Road to the Oscars
I’m going to start off by saying, the Academy Awards should not be treated as an authority of quality of films. It is the very definition of a popularity contest, the winners voted on by members of the academy after being influenced by the millions spent by studios every year campaigning for their films. A quick look back at some past winners reveals the lengths that certain convicted rapists who need not be mentioned by name went to, to ensure their milquetoast films won over more deserving films.
The Oscars are also steeped in the white, conservative patriarchy that has defined the film industry for 100 years. They were started, in point of fact, as a union busting tactic. The founders believed that giving professionals a shiny trophy would placate them and deter them from unionizing. It did, in fact, the opposite, galvanizing the idea of the industry’s importance and help lead to the founding of the Screen Actors Guild, Directors Guild, Writer’s guild, etc.
How I prefer to view the Oscars is as a temperature test of the culture of Hollywood. Is a sea change in process? Setting aside blatant attempts to remain relevant and popular in the TV ratings (like increasing the Best Pictures nominees to ten so they could put up a couple red herring nominees like a Marvel movie, or this year’s Top Gun: Maverick, that have no chance in hell of winning but hey the kids liked it!), seeing how the academy voted can give a glimpse of a fragment of an idea on how the vibe of the industry is progressing. And every once and a while a year like 2023 comes along and gives a person hope.
The following are some thoughts I had on specific categories. It isn’t exhaustive, because for most, like Best Screenplay (Original or Adapted) or Best Original Song, I have no thoughts. Good choices won.
Best Picture
Everything, Everywhere All At Once deserved to win this award, especially when compared to the nine other films put against it. Only All Quiet on the Western Front deserved to be in contention, but it was obviously going to take home the Best International Film (this is the latest in a new ploy of the academy, nominating the best received international film in both categories - they did it with Roma, Parasite, and Drive My Car, with only Parasite taking both). I love Everything; I loved it a year ago when it was on it’s first miracle run of “saving cinema”. I love that the historically short memory of the academy held on to it for this long; but mostly I love it when a weird movie wins Best Picture. The more movies like Shape of Water or Parasite or Everything that win, the more hope I have that the academy is able to recognize that dour, prestige dramas are not the only films of merit. The academy has an ugly history of genre bigotry, or preferring films that flatter the industry itself. Seeing a dynamic, high-concept science fiction comedy win is a breath of fresh air (especially when something so masturbatory like The Fablemans is right there), and makes me wonder if the fear over the future of cinema is high enough that the voters finally recognize that genre films are the thing keeping theatres alive, not the decedents of Merchant Ivory. So long as next year, they don’t return to their old ways and give the award to Green Book again.
Best Actor
Brendan Fraser won, completing his sweep of this category across nearly every award show this season. Sadly, he won for a film that will be forgotten by noon tomorrow. The Whale is room temperature at best, and while Fraser is an actor deserving of an award, it’s a shame he won it for this. This run of wins is the industry telling him “we’re sorry and we love you”, a celebration of a career and actor that an actress would never receive, and there are certainly a far greater majority of actresses that the film industry owes an apology. My hope is, this run revitalizes Fraser’s career, and that he turns out a performance in a film that actually deserves recognition. I found this year’s male actor nominee’s to be the least engaging, and if the Academy were going to give a career achievement award to someone, it should have been Bill Nighy. Living was no more deserving a film, and will be no more remembered than The Whale, but Fraser has a higher chance of nabbing a future nomination. But all the same, it’s nice that Fraser won. Welcome back.
Best Actress
Only two women of colour have every won best actress - Halle Berry twenty years ago, and Michelle Yeoh this year. Ridiculous. Hopefully this means that Yeoh can stop taking jobs like a Witcher prequel on Netflix, and Hollywood can give her more of the roles that she has deserved for thirty years. The fact that it took her until 2023 to win an Oscar is a travesty - she was in Crouching Tiger for the love of gods, a film that received no acting nominations at the Oscars in 2000. Yeoh has had such a varied and diverse career, alternating between being a character actor while occasionally being given a lead role to sink her teeth into, and she always kills it. So, she deserves this award for Everything, and for everything she’s done since Super Cop. And if there is any sense of correctness in the world, this won’t be the last time she’s nominated for this award.
But I’m going to be honest with you, I thought for sure they were going to give it to Cate Blanchett for Tár. Todd Field took home the goose egg once again. Maybe if he waits another 15 years.
