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What ‘Green Book’ Says About the Academy. Our Critics on the Oscars.
By Manohla Dargis, A.O. Scott and Wesley Morris
It makes perverse sense that the biggest movie show on earth provided ridiculous drama, unsurprising twists and cartoon villains leading up to Sunday’s ceremony, including ill-advised proposals (like a so-called popular Oscar) that were either shelved or jettisoned. So perhaps it was unexpected that the actual Academy Awards would deliver a predictable bummer ending. Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott, our co-chief film critics, join Wesley Morris, a critic at large, to talk about the diverse slate of winners, “Roma’s” not-so-surprise loss and, yes, “Green Book.”
[The best and worst moments of the Oscars | Our analysis of the ceremony. | The complete list of winners.]
MANOHLA DARGIS To be fair, the awards were pretty good and sometimes great, until they weren’t. It was a pleasure and often moving to see all those women rise up to take their rightful place on that stage, starting with the three nonhosts — Maya Rudolph, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler — who did exactly what you want from good hosts and what those who produce the Oscars rarely grasp. They were funny, charming, breezy, and then they got off the stage before they could bore or embarrass us. And then there were all the female winners, including two for “Black Panther”: the costume designer Ruth E. Carter and the production designer Hannah Beachler.
Both were hired by Ryan Coogler, the director of “Black Panther” and one of the heroes of last night. He doesn’t just hire women to work on his movies, he hires them to head departments (like cinematography, a male-dominated field), putting them in positions of power. His hiring practices represent the kind of real activism that few other moviemakers embrace, as the parade of men thanking their wives last night continues to affirm. Even so, it was also deeply satisfying to see one man, Spike Lee, finally receive a competitive Oscar, sharing best adapted screenplay. That it took the academy this long to formally honor him speaks volumes about this organization.
That it remains a deeply divided body was evident leading up to best picture going to “Green Book.” Its director, Peter Farrelly, said that the movie’s “whole story is about love. It’s about loving each other despite our differences, and finding the truth about who we are. We’re the same people” I wasn’t feeling the love, so to make myself feel worse, I rewatched the acceptance speeches for “Crash,” the last best picture winner that made me loathe these awards. When “Crash” won in 2006, the producer Cathy Schulman said, “Thank you to all the members of the academy for embracing our film about love and about tolerance about truth.”
A.O. SCOTT Spike Lee won an Oscar. So did Regina King and Olivia Colman. Alfonso Cuarón won three. All of that sparked joy (to cite Marie Kondo, who was at the Dolby Theater and maybe should have been consulted on that weird stage design). So did the absence of a host, which I hope becomes a tradition.
The upside of the Kevin Hart fiasco was that we didn’t have to endure the desperate, self-conscious brand extension of a flailing comedian or the forced graciousness of a movie star who would have preferred to be seated among the nominees. Instead, the presenters were allowed to carry the night, and to infuse it with a glamour that felt, to me, both old-fashioned and distinctly of the moment. It was an impressively inclusive bunch, with respect to gender, generation, background and celebrity pedigree. Queen Latifah! Awkwafina! Serena Williams! Barbra Streisand! That diversity is the result of carefully managed optics, to be sure, but it also felt like a plausible representation of reality.
Of course the reality is more complicated. This is still Hollywood we’re talking about, so there had to be some dissonance beneath the heartfelt harmonizing. There was lots of love for Queen and “Bohemian Rhapsody,” but not a single mention in any acceptance speech of its director, Bryan Singer. #MeToo? What? Who? And in the year of “Black Panther” and “BlacKkKlansman” — and of “Sorry to Bother You,” “Blindspotting,” “Hale County This Morning, This Evening” and “Widows” — the best picture trophy went to a movie whose best friend is black, a movie that doesn’t see color, a movie about how all lives matter. “Green Book” believes itself to be a movie about racial progress, but its victory smacks of backlash.
WESLEY MORRIS Tony, the set! It was the recurring bathroom art from “Russian Doll” come, disturbingly, to life. Would a concept like revanchism apply here? Is best-picture territory reclaimed or doubled down against? Does this constitute a reassertion of authority? As you’ve both enumerated things are changing within this organization. And yet “Green Book’s” victory makes all kinds of sense. First, for all the changing that’s been reported about the academy’s membership — it’s getting less white and less male every year — it’s not yet entirely reflective of all that change: white and male and, at this point, capable of feeling better about a movie like “Green Book” more than, say, a movie like “Vice,” a fever dream about Dick Cheney. “Green Book” is the more convincing progressive fantasy. Second, and I say this as someone who doesn’t like “Green Book,” the movie works as a movie. Peter Farrelly makes comedies and this movie, if you’re inclined to find laughs at the friendship at the film’s center, is funny.
And the last line is so good and right and pleasing that I actually went for a third helping just to make sure I wasn’t wrong about it all. Only once I start thinking about what and who I’m laughing at do I get depressed — and Tony, my seatmate at that first helping can attest — I got depressed pretty fast. The idea that Representative John Lewis, civil rights hero and national activist treasure, gave such a roused (if rambling) endorsement of the movie’s reality — around the movie not in it — felt both unclean and indicative of the spell it casts. To see this movie is to love it.
