The Weekly Reel, Oscars Special
The first in-person Oscars for a couple years featuring a leaner format with backlash and the first with streaming companies seriously competing against studios.
Although the Oscars merit justified criticism and a volte-face over its history of winners that age like Hackfleisch, it still offers one the chance to look back at the previous year in North American-British cinema and judge accordingly. For one with a film blog, it offers the chance for a belated Year-in-Review special.
This is not a comprehensive list of all nominees and predictions, which is an exercise in hubristic clicktrolling. I’m merely here to point out some light observations on snubs, controversy, Best Pic nominees, and special mentions.
Snubs and Controversy
One of the tritest critiques of the Oscars is the “snub.” It’s the equivalent of the meme with three orangutans sitting around a talk-show coffee table asking in pongine English, “where banana?”
Put simply, the Academy banged The French Dispatch on all fronts. While the prestige awards (Picture, Acting, Director, and sometimes Screenplay) are more volatile depending on industry whim, one can safely argue that, at the very least, the Academy ought to have recognized The French Dispatch for outstanding achievement in the technical categories: Costume Design, Film Editing, Makeup & Hairstyling, Cinematography, and Production Design. One can proceed further to argue that Production Design—which Richard Brody claims “should be named the Wes Anderson Award”—should go to Adam Stockhausen and Rena DeAngelo. From the film’s intricate miniatures to stop-motion, animation to set design, it’s no contest—were the snubs to give other films a chance? The rumor for this embarrassing stiff-arm is the way in which nominees are chosen, namely by way of industry unions relevant to each category. It’s not uncommon for the nominees of Cinematography and Production Design to mirror one another because of overlapping members. But these voters unequally favor the former and for unexpressed reasons have had enough with Anderson.
Looking at the prestige awards it becomes clear we’re dealing with a full Oscars sweep. Jeffrey Wright delivers one of Anderson’s best performances. While it may be true that Oscar nominations are subjective representations of how the industry wishes for others to perceive it, one need not amputate an auteur, an endangered species nowadays, for sociocultural vanity.
Another “snub” of technical awards is the confident directing, writing, production design, and costuming and makeup of David Lowery’s The Green Knight. A24 decided to promote its sqaure-framed, chiaroscuro Denzel oscarbait instead, which reduced the “for your consideration” ads for The Green Knight to nil. And this happened even before the realpolitik game of awards.
And finally, the lack of recognition for Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim for Licorice Pizza reveals a glitch in the acting categories that enlarged and/or more specific categories could fix. The Critics’ Choice Awards offers six nominations for the four standard acting categories as well as Best Young Actor/Actress and Best Acting Ensemble categories. Alana not receiving the Acting nod was especially bizarre and on the level of The French Dispatch snubbery.
One could go on with snubs of foreign and indie titles, but that’s not the game the HW studios are playing for their yearly yackamadu.
It wouldn’t be a proper Oscars without controversy. Claiming the need to please the network host, the showrunners will cut an hour of material, most notably the award presentations for Documentary Short, Editing, Makeup and Hairstyling, Score, Production Design, Animated and Live Action Short, and Sound. Their awards will be handed over, untelevised, an hour before the show and then “seamlessly” edited into the show. Good on the Academy for finding a compromise that is equally awful for those who like to watch the show and those who weren’t going to watch it anyway. What it does reveal is the lack of creativity among the show’s producers, who should be looking towards a younger audience through YouTube or Instagram live.
Several stars have since shown solidarity with these minor award nominees with threats of red-carpet no-shows. Let’s hope they deliver!
Oscarbait
Until the #OscarsSoWhite twitter protest in 2015 against all twenty acting nominations going to whites, the Best Picture award consistently receives the most grunts and grievances. The range of opinion runs anywhere between proper (Parasite) to yikes (The Green Book) and “why the fish-fucking one?” (The Shape of Water, against all odds, beat out eight films that were better than it: Call Me by Your Name, Dunkirk, Get Out, Darkest Hour, Lady Bird, Phantom Thread, The Post, and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri).
