It’s film awards season, which means movie lovers and Academy/Screen Actors Guild/Nickelodeon-watching kid voters alike have been busy sorting out the best films from last year.

Many of the most hyped-up contenders of this year’s (or any) film awards season are truly worthy of the honors they seek. Whether it’s because of their unique, high-concept plot, sublime acting performances, perfectly executed action thrills, or some other form of excellence, they deliver on their promises.

And then you have the other films up “for your consideration”—and those that really, really thought they would be. You know the ones I’m talking about. They’re tailor-made to give the appearance of depth, typically through shamelessly grandiose performances, clunky attempts to tackle Big Important Issues, or both. (And possibly a fat suit.) It’s these try-hards for whom the insult “Oscar bait” was first invented.

But in the midst of all this excellence, whether actual or ruthlessly engineered, it’s worth sparing a thought for the supposed lesser films and actors with no hope of taking home a tiny statue this year. These are the movies released on a random Friday in January—the film industry’s de facto “dump month”—or sent straight to streaming jail without even a half-hearted promotional campaign. Or better yet, made completely outside the Hollywood system by amateurs with little more than a camera and a handful of wacky ideas (and the results to show for it). Because if you’re willing to wade through the muck of these kinds of films, you may be pleasantly surprised by what they can teach us—not about badness, but instead about what passes for “good.”

For my money, there’s no better teacher than the cult film The Room, a 2003 cinematic catastrophe I find so fascinating that I edited a whole book of essays about it. Written, directed, starred in, financed, and produced by Tommy Wiseau, an untrained filmmaker of ambiguous Eastern European origins and means, The Room was supposed to be a deeply affecting story of a love triangle gone wrong. That was the intention, at least. The result, however, is a movie that is legendarily terrible: terribly shot, terribly written, and, most infamously, terribly, terribly acted.

Without even addressing the plot, or lack thereof, it’s easy to tick off the nearly infinite problems there are with The Room. Continuity is non-existent: one character announces, willy-nilly, that she has breast cancer, only for it to never be brought up again; another character disappears completely without explanation, only to be replaced by an entirely different character (also without explanation). Multiple gratuitous sex scenes (four!) go on for several minutes, in a movie that’s barely an hour and a half long. And, most memorably for fans, the dialogue ranges from utterly banal (“If a lot of people loved each other, the world would be a better place to live”) to strange (“Keep your stupid comments in your pocket!”) to downright nonsensical (“My Lisa’s great when I can get it”).

It’s easy—so, so easy—to dismiss The Room as nothing more than a perfect and hilarious example of something “so good it’s bad.” But if you let yourself dig below the (extremely rough) exterior, you’re left with a cultural artifact that reveals the deep-seated pretensions of the film industry. To wit: In its laughably transparent attempt to be taken seriously, it’s an accidental but deeply cutting parody of Oscar bait.

Take the performance of its star, Wiseau, playing the movie’s protagonist, Johnny. It isn’t merely big; it’s gigantic. “You are tearing me apart, Lisa!” Johnny wails during a mundane argument with his fiancée, gesticulating wildly for even greater melodramatic effect.

Minus the “Lisa,” this is an exact rip-off of a famous James Dean line in Rebel Without a Cause. Dean was one of Wiseau’s idols, and Wiseau’s performance can be seen as part homage to the Hollywood legend, part improvement attempt. Throughout the movie, Wiseau also channels his other idol, Marlon Brando, and his performance as the volatile Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, in particular.

Thanks to Wiseau’s unforgettable performance (and, to be fair, the performances of everyone else), The Room has become the biggest cult movie since The Rocky Horror Picture Show. That’s why fans flock to monthly screenings around the country and the world to gawk, smugly, at Johnny’s impassioned but utterly unconvincing cries. And yet, with The Room, Wiseau is doing, albeit very sloppily, what so much Oscar bait is accused of: trying really, really hard to convey pathos in an attempt to manipulate the viewer into feeling something.

Lacking even the most basic ability to develop plot and character, Wiseau goes all in with a brute force display of emotion. Like most shortcuts, the approach falls utterly flat. The louder Johnny shouts, the more he contorts his face to really show his heartache, the more the audience can’t help but laugh.

Unfortunately, the performances of Dean, Brando, and many recent, talented award nominees can’t just be mimicked for effect. There’s an alchemy to a truly moving performance that goes beyond good writing and acting skill (not that The Room remotely possessed either of those). The viewer usually knows when they’re being had.

