They Shoot Oscar Prognosticators, Don't They?
Post-Mortem: The Watershed Oscars
By J. Don Birnam
March 2, 2017
BoxOfficeProphets.com
I hope this year puts to rest any notion - born of the thoughtless #OscarsSoWhite moniker - that the Academy is full of racist ninnies. The Academy finally reached outside and beyond itself - buoyed arguably not by some sense of racial or political statement, but by the idea, I advanced here, that it was high time to listen to other stories. As it turns out, my impassioned, yearly defenses of the Academy have even more resonance this year than in previous ones, despite my perhaps premature critique of them before the telecast.
The Flub
You probably don’t need me to tell you about the embarrassing and somewhat unfortunate (but also highly amusing) ending to the night, with Faye Dunaway mistakenly but understandably screaming out “La La Land” in what was supposed to be a scripted finale to the night. Suffice it to say that a perfect confluence of factors had to be present to result in this moment - including that Best Actress was the last award and that the winner of that category was in a Best Picture front-runner, which has not happened since Million Dollar Baby in 2004.
In any event, the grace and majesty with which La La Land producer Jordan Horowitz handled the entire fiasco is a testament to the fact that for all that seems to divide us as a people today, there are still some worthy humans out there.
La La Land Cedes The Stage
But even before La La Land was announced and then renounced as the night’s big winner, it was clear as the night progressed that something fishy was afoot. La La Land, the movie about Hollywood that these Hollywood insiders surely had to love (and that it had already loved with Critics’ Choice, PGA, DGA, BAFTA, and Globes wins), was supposed to be more a less a sweeper. Quickly, however, that did not materialize.
First the movie lost Costumes to the more lavish gowns of Fantastic Beasts, which I had sort of felt but still not predicted. But then it lost both sound races, one of which at least always goes to musicals. What was up? It still netted the expected Score and Song awards, as well as a deserved cinematography win, but any chances of a record were clearly gone and it did not seem to figure in the Screenplay or Editing races. At that point, even Emma Stone seemed in peril.
In the end, the movie did very well, netting six Oscars (as many as the top winner last year, Mad Max, but also Best Director), but falling just short - quite literally - of that seventh.
The Historic Reversal of Fortunes
From the perspective of Oscars history and statistics, Moonlight’s victory was pretty historic. Moonlight lost the SAG Ensemble, the DGA, the PGA, the BAFTA and still won Best Picture. When did that last happen? Simple: Never. Braveheart, in the first year of SAG, did not get a SAG ensemble nomination and lost the other nominations en route to a Best Picture triumph, but no one had ever managed to be nominated for all of them and lose them all. And needless to say, thematically, no movie about gay characters or directed by an African-American person ever won Best Picture.
La La Land’s defeat was no less unprecedented. Only Brokeback Mountain won as many precursors (the same as the musical) and then lost Best Picture. La La Land did it while managing to still net a whopping SIX Oscars, doubling Brokeback’s total.
But the really stunning aspect of its defeat is how the roles were, in a way, reversed. Sure, Gravity just recently had won seven Oscars, including Best Director, and the PGA and DGA, and then lost Best Picture to 12 Years a Slave. The difference in the situations is obvious. When Slave won, the more-daring, innovative movie (Gravity) won a lot of Oscars only to fall to a much safer movie with a much more traditional narrative and structure. The same is true of Brokeback Mountain losing to the much safer Crash, or The Revenant to a much safer Spotlight, etc.
This time around, La La Land would have been the obvious safe choice - a familiar and innovative movie with a familiar and touching story, one no one could object to. Instead, the easy movie is the one that saw itself net the most precursors only to fall short, ceding the space to a movie that while not particularly daring or dangerous, was sure to raise eyebrows in certain corners of the populace.
A New Era of Racial or Political Movies?
