Why Oscar season is crazy, frustrating and still essential
When people find out that I’m the new Carpetbagger columnist, tasked with covering Oscar season for The Times, they usually have two questions.
“Why is it called the Carpetbagger?” they’ll ask.
And, inevitably, it’s followed by that old chestnut: “Do the Oscars really matter anymore?”
The answer to the first question might suggest why so many are tempted to ask the second. If you count yourself among the curious, let me explain.
You may know that political candidates are far more likely than columnists to be accused of carpetbagging, since the Reconstruction-era term refers to, among others, someone who runs for office in a place he or she hardly knows. My predecessors in this space — David Carr, Melena Ryzik and Cara Buckley — called themselves Carpetbaggers in sort of a cheeky way, since they were New York journalists who would parachute into Hollywood a few times a year.
Sometimes, it was their first time working the beat, and this could produce a wonderful friction, since the Carpetbagger was liable to spot details or ask questions that a jaded industry reporter might not think of.
I’m the fourth Carpetbagger, but the first departure from this time-tested model. For one, I live in Los Angeles. (Still, I like to say that we’ve retained the column name because now, as a Southern California native writing for The New York
Times, I’m carpetbagging in the opposite direction.)
I’m also no novice to the award-season beat, and that probably informs my answer to the second question, about the Oscars’ relevance. As your new Carpetbagger, I’m not going to spend these column inches pondering whether the Oscars continue to matter. I know they do, and from the start of my tenure here, I’m going to tell you why.
This isn’t rah-rah boosterism: These awards can frustrate and often miss the mark, but that’s why they remain so crucial. If the Oscar nominations provide a snapshot of that year in Hollywood, and Hollywood helps shape the way we see ourselves, then examining them can tell us not only where the industry is headed but also where our cultural blind spots still lie.
Think of #OscarsSoWhite, the hashtag started by April Reign after two straight years of all-white acting nominees. It spurred the academy to finally diversify its membership and forced the industry to reckon with which people are given the best parts.
But there are more granular Oscarseason details that can also reveal a lot about the way we think. Twice over the last four years, a situation arose where only one of the best actress nominees fronted a film nominated for best picture, while four of the best actor nominees hailed from movies contending for that top prize. This is an all-too-familiar trend for award watchers, and yet more proof that our culture has a tendency to take maleled stories more seriously, whether it’s on the Oscar stage or elsewhere.
Given all this, what can we divine about the state of Hollywood from how our current award season is shaping up? Quite a bit, and some of it is heartening.
I’m thinking of four of our most notable Oscar contenders this year, which were made by black directors. That group includes two men whose films recently won best picture: “Moonlight” director Barry Jenkins, who returns this year with the romantic drama “If Beale Street Could Talk,” and Steve McQueen, who has followed up “12 Years a Slave” with the heist thriller “Widows.” They may be up against Ryan Coogler, the director of Marvel’s “Black Panther,” and “BlacKkKlansman” auteur Spike Lee, who has improbably never received an Academy Award nomination for best director.
If any two of those movies crack either the best picture or best director category, it would be the first time in Oscar history that more than one black-directed film was so honored in the same year. Given that only five black people have ever been nominated for best director, and the first best picture nominee from a black director was the 2009 drama “Precious,” this is significant and overdue progress.
The streaming-service Netflix is also likely to make history this year in the pursuit of Oscar gold. The academy has limited the big N’s influence in previous seasons, mostly recognizing the company in feature-documentary and documentary-short categories. Last year, the period drama “Mudbound” was Netflix’s big play, and while it failed to penetrate the bestpicture lineup, it did crash the cinematography race, where Rachel Morrison was the first woman to score a nomination in that category.
This year, the Netflix incursion is expected to affect nearly all of the big Oscar races. “Roma,” an acclaimed black-andwhite mood piece from “Gravity” director Alfonso Cuarón, will almost certainly make the lineup for picture and director, and Netflix has given the film a release in theatres first, a bid to convince cautious academy members that this disruptive company can still play by old rules. Netflix has already reshaped this industry in a way that will be felt for decades to come, and if the streaming service can win over the Oscars, then one of Hollywood’s last barriers will fall.
Finally, as we draw closer to the Oscar nominations in January, I’m reminded of the category that was hastily suggested and withdrawn almost as suddenly: the scuttled Oscar for best popular film.
This award was meant to provide succor for blockbusters traditionally overlooked by the academy and, in so doing, shore up dwindling Oscar ratings over the past two years. Personally, I think those ratings woes had something to do with disengaged Oscar host Jimmy Kimmel; if the academy is so determined to include the efforts of Ryan Reynolds or Dwayne Johnson on the Oscar telecast, maybe it ought to hire them as hosts instead.
The irony is that this year’s best picture winner has the potential to be the most widely seen in years. The front-runner, “A Star Is Born,” is nearing a domestic gross of $200 million and would be the most successful winner since “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” (2003), while likely nominee “Black Panther” is the third-biggest film of all time at the U.S. box office. (Even “Roma,” an art piece by any measure, can be watched in more than 100 million households thanks to Netflix.) We didn’t need a popular-film Oscar. We just needed better popular films.