It is exactly this Grand Canyon-sized gap between Wiseau’s intention (depicting a riveting domestic drama) and his execution (creating a surreal, seemingly incoherent work of possible outsider art) that makes the movie so “bad,” and thus so compelling. In this respect, The Room is like any other film that aimed so high but landed so low. Just much more so.

There is one important difference, though. Wiseau’s utter sincerity, no matter how absurd the final result, imbues The Room with a kind of authenticity that sets it apart. “You want to be fake? Not me. I hate fake stuff,” he told his crew during filming, according to The Disaster Artist, the 2013 memoir about the making of the film by The Room co-star Greg Sestero (and the inspiration for the 2017 film, also named The Disaster Artist). Indeed, Wiseau had so much faith in the emotional honesty of his work that when The Room was first released, he rented a Laemmle theater in the San Fernando Valley to show it for two weeks—the minimum run required for a movie to be considered for an Oscar.

If recent Oscar acceptance speeches are any gauge, more than a few actors (and directors, writers, and producers) believe they are creating something that transcends the mere label of “entertainment.” Some of them are. But more often than not, their goal is ultimately the same as Wiseau’s: to signal to the viewer that the movie they’re watching is important. Maybe even worthy of a top-flight award.

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My subjects were “Introduction to Cinema” and “Basics of Scriptwriting.” They may seem shallow, a poor attempt to retain normalcy in a country falling apart, but I found the experience to be a distraction from my other job, which was reporting on current events in Venezuela. Talking with my students, I realized that I wasn’t alone in seeking to forget, if only for a while, our daily tragedy.

The first thing I asked my students was about what kind of movies they watched. Less than a decade separated us, and it was easy to see generational trends that were no different from those of our demographic counterparts in other countries. You had your fans of Marvel and Harry Potter, users of Reddit and Tumblr, viewers of 13 Reasons Why or Game of Thrones, and even readers of literature ranging from Jane Austen to 50 Shades of Grey.

At first, it’s all too easy to declare all of this pure escapism: a release from inflation, food shortages, and one of the highest crime rates in the world. And while normal life is a struggle, finding foreign movies and TV shows is relatively easy and nearly free, as long as your internet connection allows it. Piracy is commonplace in Latin America, but what makes Venezuela stand out is the gradual inaccessibility of legal media. Even before the country was caught in quadruple-digit inflation, getting new books or going to the cinema regularly was seen as something of a luxury. Most of my students read their books not from paperbacks or on Kindle, but on Wattpad or as PDFs in their phones or laptops.

Looking deeper, though, you can see there’s also another kind of release involved, the one you get when you can put into words and images what you don’t have any other way to express.

Browsing Facebook and Twitter, it’s easy to find memes comparing the opacity and abuses of the Maduro government to the court intrigue in Game of Thrones’ Westeros, or memes juxtaposing the violent survivalism of The Walking Dead with daily life here—food shortages, failing infrastructure, and a very limited supply of medicine.

Earlier this year, social media followed closely the death of renegade security official Óscar Pérez—including videos he uploaded himself on Instagram. It was a scene that wouldn’t have been out of place in The Hunger Games or V for Vendetta, both of which younger Venezuelans reference to their own situation—sometimes as a joke, other times more seriously.

It’s ironic, really, that we end up defining our struggles through foreign media. When Hugo Chávez became president in 1999, he was seen as a nationalist, a military commander, a common man. But above all, he was a llanero, a plainsman, a Venezuelan cowboy who would lead not only a social or economic revolution, but also a cultural one.

He was seen by many as a return to our roots, a U-turn to a “real Venezuela”—a country that, incidentally, had been defined by the rule of charismatic strongmen.

A couple of artists and intellectuals soon adapted to this new situation, some because of political affinity, others for funds. Román Chalbaud, arguably the Bolivarian Revolution’s most prominent artist, used to be a filmmaker well-known for his realistic—if lurid—social dramas. Today, he mostly directs historical epics where llaneros read Karl Marx in the 1850s.

For 15 years there was a boom in Venezuelan cinema, in no small part thanks to a heavy investment and promotion by the government. It managed to make terrific, thought-provoking, award-winning films, and every now and then it made the occasional piece of propaganda, mostly by the hand of Chalbaud and his kind.