There’s also the idea that this movie won and not “Vice.” I kept thinking about what would have happened if “First Man” had sailed through this campaign process to best picture, as it might have in the 1990s and early 2000s. It’s certainly more imaginatively made than a lot of those winners. But I think a movie like that, a square (but not square at all!) historical drama about men who did Great Things and the women who were Wives, is a relic. And as much a reliquary as “Green Book” seems to be, its makers and the academy can be patted on the back for speaking to whatever racial euphemism people like Farrelly and Cathy Schulman are using when they talk about “truth.”
But also — and I’m wondering whether you have as much anecdotal experience with this as I have — I’ve talked to so many people who really didn’t like, “get” or want to see “Roma.” Some of them are real academy voters. Some of them are people in the majority membership demographic: It was too long, too in Spanish, too black and white, too dull, too much on the dreaded Netflix to grab them. With it also in the foreign language category (where it won), “Roma” might never have had a serious chance after all.
DARGIS I think you’re right about the chances of “Roma” winning best picture, particularly given that academy members are (wrongly) allowed to watch nominees at home, where they hit the pause button at will. “Roma” is a big movie and to appreciate its panoramic splendor and lapidary details you need a big bright screen. Some may also need, I think, a real theater to keep watching it because “Roma” is an art movie and in crucial ways more indebted to classic art cinema — in its pacing, tableaus, ellipses and ambiguity — than to Hollywood. As we know from the box office, American moviegoers these days largely watch relatively fast-paced obvious movies.
So, yes, perhaps best picture for “Roma” was always a long shot. I can imagine people hitting pause — and then stop — during the first sweeping camera movement across the family’s emptied-out house. And its chances might have been hurt by the animus that some in the industry understandably feel toward Netflix, which seems hostile to theatrical distribution. Still, I was holding out hope partly because in 2017 the award had been won by Barry Jenkins’s “Moonlight,” another art movie. In that case, the coming-of-age story and three-part structure made it easier for viewers to accept Jenkins’s formal and stylistic experimentation.
The industry is often and sometimes laughably called liberal, but its entrenched economic conservatism as well as its gender and racial makeup is often matched by its aesthetic traditionalism.
MORRIS While we’re pouring one out for “Roma” — maybe gratuitously (Cuarón himself won three major Oscars last night!) — I also want to spill a little for Glenn Close, whose work in “The Wife” (a so-so movie) lost to a performance, in Olivia Colman’s ferocious, ingenious, origamic dithering in “The Favourite,” that felt very Glenn Close in “Reversal of Fortune,” “Hamlet” and “Cookie’s Fortune.” She was a great sport when Colman blurted a tribute to her from the stage. But it also almost reminds me of another aspect of Oscars folly. That Oscar wouldn’t make Close any more essential to our ideas of risk in American movie acting than Close already is.
I’ll also say that Bradley Cooper, who pretty much did everything for “A Star Is Born” short of rip tickets, is also evidence of some kind of turned tide. That was deemed the big winner when it landed in the fall and according to at least one poll was the movie a majority of the public picked to win. But fashion is fickle with these things, too. And for all of that movie’s hefty movieness and despite “The Shape of Water” winning last year, it’s hard for a movie about a woman to go all the way.
That said, I too am thrilled about Oscars for Regina King and Ruth Carter and Hannah Beachler and the women who won those shorts Oscars. But I’m just going to prepare us for next year’s show, when something like “The Best of Enemies” could be a factor. That’s set in late Jim Crow-era North Carolina and is about a civil rights activist (Taraji P. Henson) who teams up with the local KKK chief (Sam Rockwell) to desegregate their children’s school. I haven’t seen this movie yet. (It could be great!) But it also speaks to an inclination to find racial reconciliation in the past as a proxy for the present, for a particular kind of nostalgia.
SCOTT A song from “A Star Is Born” not performed onstage last night muses that “maybe it’s time to let the old ways die.” The academy, which is building a museum in Los Angeles dedicated to movie history — and itself — is not likely to take that sentiment to heart any time soon. “A Star Is Born” sure didn’t.
That traditionalism can be vexatious in the ways we’ve been talking about — aesthetically and politically — but it can also be charming, even moving at times. My glasses always fog up at the In Memoriam montage, in spite of the inevitable omissions. Albert Finney! Margot Kidder! Were we ever so young? The show sells continuity as well as novelty, nostalgia alongside relevance. And it encourages the audience to believe that the movies are uniquely positioned to answer our desires to look fondly at the past and eagerly into the future. Sometimes within a single viewing experience, like “Roma.”
That idea of movies has always been a myth, and maybe it’s an especially fragile myth at this moment of disruption and dissension. This was a better show than most of its recent predecessors — smoother, more relaxed, livelier and less anxious — but the three hours and change also had a feeling of borrowed time. I found myself wondering who this whole thing is for, whether it can keep going in its current form and whether any of us would miss it if it went away.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/25/movies/oscars-critics-green-book.html
2019-02-25 19:21:43Z
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