So why did this happen? The easy - but likely incorrect - answer, is that this happened because of #OscarsSoWhite. They are voting for a “black movie” simply out of “guilt” for the shaming they suffered the last two years. This theory is preposterous on several levels. First, Moonlight, a story about a young man’s life, is no more a racial movie than, say, Boyhood. To accuse the Academy of race obsession while racially-obsessively equating a movie where the central character is of one race to necessarily being a “racial” or “message” movie is ironic.
Nor is it logical to think that the voters react like this. On the contrary, Moonlight arguably won in spite of #OscarsSoWhite, with Academy members resisting the natural impulse to stay the course in the face of what is a deeply misguided critique of them.
More logically, Moonlight benefited from a combination of factors that may indeed portend a permanent evolution to the way the Academy thinks - augured in, ironically, by the very two heroes that did so in 1967 when they teamed up for the-then watershed Bonnie and Clyde. Quite simply, the Academy decided it was high time to look beyond itself.
As I have written before, it is demonstrably silly to think that someone who is attracted more to a movie with which he or she personally identifies is somehow prejudiced or bigoted against another group. Teenage girls are drawn to movies about teenage girls, and old white guys to movies about them, just as gay men enjoy watching movies with a gay theme. To reduce these people into thoughtless buffoons simply because their choices do not reflect some sort of diversity that pleases our own aesthetic or politics, is not very thoughtful.
To be sure, it is the case that diversity of thought should be encouraged. If the Academy simply becomes a self-congratulatory machine, they will become irrelevant, as I wrote, simply because they will not speak to anyone of any race or gender or color or profession or walk of life or occupation or religion or national origin or socioeconomic status, other than their own.
What the Academy did with the Moonlight win was something genuinely impressive. They were willing and able to look beyond themselves and reward stories that were not about them. How often do most of us do that in real life, I wonder? Not me, certainly, who identified very little with the story of Moonlight (despite having similar experiences as a gay man). My favorite movie of the year was Arrival, it is the one that spoke most to me on a personal level.
The Academy did this while still responding to their base demographic - the two Oscar wins for Manchester by the Sea and Hacksaw Ridge show as much. But that they were finally willing to look past each other for the end result while still having a pull to the familiar is even more impressive.
It will take us a while to know what exactly this turn outward means to the future. Surely, it was helped and pushed ahead by the Academy’s effort to speed up the diversification process - the one good thing that came out of #OscarsSoWhite - which netted in particular many international and younger people. That the Moonlight win was more than a fluke can be seen in other bolder, unconventional choices like giving Makeup to a non-prestigious movie in Suicide Squad.
In reality, the Academy had been well on a road to modernity for a while. Despite being about themselves, the choice of Birdman, for example, was pretty impressive in its narrative and unsatisfying ending style. And the large Oscar hauls for sci-fi movies like Gravity and Mad Max show that they are adapting. Moonlight’s win was the culmination - a historical, grand coronation - that will be celebrated by all those who love to see different types of stories told and celebrated each year, not because they check off facile boxes of race or sexual orientation, but simply because they open our collective eyes to stories we had never experienced in our own skin. Isn't that the whole point of the movies???
In other words, the failing of #OscarsSoWhite is that it seems to actually elevate race over substance. Diversity matters because telling different stories is more fun, and it helps us learn more, and advance common truths more. That is what the Academy is actually doing, and it is pretty remarkable to watch.
Predictions Peril?
So does this mean that the Prognosticator is in peril? That we won’t be able to call races quite as accurately with new members? Not quite.
I did do laughably bad in my predictions this year, but if you count my second place votes, I actually got 21 correct (missing on Best Picture, however!). Obviously my actual score was embarrassingly low, but that most categories can be predicted in second or so place tells us that we still have a pretty good understanding of the game. There were no surprises in any major acting, writing, or feature film category, except of course the monster one at the end.
So, I will not hang my hat up just yet.
Thanks for reading us this year! Before you know it, the Fall Film Festivals will be upon us, and we will do the whole horrid exercise all over again.