Best Supporting Actor
The academy has been more tolerate of minorities in the supporting categories, in a way that has definitely felt like them saying “good job, but know your place.” Both the male actor categories this year felt like where the weakest nominees were put up, outside of the front runner, so it was of little surprise that Ke Huy Quan took the win for Everything. It’s the type of story that the academy loves, and they they will vote for a story over a performance every time (See above re: Fraser). Quan was a child actor who stepped behind the camera once he aged out of being cute and was sudden just Asian, and unexpectedly stepped back in front of the lens for Crazy Rich Asians (a film that also reminded everyone of the awesomeness of Yeoh). Honestly, I hope A24 sent Warner Bros a care package after the ceremony for all the leg work Crazy Rich Asians did to set up Everything’s success.
Best Supporting Actress
The only major award I disagree with. Jamie Lee Curtis is a one of my favourite actors, especially when she’s doing comedy (she deserved to win for A Fish Called Wanda) and that this was her first nomination is crazy stupid. But, Angela Bassett deserved the win here for Wakanda Forever. That performance is a high frequency wire vibrating at a fever pitch. It is rage and sorrow and vengeance and she dominates that movie with her presence. I suspect Curtis winning is as above board and honest as you can get, and Bassett losing was not a symptom of the academy really hating superhero movies. It was a solid category, and part of me thought the two nominations for Everything here might cancel each other out. But I’m not mad about it, just disappointed.
Best Animated Feature
I knew del Toro would win here. I just knew it. His Pinocchio is beautiful, and any time stop frame animation gets some attention is a good thing (and it has been ascendant of late - three major stop frame features released last year!). As soon as I put it on, I knew it would win. But Marcel the Shell With Shoes On deserved this award as much as anything every deserved anything. That the academy cleared it to be nominated in the animation category to begin with was a feat, but it was easily one of the best films of last year. It was the gentle, hopeful, grieving hug that we all needed after the pandemic. So simple, earnest, and unjaded. It did win the Annie for best independent feature, and frankly I think the Annie’s are a better indicator of quality than the Oscars, especially when it comes to animation where the Oscars have largely been Disney-dominate since it’s inception (Frozen beating The Wind Rises, and Encanto beating The Mitchells vs. the Machines are both absurd). But, del Toro’s Pinocchio took the Best Feature award at the Annie’s too, so it was obviously going to be a race between them, and del Toro has more Academy clout. C’est la vie.
Best Director
The Daniels winning here is not just impressive, it might be the greatest indicator of a sea change in the Academy. They beat Todd Field, whose entire directorial career has been Oscar aspirational. They beat Martin McDonagh, who has been chasing the dragon of In Bruges so hard, he spent the pandemic at the Denis Villeneuve school of directing. They beat Ruben Östlund, which actually yeah that makes sense, but mark my words, Östlund is going to pull a Yorgos Lanthimos within the next five years so watch out. And they beat Spielberg. They beat Spielberg in his home, in front of everybody. The preeminent director of the twentieth century, directing his personal biography, and he didn’t have a chance up against hot dog fingers.
The Daniels have a century of filmmaking and the likes of Spielberg in their rearview and have developed new ways of looking at the world and of moving the camera and of telling a story. Sometimes that means butt plugs, and sometimes that means silent rocks. The point isn’t that they went crazy and threw everything they had at the screen. The point is that what seemed like chaos was in fact highly orchestrated melody, directed to beautiful crescendo. The likes of Field and McDonagh and Spielberg still have a place in film; they are still master craftsmen. But this time, the academy had the foresight to also recognize that they aren’t the only type of craftsmen in the industry.
Everything Everywhere All At Once runs a risk of becoming Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, or Pulp Fiction, or Swingers. Of becoming the movie that obnoxious movie nerds become obsessed with in college; that gets aped and copied by less talented directors for the next decade without recognizing why it hit when and how it did. It runs the risk of the death of it’s reputation by a thousand cuts. What it doesn’t have, what those other films do, is toxic masculinity at it’s core. It isn’t a movie without a message. All the flash and style are a cocoon for heartfelt, universal emotion. And I’m hoping that will mean it has longer staying power than other films.
Road to the Next Oscars
I’m always exhausted by the run up to the Oscars. From December onwards, the parade of prestige (and often, insufferable) films all fighting it out, trying to claw their way into the nomination list, all for a fleeting moment of recognition before being resigned to the trivia books. This year is no different. For the rest of memory, people will say “Brendan Fraser won an Oscar, what was it for?” at a pub trivia night, and no one will remember because no one will remember The Whale. James Cameron will recede once again into his personal subaquatic laboratory and plot what movie he’ll release in 2045. And movies will continue to be released, and a year from now we’ll be here again, because somewhere on the IMDb list of 2023 release dates is already next year’s Best Picture winner, we just don’t realize it yet.