OSCARS: THE DAY AFTER
The reality, the romance, the party,
The hostless Oscars made a virtue of necessity Sunday night, pulling a trick straight out of The Wizard of Oz.
Like the scam shaman in that 1939 Best Picture nominee, who was caught bluffing behind a curtain and then worked some version of magic anyway, the film academy finagled its way out of an embarrassing problem. However, it did so while pretending that other headaches — notably the existential threat posed by Netflix and other streaming services — don’t exist.
The academy acted as if it really didn’t need a show emcee to replace its abandoned choice, the Twitter-shamed Kevin Hart, and the trick worked. The telecast ran just over three hours rather than the customary four, making it seem almost too brisk (we critics are never happy).
Look at all the non-host hosts who were trotted out! Tina Fey, Amy Poehler and Maya Rudolph joked about how they were not hosting, reminding everybody how funny they are at the Golden Globes — and how they’d be preferred candidates to host the Oscars in 2020. The presentations pairing of Mike Myers with his Wayne’s World co-star Dana Carvey, Awkwafina with John Mulaney and a rabbit-festooned Melissa McCarthy with Brian Tyree Henry also offered amusing glimpses of talent the academy could possibly tap.
And who needs an Oscar for Best Popular Film — another failed academy scheme — when you’re handing out gold to critically panned/publicly adored films like Green Book and Bohemian Rhapsody, and finally recognizing Marvel Studios with wins for Black Panther and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, two other hits from last year.
The Academy Awards have rarely looked as populist as they did Sunday. I even liked the simplicity of the swirly stage design, which looked great even if many wags compared it to Donald Trump’s hair.
The Oscars also addressed, in their own awkward and gun-to-head way, the very real problem of being an awards show about white people honouring other white people.
By dramatically upping the number of women, people of colour and nonAmerican voters in its ranks, it helped result in the most diverse Academy Awards show ever. Many great moments attested to this.
Spike Lee won his first Oscar ever, a Best Adapted Screenplay win as one of the co-writers of BlacKkKlansman, a fact-based movie about Black and Jewish cops outfoxing the KKK.
Toronto’s Domee Shi won Best Animated Short for Bao, a film actually set in this most diverse of cities — you can see the CN Tower in the background. It’s a fantasy story about a ChineseCanadian mom, missing her absent child, who gets to mother an adorable dumpling.
None of the four acting winners — Rami Malek, Olivia Colman, Mahershala Ali and Regina King — were the usual vanilla Hollywood suspects. All except Ali were first-time nominees, and Ali had the distinction of being only the second Black actor ever to win a second Oscar, a feat Denzel Washington achieved 17 years ago but Ali managed in just two.
The 91st Oscars also saw first-time African-American wins for costume design (Ruth Carter) and production design (Hannah Beachler). Both were for Black Panther, the first Marvel superhero movie to be nominated for Best Picture.
So there was a lot of progress made. The academy even invited #OscarsSoWhite creator April Reign to attend the show and enjoy the parties after.
But now we get to Best Picture winner Green Book, the most divisive choice in years. By choosing Peter Farrelly’s head-patting racial parable over Roma, Alfonso Cuaron’s masterful human drama for filmdom’s top prize, the academy showed how bootless it is in using a preferential ballot for this category.
Combining second, third and subsequent choices results in a winner that is more of an accident of arithmetic — the choice that offended the fewest voters — than a true Best Picture victor. (And I’m saying this as someone who really liked Green Book.) The academy should drop the preferential ballot and use the simple majority system of the other 23 categories.
The more significant truth about Green Book’s win over Cuaron’s clearly superior film is that it let Oscar voters put off their inevitable reckoning with changing technology, represented by Netflix and other streaming services. Hollywood diehards can’t wrap their heads around the new reality that Netflix doesn’t embrace the traditional big-screen movie experience, it avoids it.
Netflix does begrudgingly have a few theatrical releases to woo Oscar voters, as it did with Roma, which it also backed with a reported $25-million (U.S.) publicity spree of a kind not seen since the freewheeling days of Miramax. In truth, Best Foreign Language Film winner Roma needs to be seen on a big screen to fully appreciate Cuaron’s empathetic artistry and Oscar-winning direction and cinematography.
Like it or not, Hollywood and the Oscars are going to have to make their peace with the streamers. This year will see the launch of Disney+, a new streaming giant that will threaten Netflix’s hegemony because it will also carry Marvel and Star Wars films. WarnerMedia, NBCUniversal and Apple will also soon launching streaming services, while Netflix, Amazon and Hulu (snapped up by Disney along with its Fox purchase) have expansion plans.
We got a peek of the fast-approaching future Sunday night with the first teaser for Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, a Netflix film which will primarily be viewed at home but which the streamer will undoubtedly push for Best Picture consideration at the 2020 Oscars.
Sooner rather than later, the wannabe wizards behind Oscar’s curtain will have to stop faking it.