STARRY NIGHT
‘Green Book’ took Best Picture during an Oscars show full of diverse firsts, smashed records — and dropped jaws.
Green Book took Best Picture at the 91st Academy Awards Sunday night, capping an evening of diverse firsts, smashed records — and dropped jaws.
Peter Farrelly’s racially-themed road comedy triumphed despite numerous racial and sexual gaffes on the promotional trail, snatching ultimate victory from Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón. His memory movie Roma, the first Netflix movie nominated for filmdom’s top prize, had been expected to win.
Cuarón did succeed in making Oscar history with Roma, his B&W drama about his Mexico City childhood, filmed in Spanish and in the Indigenous language Mixtec.
He won Best Director and Best Cinematography, the first filmmaker to win both prizes at one Academy Awards ceremony. Roma also took Best Foreign Language Film.
Three of the four winners in the acting catergories — Best Actress Olivia Colman ( The Favourite), Best Actor Rami Malek ( Bohemian Rhapsody) and Best Supporting Actress Regina King ( If Beale Street Could Talk) — were firsttime nominees. And Best Supporting Actor winner Mahershala Ali ( Green Book) became only the second Black actor to win multiple Oscars, many years after Denzel Washington’s similar achievement. (Ali previously won for Moonlight in 2017.)
Accepting the prize for Best Foreign Language Film earlier in the evening, Cuarón spoke for many at an event notable for its diversity when he observed that “foreign” is all in the eyes and ears of the beholder:
“I grew up watching foreign language films and learning so much from them and being inspired. Films like Citizen Kane, Jaws, Rashomon, The Godfather and Breathless. When asked about in the book about the New Wave, Claude Chabrol said, ‘There are no waves, there’s only the ocean.’ I think that the nominees tonight have proven that we are part of the same ocean.”
There were gasps of surprise in the Dolby Theatre as Britain’s Olivia Colman took Best Actress for playing dotty 18th century British Queen Anne in The Favourite, a film with 10 nominations (tied with Roma) going into the night, but which seemed destined to win nothing as the night ran on.
The prize had been expected to go Glenn Close, for her role of the aggrieved title spouse of The Wife. She’s now a seven-time loser at the Oscars, an unfortunate new record.
“It’s genuinely quite stressful!” Colman understated, fighting back tears as she clutched her prize.
First-time Oscar nominee Rami Malek took Best Actor for his protrayal of late Queen frontman Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody.
The film was the most winning one of the evening, taking four of its five nominated prizes, the others being craft awards for film editing, sound editing and sound mixing. It missed out only on Best Picture.
“I may not have been the obvious choice, but I guess it worked out.”
He thanked the surviving members of Queen, who opened the show by playing the band’s classic hits “We Will Rock You” and “We Are the Champions,” with singer Adam Lambert filling in for the late Mercury.
“We’re longing for stories like this,” Malek said of the outsider-to-rock-god arc of Mercury’s career. He noted that he’s the son of Eygptian immigrants to America, just as Mercury’s family had been immigrants to England.
Toronto filmmaker Domee Shi was one of the evening’s many first-time Oscar winners, taking Best Animated Short for Bao, a Disney-Pixar film set in Toronto. It’s a fantasy story about a Chinese-Canadian mother, missing her absent child, who gets a second chance at motherhood when a dumpling she makes for dinner comes to life.
“To all of the nerdy girls out there who hide behind your sketchbooks, don’t be afraid to tell your stories to the world,” Shi said from the Dolby Theatre stage, as she clutched her shiny golden statue.
Spike Lee didn’t get to win either for Best Picture or Best Director with BlacKkKlansman, his fact-based story of a Black cop infiltrating the racist KKK in the 1970s. But he got his first Oscar regardless, a shared win for Best Adapted Screenplay, making up for the sting 30 years ago when his acclaimed film Do the Right Thing didn’t even get nominated.
“The 2020 presidential election is around the corner. Let’s all mobilize, let’s all be on the right side of history,” he said.
“Make the moral choice between love versus hate. Let’s do the right the thing!”
Sunday’s show marked the first time since 1989 that the Oscars haven’t had a host, although what would have been a dream team of potential hosts showed up right off the bat to joke about not being hosts: comic actors Tina Fey, Amy Poehler and Maya Rudolph.
Black Panther from Marvel Studios was another noteworthy winner, the first comic book movie to win an Oscar — and it took three of them, for costume design, production design and original score.
It was a great night for Marvel, which also won Best Animated Feature for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.
Black Panther’s costume designer Ruth Carter won her first Oscar in three attempts, becoming the first Black woman to win this category: “Wow, wow! I got it! This has been a long time coming!”
She added, to audience applause: “Marvel may have created the first black superhero, but we turned him into an African king,”
Pop diva Lady Gaga won her first Oscar for the song “Shallow” from A Star Is Born.