Existential question animates this year's Oscar race: What, exactly, is a movie?
“WEIRD.” “Crazy.” “The strangest I’ve seen in years.”
Those were the most-oft repeated descriptions of this year’s Oscar race overheard in Los Angeles last month, as members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences prepared to select their nominees. Plunging into the season’s nonstop circuit of screenings, Q-andA’s and “tastemaker” parties (“You’re invited to join Angelina Jolie for a reception celebrating ‘Roma’ ...”), voters were visibly discombobulated, as bemused by promotional profligacy and whispered takedown campaigns as by the technological, cultural and demographic changes rapidly engulfing their industry.
As the academy turns the corner toward its 100th year, which movie to vote for has taken on implications beyond the usual in-group popularity contest or matter of consensus compromise. What’s at stake feels nothing less than existential, with the result reflecting not just Hollywood’s collective self-image, governing taste and vision of the future, but the definition of film itself.
To be a movie in this day and age, what’s too big, too small, too out-there, too safe? Does where and how we see them matter? Are once-beloved genres simply too outdated to qualify? Is Hollywood heading into an era of liberated pluralism or a monoculture dominated by one voracious talent-hungry company?
That this year’s Oscars race crystallises these questions so dramatically isn’t surprising as much as an accurate reflection of 21st century realities, including at the academy itself. Having been sharply criticised for being too white and too male, the organisation has taken steps to reproportion its membership. More than 1,700 people have been invited to join over the past two years, making it not just more inclusive in terms of gender and ethnicity, but far more global (this year’s nominated directors are from Mexico, Poland and Greece, as well as the United States).
The best picture shortlist aptly illustrates the fluidity of the moment, when parameters are unchanging but also shifting, sometimes in the same film. “Roma,” for example, is just the kind of personal, visually bravura art film that Oscars have favoured in recent years. But it’s also a Netflix movie and, should it win, will be the first foreign language film to do so.
“Black Panther,” a superbly made instalment of the endless Marvel universe — and the first comic book movie to compete for best picture — suggests that the industry might finally find peaceful coexistence between the kind of mass-market product it has long depended on and the prestige it not-so-secretly craves.
“BlacKkKlansman,” a damning, scabrously funny sendup of racism and white identity politics, marks the first time Spike Lee has been nominated, not just for best picture but director. As an uneven but galvanising cri de coeur from one of America’s most important filmmakers, it proves that audiences haven’t given up on auteurism at its most fiercely didactic and bracingly idiosyncratic.
“Green Book,” a warmly amusing buddy comedy about racial reconciliation set in the Jim Crow-era South, is as gentle and reassuring as “BlacKkKlansman” is provocative and unsettling. Like “A Star Is Born” and “Bohemian Rhapsody,” it’s an unapologetically mainstream crowd-pleaser that harks back to the kind of movies the industry supposedly doesn’t make anymore, until it does.
Indeed, in one of this year’s many reversals, most of this year’s nominees are big-studio films, or at least big-studioadjacent. In past years, the Oscars have been derided by some observers as having turned into another version of the Independent Spirit Awards (conferred the day before at a laid-back party on the beach), with the best picture Oscar often going to a film that, although perhaps artistically worthy, few filmgoers had actually seen.
With studios such as Disney, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal and Warner Bros. in the hunt, those grumblings have abated. Not only was “Black Panther” the biggest hit of 2018, with “A Star Is Born” and “Bohemian Rhapsody” also making hundreds of millions of dollars, but “BlacKkKlansman” and “Green Book” have both proven hugely popular with audiences, punching far above their weight at the box office.
The standards for what qualifies as an “Oscar movie” — what is considered worthy, important, legitimate — have always been elastic, sometimes confoundingly so. Even before Harvey Weinstein propelled “Shakespeare in Love” to an upset over “Saving Private Ryan,” the tiny 1955 domestic drama “Marty” proved its bona fides — just a few years after the spangly extravaganza