Hate to break it to you, but the Oscars were always like that.

Most people are not familiar with the Oscars but it was created as an anti-union group where the people in power gave voting rights to people who had past commercial success and the goal was to create a "status quo bias" aka a "In Club" that was self perpetuating.

Is it any surprising that the same type of "rules" that determine the voting by "controlling who is part of the Academy." But instead of being an institution of higher learning, it was a membership club to show who is "part of the elite." Well this same elite will be insular by its nature of who is allowed in and thus we will see less women and other races be part of the club for this was a self perpetuating a culture bias from the late 20s and 30s.

Furthermore when you have such an insular club you will have a social cache, a social currency where you are trying to promote things that are associated with you and people you like. And when social movements outside of this insular club occur and there are competing social currencies you will also see this insular club try to argue that they are the true deliverers of this alternative social currency in order to maintain the social pyramid that they are attached to for they are at the top or close to the top of the existing social pyramid.

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A social pyramid that is not just about social currency but also real world currency for these types of awards create monetary incentives of what types of movies get made if people believe that the awards are quantifiers of what you should watch, and thus people go to the movies and so on. A form of "Virtuous circle and vicious circle" feedback loops.

And this was the entire point of creating the oscars with its anti union membership for it encourage the sale of productions that did not have unions and discouraged upstarts which may be more likely to be union. Of course unions did eventually happen in Hollywood, but that does not mean the Oscars did not succeed at its goals. By creating another form of currency besides money you allowed people who to make money to better control other parts of the moving making process such as actors, the crew, and so on. To quote the guy who created the oscars.

Me personally, Matt / Roland00...well I am not really into this pagentry and such for I find it inauthentic...But I understand why these things exist and they do serve some good social functions if these institutions are managed correctly. That said part of me just does not care enough to be invested in whether they are managed correctly or not...there are too many things in the world and I just can't care about everything even if everything has a purpose in some grand design (note I am not implying in a god, but I am refering to instead the culture that human mankind creates, everything that mankind interacts with comes from humans or nature itself.)