Three Post-Oscars Thoughts
Guys, Green Book is the Best Picture of 2018! Not only is it the Best Picture of 2018, but, if you’re plugged into the voices of millennial thinkpieces at places like Vox, The Ringer, and The Atlantic, you’re probably also aware that it’s THE WORST BEST PICTURE WINNER SINCE CRASH!(!!!!)
In any case, now that the ceremony is mercifully in the rearview mirror (that’s a Green Book joke, by the way) and the outraged reactions have faded, I wanted to take a moment to gather a few stray thoughts on both the apparently beleaguered state of the Academy Awards and on a couple films.
To start with the most obvious, then…
1. Everyone needs to chill the f*** out about Green Book
I want to say that I’m shocked every year at the level of vitriol and bombast that the Oscars engender, but having fallen into the trap of it myself, that wouldn’t be quite intellectually honest. (I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to The Post and Get Out for being too mean to those movies last year. That was wrong of me and I’m sorry.) The outrage at Green Book winning Best Picture, however, is to me particularly pernicious and unwarranted. Outrage over that film’s victory seems to hit on a couple main points: aesthetically speaking, the film isn’t on the level of previous Best Picture winners; the film’s victory represents the increasing irrelevance of the Academy Awards; and the film’s racial politics are overly simplistic and uncomplicated. More on the second point below; the first and third I’ll take in turn.
To the argument that Green Book isn’t as good as past Best Picture winners, then – taken in a vacuum, I would agree with this statement, though I don’t think the claim can fairly be taken to the extremes that people want to take it in terms of the particular effort to indict Green Book. Has everyone already forgotten that The Shape of Water won Best Picture last year? There’s some degree of accounting for taste involved in any argument like this, but I doubt I’m alone in the opinion that Shape of Water is not only a worse movie than Green Book, but a clearly worse movie. Beyond that, I think we have to keep in mind (again with the caveat that taste is a clear factor in one’s feelings about this) that 2018 was a truly dismal year at the movies. That’s of relevance here for two reasons, one pretty self-evident and one arising from the complicated voting system that the Academy uses to select the Best Picture winner. The self-evident reason: if a year’s best movies are all pretty mediocre, a pretty mediocre movie is probably going to win Best Picture.
Let me pause here to offer a very brief summary of the Oscars’ instant-runoff voting system for the Best Picture category. Rather than a “first past the post” system, whereby everyone in the electorate just votes for their favorite movie and the movie with the most votes wins, the Oscars employ a preferential voting system whereby each voter ranks the movies from best to worst. If a movie is ranked first on 50%-plus-one ballots, it is named Best Picture. If no movie is ranked first on more than 50% of ballots, the movie with the fewest first place votes is eliminated and ballots on which that film was ranked first are re-assigned to their second-place film. This process repeats until a movie gathers over 50% of the remaining vote.
In other words, if there’s no clear favorite, second-, third-, and even fourth-place votes become crucial to a movie’s chance of winning, and the less consensus there is, the more chance there is for a liked-but-not-loved film to come out on top. In 2018, there wasn’t even the base consensus that most years have where we pretty much know that it’s going to come down to one of two or, in a weird year, maybe three films – last year it was The Shape of Water, Call Me By Your Name, or Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and the year before that it came down to Moonlight and La La Land. This year no film or set of films distinguished itself as being clearly preferred by a wide set of the electorate, so Green Book’s being generally liked – and, crucially, generally enjoyable – probably allowed it to sneak in the win over other films that may have had more passionate support. (More on how this dynamic played out two years ago from the LA Times: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-ca-mn-oscars-preferential-ballots-20180301-story.html)
None of that is to say that Green Book “deserved” to win Best Picture. (It wasn’t my first or my second choice.) It is, however, to say that there’s perfectly comprehensible reasons why this movie won the award and why it’s perfectly understandable in the context of 2018’s cinematic output that it did so.
