In past years, the lack of minorities in the major acting categories led to widespread criticism and controversy over diversity within the industry, and whether the ways it honors acting and film-making accolades is fair. However, the fallout from various stories of harassment and sexual assault this year, the #MeToo movement which was borne out of it, as well as other aspects of the current political climate, made this year’s Oscars telecast a politically charged event where the concerns of women, the strength of diversity in a country plagued by problems of race, gun control concerns after Parkland and the plight of immigrant dreamers were touched on throughout the show.
Just like the movies themselves, there's a difference between the fantasies we weave in our minds and the reality they’re based on. As much as conservatives rail against Hollywood as a bastion of liberalism, the truth is a bit more complex. As much as the town sees itself as progressive, the true power brokers of Hollywood are very male, very white, almost old enough to draw Social Security, and sometimes can't see their own biases and limitations. And while there have been some measures taken to correct some of the symptoms, the underlying dynamics of Hollywood, its business model, the way social biases inform it, and the way decisions are made concerning casting films remain problems. And if those are the big picture problems, the way women have been treated in casting those films for many many years is a scandal.
Beyond the social politics of the night, there’s the usual arguing over the Oscars.
There are always "snubbings" of actors, writers and films which people feel should have been nominated and won. A little bit of this has occurred with debates over whether The Shape of Water should have won over Get Out.
From Gregg Kilday at The Hollywood Reporter:
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, making every effort to put past Hollywood sins behind it and present a new, more evolved face to the world, on Sunday embraced The Shape of Water, crowning it as best picture at the 90th annual Academy Awards. Director Guillermo del Toro’s romantic fantasy — the ultimate fish-out-of-water story, which unapologetically owes a debt to B-movies — appeared to fit the present moment, telling as it does the tale of a mute woman, a depressed gay man and a supportive black cleaning woman who all team up to save the life of a threatened sea creature.
The Mexico-born del Toro was singled out as best director. “I am an immigrant,” he proudly proclaimed as he accepted the first of his two awards for the Fox Searchlight film. But noting that he now travels among countries, he added, "The greatest thing our art does and our industry does is to erase the lines in the sand. We should continue doing that."
The Shape of Water’s victory culminated a purposefully "woke" evening, whose host Jimmy Kimmel set the stage from the very beginning. In his opening monologue, he began by acknowledging last year’s envelope fiasco (“So then the accountants went ahead and did comedy of their own!”) and the Academy’s expulsion of Harvey Weinstein (“Harvey deserved it the most!”). Kimmel noted several firsts among this year’s nominees — like Mudbound’s Rachel Morrison, the first woman ever nominated in the cinematography category. And he invited winners to use their moment in the spotlight to address issues like #MeToo, Time’s Up and the March 24 march on Washington being organized by students from Parkland, Florida.
The joint appearance of three of Harvey Weinstein’s accusers—Ashley Judd, Annabella Sciorra, and Salma Hayek—saw the actresses urging for “a new path” forward. But it was the acceptance speech of Frances McDormand, accepting the Best Actress Oscar for her performance in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri , which seemed to be one of the most talked about moments of the night in a lot of circles.
From Michael Schulman at The New Yorker:
She thanked her director, Martin McDonagh: “We are a bunch of hooligans and anarchists, but we do clean up nice.” She thanked her sister, Dorothy, and her “clan”: her husband, Joel Coen, and their son, Pedro. “These two stalwart individuals were well raised by their feminist mothers,” she said, making clear that she’s a feminist mother par excellence. “They value each other, themselves, and those around them. I know you are proud of me, and that fills me with everlasting joy.” If you didn’t already want to spend a weeknight eating spaghetti and meatballs in the McDormand-Coen household, you do now.
Then, she informed us, it was time for “some perspective.” She placed her Oscar on the floor and gave it a friendly tap on the head. Putting her hand to her chest, she asked all the female nominees to stand with her. (“Meryl, if you do it, everybody else will.”) Up shot Greta Gerwig and Lesley Manville and Octavia Spencer and dozens of others, as McDormand let out another crazy laugh and yelled, “C’mon!” The room was utterly hers. “Look around, ladies and gentlemen,” she continued, “because we all have stories to tell and projects we need financed. Don’t talk to us about it at the parties tonight.” She tapped a nonexistent wristwatch. “Invite us into your office in a couple days, or you can come to ours—whichever suits you best—and we’ll tell you all about them.” Did you hear that, money people? Frances McDormand doesn’t need your party talk. Get real.
She concluded, “I have two words to leave you with tonight, ladies and gentlemen: inclusion rider.” Then she gave a brief little stare that said, “No, I’m not going to explain what that means—you’re going to look it up, and you’re going to like it.” (An inclusion rider, as Stacy Smith explains in this ted Talk, is an equity clause for contracts that insures diversity on film sets.) With that, she picked up her Oscar, curtsied, and left.
