Campaign throws Oscar speculation into disarray
This has been a great movie awards season for fans of cliffhanger endings.
Nominations for the 91st Academy Awards will be announced Tuesday morning. Normally by this stage of the Oscar race, there’s a definite sense of which film will be the leading nominee and which will likely triumph for Best Picture and other prizes.
There’s no such certainty this year. Thanks to the Kevin Hart debacle, there isn’t even a host for the Feb. 24 telecast, unless the Academy has a change of heart. And the Academy has been busily increasing its membership, improving the percentages of women and people of colour, which makes guessing the preferences of voters a whole new ball game.
Bradley Cooper’s fourthtime-around remake of A Star Is Born looked, going into awards season, to be cinch for Best Picture. It boasts a winsome combination of showbiz tradition and ingenue hustle, with actor Cooper making his directing debut and pop diva Lady Gaga making her bigscreen breakthrough.
Yet A Star Is Born came up far short of expectations at the recent Golden Globes and Critics’ Choice Movie Awards. It won for Best Song (“Shallow”) at both of these significant Oscar precursor events, and Gaga took Best Actress at the CCMAs — but a tie vote meant she had to share it with Glenn Close of The Wife, who won this category on her own at the Globes and who is starting to look like the eventual Oscar winner. (Disclosure: I’m a member of the Broadcast Film Critics Association, which hands out the CCMAs.)
A Star Is Born has now slipped into second place on the chart of the Gurus o’ Gold awards prediction panel, of which I’m a member, having ceded the top spot to Alfonso Cuarón’s memory drama Roma, which has become the little picture that could in this year’s race.
Roma has been steadily amassing critical and industry kudos — it did well at the Golden Globes and CCMAs — and now stands a solid chance of being nominated for and winning Best Picture and Best Foreign Language Feature at the Oscars, which would be a first. Cuaron also looks likely to win Best Director, a prize he previously won for Gravity in 2013. But there are numerous obstacles along Roma’s tiled footpath to glory. The Oscar for Best Picture has always gone to a movie in the English language; just nine foreign-language films even been nominated for this prize. Roma, which is in Spanish and the Indigenous language Mixtec, would have to overcome nearly a century of English-dominant voting habits.
The Academy has also never given its highest honour to a Netflix movie like Roma, since many people in Hollywood view the streaming service as a threat to theatrical distribution of movies. But Netflix has been doing big-screen presentations of the film at key theatres around the world, including Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox, where it’s currently showing in glorious 70mm.
There are other worrisome opens for Roma. The movie is in black and white, a palette the Academy has rarely favoured, most recently with The Artist at the 2012 Oscars. And Roma lacks a nomination for best acting ensemble at the Screen Actors Guild Awards on Jan. 27, which would normally be seen as a fatal omission — yet The Shape of Water won Best Picture at the Oscars last year without benefit of this SAG benediction.
The fates of other Oscar hopefuls are similarly up for debate.
Peter Farrelly’s race-relations road comedy Green Book had a full tank of gas after it won the Audience Award following its world premiere at TIFF 2018. But some critics flailed it for taking a facile approach to serious issues, and a series of embarrassing and offensive gaffes by Farrelly, co-screenwriter Nick Vallelonga and co-star Viggo Mortensen have made it seem to many pundits that honouring the film would be tantamount to giving an Oscar to Donald Trump. The only surefire Oscar nominee (and likely winner) for Green Book is Mahershala Ali for Best Supporting Actor, although he really should be considered the film’s co-lead with Mortensen.
A likely beneficiary of Green Book’s presumed slippage is another story about race: Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansmen, a factbased drama about a Black cop, played by John David Washington, who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s. The normally outspoken Lee has managed to avoid saying anything incendiary during the Oscar campaign, no small feat for a guy who unleashed a stream of profanity at a news conference after the film’s Cannes premiere last May. He drew parallels between the racism of Klan and that of Trump — a connection also made in the movie — but that will win Lee more votes in Trump-averse Hollywood than it will lose him.
Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite appears to have fallen out of favour. The Greek director’s scathing satire of royal manners and disloyal methods, set in the English court of the 18th century, went into last week’s CCMAs with a leading 14 nominations. It ended up with just two wins: Best Acting Ensemble and Best Actress in a Comedy (Olivia Colman), which is something far short of the rapturous reception required from the Broadcast Film Critics Association, a 300-member group of journalists from the U.S. and Canada whose picks often mirror even- tual Oscar winners.
Also perceived to be losing ground in the Oscar race are Damien Chazelle’s First Man, Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk and Rob Marshall’s Mary Poppins Returns, onetime hopefuls now tarnished by lacklustre box office and minimal precursor awards. There is at least one highly likely Oscar nom. for Beale Street: Regina King as Best Supporting Actress, as she has been steadily accumulating industry kudos, including prizes from the Golden Globes, the CCMAs and the Toronto Film Critics Association, among many.
Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther also seems to have stalled somewhat, despite being the No. 1 movie worldwide in 2018. It would have been the obvious winner if the Academy had gone ahead with plans to create Most Popular Picture category. Oscar voters may decide the film already has all the love it needs.
Gaining ground is Bryan Singer’s rock biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, which has become an international hit despite a decidedly mixed critical reception. Lead star Rami Malek is likely to strut to a Best Actor nod for his dynamic portrayal of Freddie Mercury, the late Queen frontman.
Also upwardly mobile are Jon M. Chu’s summer 2018 hit Crazy Rich Asians and actor John Krasinski’s feature directing debut A Quiet Place, a horror hit co-starring his wife, Emily Blunt, that could feasibly land Blunt a Best Supporting Actress nom. along with Best Actress for Mary Poppins Returns.
Which leaves us with Adam McKay’s Vice, an ambitious biopic which is definitely a Best Picture contender and also likely to reap acting nods for Christian Bale and Amy Adams. The question remains, however, as to how many people really care about former U.S. vice-president Dick Cheney, whose warmongering excesses during the George W. Bush regime now seem like a lifetime ago.
But it certainly fits the mood of this year’s Oscar race, which is one big question mark.
My best bet for Tuesday: A Star Is Born might just tip Roma for the most total nominations, because it’s stronger in the acting categories. But will it be able to convert those nominations to wins? That could be the biggest question of all this Oscar year.
Hale County coming to TIFF: I’m happy to report that Hale County This Morning, This Evening, the award-winning documentary by RaMell Ross that vividly sketches African-American lives on an Alabama trek, begins a run Saturday at TIFF Bell Lightbox following last week’s successful local debut at the Royal Cinema. It’s one of the best docs of the past year, a blast of pure visual poetry loaded with cultural potency. Go see it.