash from that. There’s a morning after and people say, ‘We did what? We gave the two billion dollar earning movie an Academy Award and not these other movies?'”

RELATED – Director Christopher McQuarrie Talks Man Of Steel 2

And not long after Titanic, the Academy gave out Oscars by the handful to The Return of the King — though that was largely thanks to the strengths of the entire trilogy, not just one film. However, since then, the Oscars have almost largely been a small movie’s game. Will we soon be reaching an era where we regularly award larger movies again? Hm…

Do you think larger movies should more regularly qualify for the bigger Oscar prizes? Let us know down below!

Don’t forget to share this post on your Facebook wall and with your Twitter followers! Just hit the buttons on the top of this page.

SOURCE: Collider