Oscars can be manipulated but also they are broken up into categories and don’t necessarily reflect popularity. For example you can have a complete shitter of a movie but still get say best music, best set, or best editing. A good example of something like this is that boring ass Mel Gibson mailman movie, which IMO actually has pretty decent costumes and set design hell the story isn’t even that bad it’s just something went wrong and it came out boring, don’t know if it got any awards just using a mid movie as an example.