(UFRGS - 2019)The Academy of Motion Picture Arts a

(UFRGS - 2019)

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced a new category in time for next February’s awards ceremony: “achievement in popular film”. The idea is [5] that, alongside the time-honoured “Best Picture” category, there will be another for films which have a broader appeal: blockbusters, in other words. Ironically, the announcement has been anything but [10] popular. On social media, responses to this idea have ranged from hostile to very hostile indeed. Many feel that the once-prestigious Oscars are dumbing down to the level of the MTV Awards. What’s next—Best kiss? Loudest [15] shoot-out? Most skyscrapers flattened by aliens in a single action sequence?

The concept of the “Hit Oscar” or the “Popcorn Oscar”, as it has been nicknamed,
raises other questions, too. To start with, who [20] decides whether or not a film is popular? What are the criteria or thresholds? And isn’t it an insult to nominees, the implicit suggestion being that hit films can’t be artistic (and vice versa)?

[25] The timing, too, is off. “Black Panther”, Marvel’s Afrofuturist superhero blockbuster, could well have been nominated for best picture in 2019. Indeed, it could well have won, ……… acknowledging the superhero [30] boom as well as emphasising just how successful films with black casts and creative teams can be. But it is now likely that “Black Panther” will be shoved into the “popular” ghetto, and that the best-picture prize will go [35] to an indie drama. If so, the introduction of a new category will have helped maintain the status quo, rather than upending it.

It is understandable that the Oscars’ organisers should want to shake up the [40] ceremony’s format, bearing in mind how low its television ratings have fallen. One reason for this decline, the theory goes, is that best- picture winners are no longer the films that the great American public is queuing up to [45] see.

But if hugely profitable, crowd-pleasing films aren’t winning best picture these days, it is not because the Academy’s voters are becoming more snobbish or sophisticated in [50] their tastes. It is because Hollywood has stopped making middlebrow historical epics that used to be a shoo-in. What the introduction of the popular category acknowledges is that there are now hardly [55] any studio films in the chasm between shiny comic-book movies and quirky indie experiments. The industry is producing nothing for grown-up viewers who want more scale and spectacle than they can get from a [60] low-key drama, but who don’t fancy seeing people in colourful costumes firing laser beams at each other.

The new division between best picture and popular picture may be ill-judged, but it [65] reflects a pre-existing dichotomy between arthouse and multiplex fare. So have pity on the poor Academy. If Hollywood studios weren’t quite so obsessed with superhero franchises, the Oscars might not be in this [70] mess in the first place.

Adaptado de: https://www.economist.com/prospero/2018/08 /11/the-academy-announces-a-misguided-newcategory. Acesso em: 08 ago. 2018.

 

Considere os seguintes trechos extraídos do texto.

I - The idea is that, alongside the timehonoured “Best Picture” category, there will be another for films (l. 04-07).

II - It is understandable that the Oscar´s organisers should want to shake up the cerimony´s format (l. 38-40).

III- (…) best-picture winners are no longer the films that the great American public is queuing up to see (l. 42-45).

 

Em quais a palavra that pode ser tanto omitida quanto substituída por which?