Paul Schrader hasn’t watched the Oscars in 15 years

Paul Schrader has made a career out of speaking his mind honestly and gleefully disregarding public opinion, so it’s no surprise that he doesn’t particularly care about the Oscars.

In a new conversation with Oscar Isaac, published in Interview Magazinethe “Master Gardener” director explained that he advises his staff to avoid looking at awards shows as a measure of success — even though he admits it’s fun to win.

“It’s hard not to feel good when people say nice things, even if you think they’re wrong,” Schrader said. “On the other hand, I remember saying to Scorsese years ago — because Marty really wanted to win an Oscar, and he should have won an Oscar for some of his movies, but he didn’t, and it rubbed off — so I told him, ‘Marty, if the most important thing is to win the Oscar, then you will need new priorities.” And thankfully he won his, but you only have to look back at the winning films to realize that’s not the company you really want to be in.”

Schrader recently earned his first career Oscar nomination when “The First Reformed” was nominated for Best Original Screenplay in 2019. Despite this, the “Taxi Driver” writer said that he is becoming increasingly disinterested in the ceremony.

“I haven’t looked at it in ten or fifteen years,” he said. “I still voted, although this time I think I abstained from 80 percent of the votes.”

He said that he only votes in a category if one of the candidates stands by him and does not feel the need to attend despite the importance of the ceremony to the film industry.

“If I looked at five names and said, ‘I’m not really crazy about these,’ then refrain, refrain, refrain. Because this is so much a part of the economic, raw material of our business,” he said. “The Academy got themselves into a terrible mess by building that huge museum and going into a mountain of debt, so now they have to figure out how to get more and more people to watch the Oscars in more and more countries. can make more and more money, even though it actually started as a local thing years ago.”

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