Alas, forget all that. This year’s selection contains a variety of topics: half-gay Western, half-implied child pedophilia, sand vfx renders, energetic multiethnic musical made by a seventy-five year old white, black & white N. Irish memoir, deaf-family dramedy (that proves Americans are funnier silent), political oscarbait (that one should not look up), three-hour Japanese Murakami adaptation, Will Smith, and a literal nightmare.
Rather than talk about each film, I’ll group them according to categories specific to the Oscars: oscarbait, outsiders, and auteurs. The films could easily fit into more than one category, but I’ll break them down according to my own prejudices.
Gabriel Rossman and Oliver Schilke performed important scientific research with “Close, But No Cigar: The Bimodal Rewards to Prize-Seeking”. In it, they use mathematical formulas to determine the levels of oscarbait for films between 1985-2009. They found keywords like “family tragedy,” “domestic servant,” and “panties hit the floor” in more Oscar-nominated films than those with “zombie,” “bestiality,” and “black independent film.” They concluded that the most oscarbait film was Come See the Paradise, which nobody saw and received no nominations.
This isn’t to imply a value judgment on oscarbait films. They hit every level from The Green Book to Parasite, but their distinctive trait is the feeling one gets that the studio or director is trying too hard. This usually takes the shape of formulaic stories with slight twists to make it more relevant to today’s sociocultural values. Because of this, the films tend to age poorly. Other indicators include Pulitzer Prize adaptations, superstar actors, and genre (dramas, musicals, and biopics).
King Richard, while telling an important success story of an underprivileged community, is still a biopic featuring a superstar actor, which ticks many of the boxes. It’s a fine movie that features a Vegas-odds-winning performance by Will Smith but not much happens beyond the usual underdog sport film stuff.
Another film using its stars to catapult itself into the awards front rows is Don’t Look Up. The film would have landed in the auteur category if Adam McKay had a coherent vision. The formerly comic director stumbled into laurels with The Big Short, which gave McKay the unintended mandate to make his next two films, Vice and Don’t Look Up, about explaining current events to the dumb masses. That may have worked for the banking crisis, which nobody really knew how to explain, but this style is limp when taking on firmly established liberal villains (Dick Cheney and climate change). In other words, it’s like we told Michael Scott that he’s smarter than Oscar and now we’re all sitting the entrance to Dunder Mifflin watching Michael rant about digging a hole to China.
Speaking of stars directed by an Oscar-winning director, Nightmare Alley is solidly in the hands of a visionary director. Guillermo del Toro won two Oscars for his last film and is committed to the fantasy-horror flick more than any other Oscar-winning director. The mood of the film is unmistakably that of del Toro, which in the first half revolves around a mid-century, rain-soaked, sepia-toned carnival. The second half goes into the success of the protagonist as he performs for NYC elites. While the story is adapted from a 1947 film, it felt like it could or would seamlessly slip into fantasy at any moment, which one would expect from GdT. The payoff in the end was the biggest letdown (the final scene with Cate Blanchett explaining things was the worst offender), and overall, the film suffered from a distance between tone and story.
And to conclude the oscarbait section with the oscarbaitiest of them all is Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story. It’s got it all (except superstar actors): adapted from the 1961 groundbreaking classic that won ten Oscars, three-time Oscar-winning director, ethnic inclusivity and multilingual acting, and epic historical musical with a classic Shakespeare plot. I was completely shocked how well Spielberg pulled off an energetic story about young love. As IndieWire’s film critic rightly put it, although Spielberg never directed a musical before, “it sometimes feels as if they’re the only kind of movie that he’s ever made.” It moves gracefully and triumphantly even though the story is as old as modern English. The dialogue is corny when it ventures too far from the original film’s expert writing, which is why the film succeeds in the climax when it sticks closely to the original rather than go for the sociocultural twist that a younger or less confident director surely would’ve taken (I thought that police brutality would take center stage and was praying to God that it wouldn’t lead to the unity between Jets and Sharks).
