THE REAL OSCAR WINNERS
Anything can happen in this year of historic firsts in the Best Picture category. Here’s a close look at the nominees.
Hollywood loves to make history, and the 91st edition of the Academy Awards (Feb. 24) is rife with historic firsts. It’s an alternate universe, one that throws two novice actors into the ring from opposite planets— A Star Is Born’s Lady Gaga and Roma’s Yalitza Aparicio, who’s enjoying her own star-is-born miracle as the first Indigenous woman nominated for Best Actress. In America’s “year of the wall,” Hollywood is looking further beyond it than ever before. Roma, Alfonso Cuarón’s black-and-white masterpiece, is favoured to become the first foreign-language film to win Best Picture, and it brings Hollywood’s nemesis, Netflix, cannonballing into the Oscar pool for the first time—as the front-runner.
Leading the pack with 10 nominations apiece, Roma and The Favourite are unconventional in wildly different ways. Roma is an upli ing drama about a live-in maid in Mexico City in the early ’70s. The Favourite is a venomous satire set in England’s royal palace during the early 1700s. Both are about the power of women, or lack of it. No female directors are nominated, but three years a er the #OscarsSoWhite outrage, the Best Picture field shows unusual diversity, featuring two contenders with African-American directors: Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman and Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther, the first superhero movie ever nominated for Best Picture.
The most glaring snub is the Academy’s failure to recognize Bradley Cooper’s bravura feat as a first-time director with A Star Is Born. A er his Golden Globes shutout, it seems cruel and unusual punishment. But directors nominate directors, and they may not appreciate that the movie’s producer and star had the gall to direct as well. The silver lining is that Cooper’s slot was filled by Poland’s Pawel Pawlikowski for the brilliant and beautiful Cold War— like Roma, a black-and-white foreign-language film based on memoir.
So what will win Best Picture? Here’s my take on the eight nominees, ranked according to their chances of winning:
1.Roma
Going out on a wishful limb, I predict the movie that should win will win. Roma is unlike anything we’ve seen. It’s a rhapsodic mix of art-house intimacy and elevated spectacle, an affectionate family memoir that expands from the domestic rituals of an affluent household to the shanty-town manoeuvres of a populist militia; from a maid doing laundry on the roof to going into labour as riots erupt in the streets. Some have griped that Aparicio’s heroine is too silent and passive, but that’s the point. Rather than trying to inhabit her voice, Cuarón portrayed a servant from the only viewpoint he had, the distant memory of a privileged boy in a broken home.
It’s archly ironic that the year’s most exquisitely cinematic film was made by Netflix, which is driving viewers from the cinema to the couch. TV simply can’t sustain the languorous spell of its panoramic visuals or reproduce its immersive soundscape. But a Roma victory would mark a symbolic triumph for an Academy struggling with identity politics—an opportunity to honour world cinema, high art and Hollywood’s most successful Mexican filmmaker all at once. Oscar worships gravitas, and in Trump’s America, no film is more achingly resonant than this portrait of an Indigenous woman whose calm compassion prevails over hatred and chaos.
2.TheFavourite
It’s the most delicious intrigue of court decadence and backstabbing nobility since Dangerous Liaisons. Expect Olivia Colman to win Best Actress as the addled Queen Anne before taking the throne as The Crown’s next Queen Elizabeth II. The Academy can never get enough of British royalty, but costumes aside, The Favourite doesn’t play like a favourite for Best Picture. Director Yorgos Lanthimos perversely elicits then obliterates our empathy for his characters, one by one. And as rabbits run amok in the royal chambers, the “triumph of the human spirit”—Oscar’s signature cocktail—is nowhere to be found.
3.AStar Is Born
Let’s count the reasons it won’t win. First, Cooper has pulled off such an unlikely tour de force that other artists are too jealous to burnish his ego. Second, he’s been robbed of a directing nod. Third, no amount of talent can overcome the limits of a sentimental yarn that’s showing its age a er four iterations. And finally, this is the one nominee without a shred of political or cultural consequence.
On the plus side, having plummeted from favourite to underdog, A Star Is Born is primed for a comeback. Never underestimate Hollywood’s appetite for honouring movies about showbiz. And the meta-magic of the film’s own
stars being reborn onscreen is irresistible. Lady Gaga (who will win Best Song) finesses her transformation from diva to actor like no one since Barbra Streisand. As a leading man who can direct and sing, Cooper is a perfect dance partner in front of the camera and behind it. He is the next Warren Beatty and Robert Redford, a movie star destined to direct. Finally, after the ludicrous upset at the Golden Globes, where his achievement was snubbed in favour of the paint-by-numbers biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, some poetic justice is in order.
