Jojo Rabbit ticks all the Oscar boxes
Jojo Rabbit is an imperfect movie but Emily Brookes reckons it’s a shoo in for a best picture nomination.
With its People’s Choice Award win at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), Taika Waititi’s new film Jojo Rabbit has just bunny hopped into some serious Oscar buzz. In the past decade, the only People’s Choice winner not to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture was a Lebanese film, What Do We Do Now?. Of the rest, six were nominated for Best Picture, and three – The King’s Speech, 12 Years a Slave and Green Book – actually won. It doesn’t stop at the top Oscar, either. Eight winners over the past 10 years have picked up at least one acting trophy at the Academy Awards – the only one not to be nominated was, again, What Do We Do Now?, and The Imitation Game the only one to be nominated in at least one acting category without winning.
Directors also tend to do well off the back of a TIFF win. Four in the past 10 years have won the Oscar for best director and a further three were nominated (for the record, What Do We Do Now?. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and Green Book are the only People’s Choice winners to miss out on a directing nod since 2009).
In many ways, a TIFF People’s Choice win is a better indicator of Oscar success than just about anything else (even being a runner-up is a good sign; in the past 10 years, six runners-up have been nominated for or won best picture).
Box office returns don’t really tell us anything. Recent best picture winners have run the gamut from mainstream smash hits like The King’s Speech to indie outsiders like The Artist.
Nor do great reviews. For every 12 Years a Slave, with its 95 per cent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, you have got an Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (46 per cent) nabbing a best picture nomination at the Oscars.
As has been well-documented, Academy voters don’t tend to mirror even broader public consensus of what makes a good movie. Bohemian Rhapsody
was nominated for best picture, for heaven’s sake. Argo actually won.
Once nominations are done, there are some things we know Oscar doesn’t like.
He is squeamish about homosexuality, for example; while Moonlight won the top gong in 2016, Brokeback Mountain lost to Crash, one of the most maligned wins in history, in 2005, and the year after Moonlight’s win, guy-on-guy masterpiece Call Me By Your Name lost to the far inferior girl-onsea-creature melodrama The Shape of Water.
Oscar is also not keen on fright factor. Get Out
managed a best picture nomination two years ago but was never a serious contender for the gong, while Hereditary, one of the best films of last year, didn’t manage a single nod (Bohemian Rhapsody,
the sanitised version of Freddie Mercury’s life, got five, and won four).
There are some things Academy voters love, too. War movies are high up there, with World War II holding a particular fascination – Schindler’s List, The English Patient and Saving Private Ryan
are among examples of this.
Actors playing real historical figures are also much admired.
Gary Oldman’s long-overdue Oscar came for him portraying Winston Churchill in an otherwise overlooked movie. Nicole Kidman and her fake nose won for playing Virginia Woolf, Reese Witherspoon for playing June Carter Cash, Jamie Foxx for Ray Charles . . . the list goes on.
That makes a movie like The King’s Speech basically impossible to beat. World War II? Check. Absence of morally questionable or frightening material? Check. Historical figure at the centre? Check. TIFF People’s Choice winner? Hard check. So where does Jojo Rabbit factor into all this? I am one of a handful of people in New Zealand to have seen Jojo (I was at its TIFF premiere).
I liked it a lot, and I can see why TIFF audiences did too: It is very funny, and very sweet, sort of Wes Anderson meets Roberto Begnini with a whimsical Nazi Germany comedy. The two child leads,
Roman Griffin Davis and Kiwi Thomasin McKenzie, are exceptionally good; Scarlett Johansson is smartly winning as Jojo’s anti-fascist mother and the bumbling, needy version of Hitler imagined by Jojo and played by Waititi is not only hilarious but subversive in its way.
I do have my reservations, and agree with some critics that the film reduces to some extent the devastation the Nazis wrought by making them all either idiotic, or actually not-really-baddies.
In reality the Nazis were smart, organised, ruthless, and coldly, horribly rational – the fact that Jojo Rabbit painted them as the opposite bothered me.
But that might be exactly what the Academy likes. Because Jojo doesn’t ask us, for a single second, to see the world from the Nazi perspective, it neatly side-steps any troubling morality. World War II, historical figure, nothing bothersome – all in place.
With its TIFF People’s Choice win, Jojo Rabbit has secured its nomination for Oscar best picture at least and, based on form, you will see a directing nod and at least one acting nomination in there, too.
It will have strong competition with the likes of Joker, A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and another Johansson vehicle, Marriage Story – plus several movies that have buzz but aren’t yet released – but with the combo it packs, Jojo might even take home the top trophy.
The bumbling, needy version of Hitler imagined by Jojo and played by Taika Waititi is not only hilarious but subversive in its way.