Last week, it was revealed that there would be some potentially big changes at the Oscars in the years to come. In addition to the show being capped at three hours in length, it was stated that they would aim to make one other big change — a popular film category.

In recent years, the Oscars has fought with irrelevance due to their selection of — in the words of our own Nick Doll — “boring and safe” films for Best Picture. It’s become rare that any film mainstream audiences have actually seen would actually be in contention for the top prize. With that in mind, they hoped this addition of the category would bring more discussion to those films, and more importantly, higher ratings to their broadcast.

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I hear you. “But what does Mark Wahlberg think about this?” I hear you asking. Well, that’s a very specific person whose opinion you value. Luckily for us, we know exactly what he thinks thanks to his comments to Variety:

“Maybe if they’d had the category before, we’d have won a couple of them. We’ve had some really commercially successful films that we think certainly warranted that kind of notoriety. We make films that we want people to enjoy and if we get those kind of accolades, fantastic. If not, we make the movies for audiences to enjoy.”

I poke fun at Wahlberg, but he’s honestly got the right idea. In very few instances are these movies made with the critics in mind. First and foremost, they tend to be for the viewers, and so long as they resonate with them, critics be damned, right?

While it’s true, I’m admittedly still of the opinion that the Oscars need to get their heads out of the sand and start to realize the great art being done with some of these blockbusters. They don’t necessarily need to be Oscar winners, but every year, there are usually one or two that I think outperform even the most Oscar-baity films at their own games, but thanks to their budget and popularity, they are often stigmatized. I see this popular film category as means of brushing aside that problem and letting these movies have their own “kids table,” as it were.

Which side of this argument do you fall on? Sound off down below!

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SOURCE: Variety