4. BlacKkKlansman
If Roma didn’t exist, I’d be thrilled to see Lee’s frontal assault on white supremacy win Best Picture. But the political rage and hyperbolic style of a Spike Lee joint runs counter to what the Academy deems “good taste.” Incredibly, after directing 20 features and creating his own sub-genre—a deep and singular niche in the canon of American cinema—this is Lee’s first Best Picture nomination.
Gloriously ambitious and imperfect, BlacKkKlansman is one of his most powerful pictures—a hot mess of history, sermon, satire, mock blaxploitation, earnest melodrama and harrowing requiem. With its shocking coda of footage of 2017’s car-ramming murder in Charlottesville, Va., it confronts the atrocity of born-again racism head-on. Yet even as an odd-couple comedy, it’s more fun than Green Book. Adam Driver nails his precarious role as undercover cop posing as an outrageous bigot, and John David Washington brings buoyant swagger to his partner, who adopts a “white voice” to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan by phone. The fact that he’s one of two Black protagonists to adopt a white voice this year, along with the hero of Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, suggests Lee has a hotline to the zeitgeist, and just maybe the Oscar.
5.Green Book
This is the sort of broadly amusing, wellacted, inspirational crowd-pleaser-based-ona-true-story that used to win Oscars. Green Book bolted out of the gate at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it won the People’s Choice Award— often a precursor to Best Picture. Since then, it has been looking a bit green around the gills. Viggo Mortensen upstaged his impeccable performance by uttering the n-word during a post-screening Q&A. Then a 2015 tweet resurfaced from co-writer Nick Vallelonga supporting Trump’s claim that Muslims in New Jersey cheered the 9/11 attack.
As a role-reversed Driving Miss Daisy— with a white saviour chauffeuring an erudite Black jazz musician through the Deep South— Green Book presents an easy target. In a year with two African-American-directed nominees, giving the prize to a civil rights comedy that relegates Mahershala Ali to a supporting role would be awkward—but not unthinkable.
6.Vice
By the same token, despite eight nominations, I can’t see Vice winning Best Picture with its story of a man without a heart. For his uncanny portrayal of former veep villain Dick Cheney, Christian Bale should win Best Actor. That he’s even credible playing a moral and emotional void under a load of latex is astonishing.
Director Adam McKay goes through the motions of making a biopic, but he has the same problem as his protagonist: his heart’s not in it. He’s the first to admit that Cheney’s inner life is an enigma he has failed to crack. With Amy Adams as Cheney’s stoic wife, Steve Carell as a flippant Donald Rumsfeld and Sam Rockwell as eternal frat boy George W. Bush, the supporting cast is admirable, but it’s like watching a volley of weirdly sharp SNL impersonations. There’s an almost animatronic verisimilitude to the characters. Meanwhile, McKay keeps rapping on the fourth wall, dishing the kind of tart asides that made The Big Short a treat, but here they fall flat. Vice is the tale of an amoral fixer who changed American politics by being the smartest guy in the room. When the director tries to show he’s smarter, he’s too clever by half.
7.BlackPanther
A landmark of African-American cinema, Black Panther was both critically acclaimed and last year’s top-grossing movie. It more than earned its seven nominations, including its groundbreaking Best Picture nod. But that’s likely as far as it goes. With Coogler shut out of the directing category and no acting nominations, its chances are slim. Despite the fact that comic-book blockbusters dominate Hollywood’s economy, they sit at the bottom of Oscar’s caste system, even below rom-coms. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King was the last franchise blockbuster to win the big prize, and that was 15 years ago.
Cooper has pulled off such an unlikely tour de force that other artists are too jealous to burnish his ego
8.Bohemian Rhapsody
Its bewildering win at the Golden Globes came in spite of the fact that Bohemian Rhapsody is an anthem of formula cliché—boy meets band, boy loses band, boy gets band back. Still, it was a massive hit. Factor in Freddie Mercury’s triumph of the human spirit as an AIDS martyr staging his last hurrah at the Live Aid concert for famine relief and, well, you do the math. Stranger things have happened.