We cover the 2018 Oscars. Pictured: Sally Hawkins, left, and Octavia Spencer in “The Shape of Water,” which has received 13 nominations.
After #OscarsSoWhite, #MeToo, pressure is on Academy to recognize the underrepresented
Academy voters’ choice of best picture March 4 will be scrutinized for attributes well beyond its artistic merits.
Americans who feel underrepresented or mistreated have made it clear in recent months that they will call out perceived injustices in every aspect of public life. Already politicized by the #OscarsSoWhite campaign a few years ago, the Academy Awards are now also the highestprofile event for an industry at the center of the #MeToo movement.
If the top Oscar prize goes to a film about a heterosexual white man (or men), the Academy is going to hear about it.
There are plenty of chances to avoid that, among nominated films. They start with Jordan Peele’s racerelations/horror story “Get Out” and Greta Gerwig’s mother-daughter film “Lady Bird.” Still in their 30s
and up for directing Oscars (the fifth black man and fifth woman ever nominated), Peele and Gerwig are Hollywood’s current darlings, its faces of the future. A best picture win for “Get Out” or “Lady Bird” would signify, after last year’s “Moonlight” win, that the Academy’s recent efforts to diversify its membership hit their mark.
The same-sex romance “Call Me By Your Name” also strikes a chord for diversity. Ideas of inclusion and belonging underpin “The Shape of Water,” whose mute lead character (Sally Hawkins) conspires with her gay best friend (Richard Jenkins) and her co-worker (Octavia Spencer) to rescue a sentient fishman (Doug Jones, plus computers) held captive by the government.
Based on the pre-Oscar film awards, “Shape” is a front-runner, along with “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.” In that film, a grieving mother (Frances McDormand) empowers herself by confronting her local police department — including a racist cop played by Sam Rockwell — on its lack of progress in investigating the rape and murder of her daughter.
Criticized by some for its racist character’s perceived redemption arc, “Billboards” nevertheless offers timely subject matter. And a best picture win for it, “Shape,” “Lady Bird” or the Meryl Streep-led longshot “The Post” would be the first for a film with a female protagonist since “Million Dollar Baby” 13 years ago.
Then again, the virtually female-free “Dunkirk” might have an outside chance at winning in a race with no clear favorite. And Academy voters always have had a complicated relationship to the zeitgeist, choosing some best picture winners that reflected the country’s mood and others that were out of touch.
Seriousness, after show tunes: For much of the tumultuous 1960s, the top Oscar went to Technicolor musicals and epics. In 1968, the Academy began to catch up, naming 1967’s “In
the Heat of the Night,” in which Sidney Poitier’s detective confronts racism in a small Southern town, best picture.
Oscar voters still had to sing, had to dance, choosing “Oliver” the next year. But the Academy capped one of America’s most turbulent decades by honoring the gritty “Midnight Cowboy,” which for a while had been rated X partly for homosexual implications and augured the new American cinema of the 1970s. Gold ceiling: The women’s movement factored strongly in ’70s cinema. But for all the unmarried women and Norma Raes, no film with a female lead won the best picture prize in that decade. Unless you count “Annie Hall,” and we don’t, because Woody Allen was its protagonist. “Terms of Endearment” broke the streak in 1984. Right instinct, wrong film: In 2002, Halle Berry became the first (and still only) black lead actress winner, and Denzel Washington the first black lead actor winner in nearly 40 years. These triumphs for them were embarrassments for the Academy, calling attention to its previously backward voting patterns.
Diversity henceforth became a key part of the Oscar discussion. So you can see how, four years later, voters would seize on an ensemble film that took on race relations in Los Angeles, where most Academy members live.
But winner “Crash” was not the artistic nor social breakthrough its chief rival, the same-sex romance “Brokeback Mountain,” would prove to be. “Crash” was one of the better films to come out in 2005. “Brokeback” was a revelation that since has become a classic.
The Weinstein effect: “Slumdog Millionaire,” winner in 2009, was a rags-to-riches tale that reflected the mood of a nation in the thick of a recession. A win the next year for “The Hurt Locker,” a reminder of the protracted Iraq war, put the Oscars on a mini-roll of relevance. It would have been a streak, had “The Social Network,” with its prescient forecast of social media’s pathological grip on the culture, not lost to master Oscar campaigner Harvey Weinstein’s “The King’s Speech,” a charming but by-the-numbers biography of King George VI.
It will be interesting to see how Weinstein’s absence shapes the best picture narrative in coming years.
Nailing it: Last year’s envelope mix-up stole “Moonlight’s” moment but not its power. This was a best picture like no other — a lyrical yet unflinching coming-of-age story focused on a poor, black, gay young man, complete with a hopeful ending unusual for a gay-themed Oscar film.
“Moonlight’s” win was a sign of progress to which one could cling in divisive times. Also, it marked a rare instance in which the actual best picture won.