Auteurs and Outsiders
One may regard all the Best Picture nominees as oscarbait by definition, therefore it takes something more to elevate them above the rest. One is usually from the strong vision of a director; the other, and less frequent, is the disrupting outsider that may also come from an auteur but is an unlikely candidate for Best Picture due to the stare decisis of Academy voters.
One could argue Spielberg is more auteur than Kenneth Branagh, but nothing (Schindler’s List is the exception to all rules in Spielberg’s oeuvre) from SS is more personally directed than Belfast. The critics liken the Northern Ireland historical memoir to a pastiche without innards; for them, it was the auteurishness itself that caused this problem. To kick it while it’s down, the film does contains many oscarbait traits that the regular bloke could easily recognize as filmic pandering. Nonetheless, I find the film’s sincerity watchable and agreeable, no matter how much it’s a “scattershot crowd-pleaser.” Branagh’s three nominations set the record for most category nominations of an individual: Picture, Original and Adapted Screenplay, Live Action Short, Best Actor in Leading and Supporting roles, and Director. We should be supporting this kind of scattershot industriousness even if it be towards supposed crowdpleasers.
Paul Thomas Anderson received the same three Oscars nominations as Branagh (Picture, Director, and Original Screenplay). My review of Licorice Pizza can be found in my last Weekly Reel, therefore I won’t say more except that it seems more likely than not, to my personal chagrin (and maybe also to Sam Elliott’s but for much different reasons), that Jane Campion might single-handedly bulldoze PTA’s chances for Picture and Director. My review of Campion’s The Power of the Dog is in my penultimate Weekly Reel. Not much needs to be said about the quality of Campion and PTA’s expert ability at telling a story. While PTA lives in Greater Los Angeles, Campion lives in New Zealand and was the first woman to win the Palmes D’Or and second woman nominated for Best Director. According to Vegas odds, Campion and her film are the safer bets.
The final three films are oddities when compared to previous Best Picture winners. CODA, following the success of Sound of Metal representing the deaf community, is a strong Picture and Screenplay contender. As alluded to earlier, the mediocre humor when calibrated to A.S.L.-acting elevates it and turns a cookie-cutter dramedy into a potential accolade receiver. The plot is derivate to say the least and would be the safest (meaning least controversial) winner.
Drive My Car, following the success of a foreign language Best Picture winner (and successfully employing sign language), is a three-hour dramatic adaptation that non-Japanese people must read (quite the task for an American!). The literariness of the screenplay, which won the Prix du scénario at Cannes, is the film’s advantage and disadvantage: being adapted from a talented author provides the film with more story weight than others but at the expense of its dependence on visual storytelling. With that being said, the visuals are still enjoyable and creates the necessary atmospheres when driving between apartment to hotel to snowy house-wreck.
And Dune, although a big-budget sci-fi HW tentpole, finds itself nominated for Oscars not usually associated with these films. The number of Best Picture nominees expanded to ten to recognize these blockbusters but instead went towards arthouse and independent films. The sci-fi and fantasy tentpoles usually just compete for the niche VFX award each year, not for Best Picture against a three-hour Japanese drama and deaf-family dramedy.
An outsider without a Best Picture nomination worth mentioning is Flee, the triple-nominated (Animated, International, and Documentary Feature) memoir of a gay Afghan adolescent fleeing Afghanistan by way of Moscow to Denmark. The form resembles the animation-memoir of Persepolis and Waltz with Bashir, and like these films, we too easily overlook and forget the stories of refugees and victims of war compared to the politics associated with their displacement and amnesia. But also, and importantly so, the story doesn’t succumb to the misery porn that lesser filmmakers would have grossly employed.
If you’ve made it this far, wow!
I’ll just leave you with this: the New Yorker’s Richard Brody argues that the mainstream of studio filmmaking is dead, especially since the expansion of the Best Picture category to ten and #OscarsSoWhite campaign. Furthermore, he goes through the films that ought to and probably will win the awards.
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