PICTURE PERFECT? NOT THIS YEAR
Race for best movie an unprecedented nail-biter
Even supposing the right envelope is read at the end of Sunday’s Oscars, the night’s final moment should be one of high drama.
Usually by now, a consensus favourite has emerged — or at least a front-runner along with one or two potential underdogs. But not this year.
Five films have a legitimate shot at the night’s top award: The Shape of Water, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Get Out, Dunkirk and Lady Bird. Rarely, if ever, has the Academy Awards seen such an open field of contenders for its top award. “It’s very, very, very unpredictable,” says Sasha Stone, the longtime Oscar blogger who runs Awards Daily.
“This would be one year I wish I could just opt out of the whole thing. I have no idea what’s going to win.”
Most of the other major awards appear to be all sowed up. Frances McDormand (Three Billboards), Gary Oldman (Darkest Hour), Allison Janney (I, Tonya) and Sam Rockwell (Three Billboards) all look like locks in the acting categories. Guillermo del Toro (Shape of Water) is expected to win best director.
Reasons for the pervasive uncertainly run from the statistical to the instinctual.
But behind them all is the same development: No one really knows what an “Oscar movie” is anymore. The Oscars, in their 90th year, may look much the same on the outside.
But under the surface, everything is shifting. In the last two years, the film academy has added about a fifth of its membership, ushering in an influx of people of colour, women and international voters.
At the same time, the person most responsible for tailoring the modern Oscar campaign and catering to the tastes of the academy — Harvey Weinstein — has been exiled from the institution he was once synonymous with.
The voters are different. Some of the major players are different. And the movies are different. “It’s a year of unconventional kinds of movies being in contention,” says Scott Feinberg, the Hollywood Reporter’s awards pundit. “You do have a few of the kinds of movies that are much more in the mould of movies that won years ago. Darkest Hour and The Post are traditional Oscar bait. “But now the academy is not the same academy that used to go for those kinds of movies. And you’ve got movies that wouldn’t have even been nominated, I don’t think, in the past because they would have been dismissed as genre movies — Shape of Water and Get Out.”
Actors are easily the largest branch of the academy and their choice this year appears to be Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards, which won best ensemble from SAG and had best film bestowed upon it at the British film academy awards, the BAFTAs. Still, Three Billboards has suffered the most severe backlash of the nominees.
But the underdogs are no more statistically sound. Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Greta Gerwig ’s Lady Bird are both first-feature films that could make history for either African Americans or women.
Yet neither earned a craft nomination, and they usually lost to either Shape of Water or Three Billboards in precursor awards. Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk is an even odder sort of underdog despite being easily the biggest budget and highest grossing entry of the bunch. It aims to be the first film in 85 years to win best picture without receiving a screenplay or acting nomination.
So with a pack of flawed favourites, what’s an Oscar prognosticator to do?
“I just think you have to put it all in the same stew and not let one ingredient overpower,” says Kristopher Tapley, Variety’s awards correspondent.
“Put it all in there, don’t lean too heavily on there not being a SAG nomination there, a director nomination there. I think Dunkirk is very much in this race. These stats are there until they’re not there.”
The safe money might be on The Shape of Water.
“But people are weirded out by the fish thing,” says Stone. “It’s not actually a fish. It’s some sort of mammal. But people are weirded out by it.” The closest, most unpredictable Academy Awards race in recent history could come down to how academy voters feel about the lovemaking of a fish-man.
This would be one year I wish I could just opt out of the whole thing. I have no idea what’s going to win.