San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Joe Mathews: Why Oakland gets no Oscar love this year
The best California movie scene of recent vintage is the opening of the 2018 film “Sorry to Bother You.” A man and his girlfriend are getting intimate when his apartment suddenly fills with daylight, making their union visible to the people outside on an Oakland street.
What happened? California’s housing crisis. The apartment is really a garage whose door has abruptly opened.
This example of love interrupted is indicative of another unconsummated relationship — between Oakland and the Oscars.
Over the past year, Oakland has inspired more great films than even movie-mad nations like France and Japan. This reflects both a rising generation of filmmakers with O-Town roots, and the city’s own ascendancy in an era that prizes authenticity. Because all the real people have left unaffordable San Francisco, and because there were never many real people in Los Angeles, filmmakers seeking a relatable California reality are drawn to Oakland.
So, Hollywood, where is the Oscar love?
Oakland won’t be shut out at the Academy Awards on Feb. 24. Oakland-born (and Hayward-raised) actor Mahershala Ali is favored to win his second Oscar in three years, for playing pianist Don Shirley in “Green Book.” And “Black Panther,” which begins and ends in Oakland, is nominated for best picture.
But “Black Panther” is unlikely to win. The film’s maker, Oakland’s Ryan Coogler, didn’t get nominated for best director, even though he brought to life the land of Wakanda, which fulfilled Californians’ dreams of a finished and functional high-speed rail system. Coogler was previously snubbed by the Oscars for his brilliant 2013 film “Fruitvale Station,” about the killing of Oscar Grant by a BART police officer in Oakland.
And the academy completely overlooked two of last year’s best films: “Sorry to Bother You,” a satire with sci-fi elements (and that great intercourse-gone-awry opening), and “Blindspotting,” a beautiful buddy film about two troubled young men.
Both movies were set in Oakland and made by Oaklanders, and are about conserving the traditions and neighborhoods that make the place special. To that end, both films cast Oakland as the first line of defense for a world fighting the disruptive power of technologists from the other side of the bay.
In “Blindspotting,” the main character — played by the film’s own screenwriter, the Oakland-born actor-singer Daveed Diggs — is an ex-con on probation who moves richer people into his own gentrifying city. “Sorry to Bother You,” from director Boots Riley, ends up being about a Silicon Valley company using a business model secretly built on slavery. If you want an explanation for its Oscar shutout, I suspect that plotline cut too close to the bone for Netflix and Amazon, which now fund so much of Hollywood.
Of course, Oakland is getting its due in other ways, because it’s that rare American place still distinctive enough to convey its own message.
In politics, Oakland-born Kamala Harris, who rose through San Francisco’s establishment, tried to seize back some Oaktown cred by kicking off her presidential campaign kickoff at Frank Ogawa Plaza.
In literature, Tommy Orange’s “There There,” a novel about American Indians in Oakland, has been winning awards for its portrayal of the city’s diversity.
“Cities form in the same way as galaxies,” Orange writes. “Urban Indians feel at home walking in the shadow of a downtown building. We ride buses, trains, and cars across, over, and under concrete plains. Being Indian has never been about returning to the land. The land is everywhere or nowhere.”
In her 1937 book, “Everybody’s Autobiography,” Gertrude Stein lamented, “what was the use of having come from Oakland,” before making her famous (and false) observation that “there is no there there.” The truth is that American culture has long found Oakland useful.
Tom Hanks boasts about being from Oakland. Serious “Star Wars” fans will tell you that Oakland is the real hometown of both Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill was born and lived there until moving to San Diego at age 11) and Yoda (Frank Oz, a child immigrant from Europe, was raised there and got his start as a puppeteer at Children’s Fairyland).
After the Oscar snub, “Sorry to Bother You” director Riley declared he didn’t care about not being nominated. Worrying about what the rest of the world thinks is not a very Oakland thing to do.
But the rest of the world would benefit from seeing more of the cinematic stories emerging from Oakland.
Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square. To comment, submit your letter to the editor at SFChronicle.com/letters.