Yet, my students still disparaged Venezuelan movies as “snoozefests about Simón Bolívar” or “filled with thugs and prostitutes.”

The success of Papita, Maní, Tostón a couple of years ago—a bland, cheap gag-filled romantic comedy set in the world of baseball fandom—makes the case that Venezuelans do see Venezuelan movies, but probably don’t enjoy those that think too deeply about the state of the country.

In any case, most Venezuelan movies are hard to find since there’s very little market for home media or streaming here. And, for this reason, bootlegs aren’t easy to get. To watch Venezuelan cinema, your best option is YouTube, where you can find La Balandra Isabel”—one of the two Venezuelan films to win at Cannes—and “Papita, Maní, Tostón. But once those pixilated videos are deleted due to copyright infringement, your chance to watch the movie is gone, probably for good.

In a top 10 list of highest-grossing Venezuelan movies you’ll find three comedies, two action movies, two period pieces, one horror film, and two LGBT dramas. With the exception of these last two, and the action movies, which invariably focus on crime and corruption but never explore the reasons behind them, none expresses any sort of insight about today’s Venezuela.

So it made sense that when I asked my students to develop a plotline for class, most of them set their story either in the United States or in Western Europe. These were places they didn’t know and filled with obvious flaws—they thought that Minnesota is a city; Manhattan is outside New York City; Rome is a country. The few set in Venezuela were revenge stories or overflowing with eye-rolling nationalism.

These kids, born around the time Hugo Chávez took power, couldn’t imagine stories of love, comedy, adventure, or people’s difficulties set in their own society. Despite the government’s communications machinery—made up of several television channels, dozens of radio stations, and a handful of newspapers—and Chavismo’s cultural revolution, newer generations don’t see any images of themselves beyond despair and disillusionment. But at the same time, the opposition never managed to conceive a credible alternative to this situation.

In many ways, Venezuela has been rediscovering itself. As the country deepens into a crisis never seen here within living memory, we question supposedly inalterable facts that once defined ourselves and our nation. For 40 years Venezuela was a bipartisan democracy, made prosperous by spectacular oil revenues. One of the goals of the architects of what was dubbed “Saudi Venezuela” was to modernize the country or, at very least, to appear modern. This meant building contemporary art museums, an international literary contest, and state-of-the-art performance centers: The face of democratic Venezuela was Niemeyer-inspired architecture and art installations by Carlos Cruz-Diez.

But for many people—especially those impoverished after the economic catastrophe of the 1980s—the leaders were disconnected, elitist, more attentive to Miami or Bern than to the rural states or the slums of Caracas. It’s no surprise that apátrida, literally meaning “stateless,” was one of Chávez’s most used insults for his enemies. In his eyes, those against him weren’t “real Venezuelans.”

In response, the artists and intellectuals were baffled at how a man who had staged a coup against a democratic government could be voted in as president. For them, a question emerged: “Where did we go wrong?”

For most of the Chávez years, when you walked into any bookstore it seemed that 90 percent of the books written and published in Venezuela tried to answer this question. From journalists to college professors to former ministers, every kind of armchair expert gave their own national diagnosis and prescribed some vague formula to steer the country back on course.

This is no longer the case, though. As Chavismo solidified to become the new establishment, those experts faded from the spotlight. Partly this is due to the government quietly taking over media but it also reflects a younger generation that is not interested in restoring a flawed country they never lived in.

Today, the bookstores that haven’t closed fill their spare bookshelves with remaindered books, some of which go as far as the ’70s. Did you know there were Happy Days novelizations in Spanish? Some have a few new-ish books that easily cost a month’s salary. But lately even the trade in used books—which used to be healthy because so many people were leaving the country and trying to make quick money—has fallen off as inflation has risen.

As Venezuelans scatter around the globe, a new question takes relevancy: “What is Venezuela?” Is it a place? A memory? An ideal? Gone forever?

This question dogs the visceral, heartfelt crónicas of Héctor Torres as well the reflective, melancholic songs of La Vida Bohème. To so many Venezuelans—including those who have left, never to look back, those who look back from all directions, and those of us still remaining in the country without knowing what the future will bring—this question hovers around, unable to be ignored.

At the moment, it doesn’t have an answer. But I can’t wait to see the books and movies that we will create to answer it.

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