As to the supposed issue of the film’s racial politics, a lot of the ink spilled on this issue has gone to the claim that Green Book winning is indicative of how Hollywood always celebrates movies that oversimplify and sanitize portrayals of racial injustice, and that those stories are always told from the perspective of, and in service of rehabilitating, white racists. That would be a damning critique of Hollywood (though not, I think, of any movie in particular) if only it were true, but it’s simply inaccurate. Two years ago, La La Land, a significantly better film than Green Book, was the subject of similar criticisms of whitewashing, but that movie lost the Best Picture award to Moonlight – which, in case you have forgotten, is a coming-of-age story about a young gay black man with an all-black cast. Three years before that, 12 Years A Slave won the top prize. This is a critique, in other words, that requires cherry-picking the historical record to have any semblance of validity.
Once the broader structural critique is consigned to the dustbin of bad-faith, confirmation-bias-based arguments, the political case against Green Book becomes far less defensible. Essentially, it requires arguing that stories about racial reconciliation on an individual level are inherently unworthy of the telling, and at that point, the argument has stopped being about the film itself and has risen to a much broader and more general level. I don’t agree with that claim, but it’s a conversation I’m willing to have. Nonetheless, if that is the underlying belief of people decrying Green Book, then they should come out and say so rather than pretending that the film itself isn’t any good.
2. On the so-called desperate need for the Oscars to be ‘relevant’
The other grand criticism of Green Book winning Best Picture has been that it demonstrates that the Oscar’s aren’t relevant and aren’t trying hard enough to be relevant. Whether or not Green Book is “culturally relevant” is an issue we can leave to the side, though, because it invites a much broader set of questions, such as: Why is it the purview of the Oscars to be relevant at all? And relevant to whom, and on what definition of relevance? Giving Black Panther the Best Picture Oscar wouldn’t make the Oscars relevant to anything at all if everyone knew that Black Panther was being given the award in the name of its supposed relevance, because that would be pandering. As long as the Academy continues down the path of thinking that its importance is indivisible from its broadcast ratings, it will be continuing down the path of making itself ridiculous.
Winning an Oscar is meaningful precisely because only the most accomplished people working in the film industry are eligible to vote for who wins an Oscar. This isn’t the People’s Choice Awards, guys. If that’s what people want the Oscars to be, then let’s agree that we’re wasting our time with the whole charade and change the rules so that whatever is the year’s installment of the Fast and Furious franchise is automatically named Best Picture.
3. Some scattered exposition about why I hated Roma
Finally, I have been doing some more thinking about my intensely negative reaction to Roma and wanted to try to articulate a little bit more precisely what I didn’t like about it. I have a strong aversion to movies (and other works of art) that, from my perspective, depict suffering for the sake of depicting suffering. I think what I’m reacting against is the sense that these movies are trying to achieve a sort of sanctification via suffering of their main characters, and that’s precisely the route that Roma takes with its portrayal of Cleo (and, to a lesser extent, Sofi). Cleo is blandly virtuous in her role as a domestic worker for a family with four children, apparently giving everything she has with eager contentment to keep the house clean and its occupants happy. She becomes pregnant – but the movie assures us that she’s inexperienced and so, the suggestion seems to be, she can’t be held responsible for her poor decisions – and is then rejected by the father of her child. Meanwhile, the house in which she works is roiled by uncertainty and unrest when the man of the house runs off with his mistress, leaving wife and children in the lurch. Around her, Mexico City is at the center of growing popular political unrest. I don’t want to sketch out each plot point in gory and excruciatingly boring detail, but suffice to say that lots of bad stuff happens to Cleo, and she never does anything at all. She’s a passive, irreproachable cipher who exists only to incite our sympathy – and who the film literally has ascending into heaven in the final shot. There is no humanity in the film. This is the pornography of suffering, shown to us for the purpose of manufacturing a cheap catharsis.
My mind keeps turning to Bicycle Thieves when I think about Roma. That movie, too, centers around the suffering of a working class protagonist, though in De Sica’s film it is a hardscrabble father, Antonio, who is looking for work to support his family. Like Cleo, his suffering is visited upon him, and his plight grows increasingly desperate over the course of the film. De Sica, though, drives to a real and tragic conclusion; there is truth in his film because its project is to show how desperation can lead man into evil. There is no such argument or idea in Roma. The goal of the film, it seems to me, is to manufacture a cheap sense of pity for Cleo that it tries to pass off as profundity while passing her off as a saint. Given the glowing reactions, it seems to have succeeded.