Conservative criticisms of the telecast were bound to happen given Jimmy Kimmel’s placement as host. Already, right-wing fanatics are pointing to the show’s historically low ratings, the second lowest in Oscar history, as proof the Oscars were “phony” and “divisive.”
The problem with the argument of audiences turning away from preachy liberals being the reason for the show’s declining ratings is the number of people watching the Academy Awards have been declining for years. The reasons are myriad, including the trend of cord cutting continuing to disperse audience numbers, but one of the simplest is that viewership is usually dependent on the popularity of the movies competing in the major categories. If large amounts of people have seen the movies, and they’re not art house favorites, the ratings tend to be higher.
Fox News host Sean Hannity, on his radio show on Monday afternoon, gleefully pointed out several times that the broadcast was down in viewership compared to last year's broadcast. (Hannity said he watched the broadcast to kill time while waiting for Homeland to come on.)
"All this #MeToo, Time's Up, I've never seen such hypocrisy in my entire lifetime," Hannity said. "The people of this country, they get it. Hollywood doesn't get it. The people get it, and they're tired of the hypocrisy." (He suggested that Hollywood has, in the past, embraced Roman Polanski despite accusations against him.)
Hannity connected the ubiquity of armed security at the Dolby Theatre on Sunday night to Hollywood's embrace of gun control measures in the wake of the Feb. 14 shooting at a high school in Florida. "It wasn't a 'gun-free zone' at the Oscars," he said mockingly. He added, "I didn't see, thank God, any shootings at the Oscars last night."
Another highlight of last night’s broadcast, which may have infuriated many Hannity fans, was the win of Jordan Peele in the screenplay category for his film Get Out. Peele is the first African-American to win the Best Original Screenplay Oscar.
The significance of Peele's victory was not lost on him when he spoke to journalists backstage at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood.
"An award like this is much bigger than me," he said. "This is about paying it forward to the young people who might not believe they can achieve the highest honour in whatever craft they want to push for."
He also suggested that Hollywood was experiencing "a renaissance", adding: "I feel proud to be at the beginning of a movement where I feel like the best films in every genre are being brought to me by my fellow black directors."
Get Out began the evening with four nominations, including one for best picture. Peele was also shortlisted in the best director category, while the film's star - British actor Daniel Kaluuya - was up for best actor.
Almost as soon as the telecast ended, there were debates on social media and movie blogs as to whether the right film had won last night. Will any of this year's film be "classics" in the medium 10 or 20 years from now? Or will any of these films be ones where we look back and wonder how we thought it was so great? Whether or not a film "ages well" can factor into these kind of subjective film-geek debates. For example, 1999's Best Picture winner was American Beauty, directed by Sam Mendes and written by Alan Ball.
When it was released, the film was critically lauded and won Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor for Kevin Spacey, Best Original Screenplay and Best Cinematography.
However, beyond just the current state of Spacey’s reputation, the film has not aged well, and it now has a tendency to show up on lists of the most overrated Best Picture Oscar winners of all time. It largely stems from the fact that when you sit down and watch it now, American Beauty comes off as a movie which thinks it's really "deep" in its cultural commentary when it's not (i.e. "You mean upper middle class people have dysfunctions and problems too?!?!"). Nothing exemplifies that more than a scene of characters pontificating on the significance of a plastic bag floating in the wind.
The same is true for 2005 Best Picture winner Crash, which now comes off as Hollywood trying to make a statement about race relations by picking a film about the subject. Before getting into which movie it beat out, in doing so, the engendered backlash of Crash seemed like the result of being a movie made to be Oscar Bait. Instead of being about the issue of racism, or creating believable characters, or attempting to analyze the nuances of discrimination on any level, the film panders.
And so the argument goes that a movie about race was the safer choice than the one about the love between two gay men.
From Evan Narcisse at io9:
Both Get Out and The Shape of Water are great films about outsiders, made by people from non-white backgrounds. But, Get Out is a lot less comforting, which is probably why it didn’t win Best Picture last night.
There’s safety in distance. That’s one of the things you realize when surveying creative work that touches on prejudice in American society. Recent Oscar-nominated films about the black experience like Malcolm X, 12 Years a Slave, or Selma have all had the buffer of decades or centuries. They still hold up a mirror that reflects a history of institutionalized racism but there’s a thick layer of dust covering the reflected image, letting viewers say “That only kinda looks like us; things have gotten better.”
The Shape of Water has that same dust on it. The period-piece stylings in Guillermo del Toro’s movie are meant to invoke the timeframe when B-movie monster features were all the rage. That element also ties in neatly to the fact that blatant racism and sexism ran rampant during the Cold War era. Nothing about the movie’s lush romanticism or softly lit happy ending makes the viewer think about the plight of society’s outsiders in the present day.
