Some large fraction of the academy haven't seen the movies. Winning over that fraction is massively important. Marketing has been one way, not mentioned in the article. They literally pay to advertise to advance Oscar winning prospects. If you haven't seen the movie but need to vote on it then following the prevailing zeitgeist is a pretty common technique, rotten tomatoes strongly influences that zeitgeist, probably more strongly than the advertising and pr campaigns.<p>The real problem is most members voting clearly haven't seen the films and aren't voting their own opinion. If you can call anything of this utterly fatuous nature a problem at all. It's impossible to be cynical enough about Hollywood...
Causation vs Correlation.<p>My own belief is that the majority of those who rate films online tend to be of a younger demographic. As members of the Academy themselves get younger, it's not completely outside the realms of possibility that the two tastes become more aligned.
The real surprise here is that there is anyone left who thinks that RT scores aren't basically paid marketing for whatever film is in question, and are real organic reviews.<p>Especially with the recent virtue signaling olympics that movie critics have been going through to evaluate movies on anything but their actual quality.