Because it’s in the here-and-now, Get Out doesn’t offer the easy dodge of distance. Its central plot mechanic calls on a history of exploitation and injustice that’s continuing to happen. Lured in by white people he thought he could trust, Chris gets treated like a resource: a body to be hollowed out and a soul to be discarded. Niceties are said about his talent but doors aren’t opened; instead, the bidders at the Armitages’ backyard auction want to possess Chris’ skills for themselves rather than have him create his own successes.
Among some of the most argued about Oscar wins:
- 1939: Robert Donat wins the Best Actor Oscar for Goodbye, Mr. Chips over Clark Gable’s performance in Gone With the Wind and Jimmy Stewart’s starring role in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
- 1941: How Green Was My Valley beats Citizen Kane, The Maltese Falcon, and Sergeant York.
William Randolph Hearst’s efforts to have Citizen Kane pulled from circulation – along with consistent attacks against the film, and Welles, made by his allies in the press – arguably soured its Oscars prospects. So much so that every time Citizen Kane was mentioned at the ceremony the auditorium erupted in boos. The only award it won was for best original screenplay, while best picture went to a safer bet.
- 1952: High Noon and Singin' In The Rain—which wasn't even nominated—lose out to The Greatest Show On Earth. Also, Marlon Brando’s performance as Stanley Kowalski in Elia Kazan’s adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire is beaten by Humphrey Bogart’s in The African Queen.
- 1955: Grace Kelly’s turn in The Country Girl beats Judy Garland’s performance in A Star Is Born for the Best Actress statue.
In what Groucho Marx called "the greatest robbery since Brink's," Judy Garland's big comeback vehicle was driven off the road. Her universally acclaimed performance as Esther Blodgett/Vicki Lester was the quintessential Hollywood comeback, and just about everybody expected her to win on Oscar night. Including Garland. Eight months pregnant by the time the Academy Awards rolled around, Garland was joined in her hospital room by a camera crew to capture her victory speech. But when Kelly was announced the winner, also for playing the wife of an alcoholic, the crew quietly packed up their equipment and left Garland alone with her disappointment.
Garland never truly got over the loss, taking it as yet another sign that Hollywood hated her. Some claim the always problematic Garland's behavior on the set cost her the award, while others blamed Warner Bros. for not throwing their support behind the film. Either way, Garland's was not the only historic loss that night: Dorothy Dandridge, the first black woman nominated for Best Actress, also got stiffed for her turn in Carmen Jones.
- 1968: The win of the musical Oliver! is not criticized as much for beating out the other nominees in its category, but for the movies the Academy didn't nominate against it that year. For example, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Rosemary's Baby, Once Upon a Time in the West, Petulia, and The Producers, are among the films that could have and weren't nominated.
- 1979: Apocalypse Now and All That Jazz are beaten by Kramer v. Kramer.
- 1980: Ordinary People defeats Raging Bull. Robert Redford’s win in the directing category over Martin Scorsese is the first of many notable losses.
- 1981: Chariots of Fire beats Raiders of the Lost Ark.
- 1982: E.T. or Gandhi? Also, another instance of a famous director—Steven Spielberg—enduring multiple notations without a win.
- 1985: The Color Purple loses to Out of Africa.
- 1990: Goodfellas is beaten by Dances with Wolves. Scorsese loses the directing award to Kevin Costner.
- 1994: Probably the most discussed and argued about Best Picture award for those who like to argue about this stuff. Forrest Gump beats Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption.
- 1998: Shakespeare In Love wins over Saving Private Ryan.
- 2000: Gladiator beats Traffic and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, with Requiem For a Dream not even managing to get a nomination.
- 2002: Chicago beats out The Pianist, The Hours, Gangs of New York, and The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.
- 2003: The Return of the King or Mystic River?
- 2005: Crash beats Brokeback Mountain.
From Kevin Sullivan at Entertainment Weekly:
Conventional wisdom at the time said that director Ang Lee’s Western about two men and their tortured, unfulfilled love was destined to win. For proof, watch the YouTube clip of Oscar presenter and unflappable man Jack Nicholson decidedly flap after he reads the name of the upset winner.
The immediate cultural fallout was confusion and vitriol. Brokeback was a watershed moment for gay representation, and after the Oscars, the work itself was considered the victim of an injustice at the hands of a membership that skewed heavily old, male, and straight. Lee was named Best Director, and Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove) and Diana Ossana won Best Adapted Screenplay for their treatment of Annie Proulx’s short story, but did the same homophobia that kept Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist apart cost Brokeback the Best Picture race?
“Crash, the race drama with an ensemble led by Sandra Bullock and Matt Dillon, was the ‘safe’ pick,” went some Monday-morning thinking. Its message of tolerance and diversity went down easy, allowing Academy members to endorse the film’s worldview with their ballots. The movie’s ending suggests hope for society. Maybe we’ll beat this racism thing yet!