As we get closer and closer to Oscar night (three weeks away),
La La Land has emerged as the clear favorite. It won the Producers Guild of America Award, which is not a foolproof indicator (just last year the PGA went to
The Big Short while Oscar's Best Picture went to
Spotlight), but it is damn good. Coupled with the other awards and prizes it has received, it is definitely the favorite. Any film in this position always faces a question of will there be backlash or fatigue before the Oscar ballots are cast? We'll know in twenty days. I doubt it, but if it is going to be upset, what might do it?
Arrival marks the second year in a row with a Sci-Fi flick among the Best Picture nominees. It doesn't have the same kind of momentum and rabid fanbase that
Mad Max: Fury Road did, but depending on how strict your definition of Science Fiction, this is only the eleventh nominee from that genre:
A Clockwork Orange, Star Wars, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, District 9, Avatar, Inception, Gravity, Her, The Martian and
Mad Max: Fury Road. Will
Arrival be the first Sci-Fi film to win? Extremely unlikely. But if you're a fan of the genre, pretty cool that it is popping up much more frequently, now (certainly helped by the expansion of how many BP nominees there are each year). A Sci-Fi movie will probably win one day. Of these eleven,
Avatar was the only one that seemed like a frontrunner going into awards night, only to be upset by
The Hurt Locker. But it ain't gonna be
Arrival. Even though Villeneuve made the cut for Best Director.
Hell or High Water has drawn a lot of obvious comparison to another modern day Western Noir, the Coen Brothers'
No Country for Old Men, which did win Best Picture. This one has more of a sociopolitical bent to it than the Coen's existential thriller, which made it a timely hit in the atmosphere of 2016. Though an excellent movie it has no real chance of winning, especially without a Director nomination.
Fences, Hidden Figures, and
Lion all don't have their respective directors nominated either, which makes winning Best Picture prohibitively unlikely. In the modern era since the categories normalized a bit and they settled on the format of five Best Director nominees each year (before that format it happened early on with
Wings and
Grand Hotel) there have only been TWO movies that won without their directors at least being nominated:
Driving Miss Daisy (Oliver Stone won Director for
Born on the Fourth of July while Bruce Beresford went unnominated) and
Argo (Ang Lee won for
Life of Pi while Ben Affleck sat there unnominated). Twice in many, many decades.
Argo was only four years ago so clearly it ain't impossible, but it is very rare.
Hidden Figures did win the Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Cast, which some people (including SAG) want to link as a predictor for Best Picture. But the numbers don't really bare that out. SAG has only been giving this award since 1995, and in that span they have matched the Oscar with
Shakespeare in Love, American Beauty, Chicago, LOTR: The Return of the King, Crash, No Country for Old Men, Slumdog Millionaire, The King's Speech, Argo, Birdman, and
Spotlight. That's eleven. Out of twenty-one. Their misses were sometimes wide misses:
Apollo 13, The Birdcage, The Full Monty, Traffic, Gosford Park, Sideways, Little Miss Sunshine, Inglourious Basterds, The Help, and
American Hustle. So when
Hidden Figures doesn't win Best Picture the SAG will fall back down to only 50% accuracy as a predictor. Not great. Not in and of itself, anyway. If
Hidden Figures had won other big awards and critics prizes leading up to the SAG Awards, OK, maybe that tells you something? But when it is really the only thing it has won, no.
Fences is adapted from August Wilson's Pulitzer Prize winning play. Stage dramas and comedies that aren't Musicals have won Best Picture before.
Grand Hotel, You Can't Take it with You, Amadeus, Driving Miss Daisy.
Casablanca was famously adapted from an unproduced play ("Everybody Comes to Rick's"), and I believe
Hamlet may have been a play, first (that Billy Shakespeare: what a writer!). The screenplay for
Fences was adapted by the legendary late playwright himself, though it remained unproduced as a film for decades until Denzel picked it up and got it financed. Powerful performances and a faithful adaptation, but it's not going to win.
Lion is a fascinating true story and is the feature debut of Australian Garth Davis, who before this had worked in television and commercials. That it cracked through as a Best Picture nominee over more high profile releases from established legends like Scorsese's
Silence and Eastwood's
Sully is a testament to the power of the amazing story and the filmmaking. It will be interesting to see how Davis' career develops over the next few years since this has put him on the map in an impressive fashion, but
Lion will not find itself named Best Picture.
For anyone in or out of the film industry who thought Mel Gibson was nothing but a punchline anymore, he came roaring back with
Hacksaw Ridge. In many ways an intentionally old fashioned movie, though infused with Gibson’s bloody mayhem which makes the depiction of the WWII battlefield truly horrific and thus the true story of Desmond Doss, the conscientious objector medic who valiantly and stunningly won the Medal of Honor for his courage and resolve in the face of that chaos, all the more heroic.
Braveheart, Gibson’s second film as director, did win Best Picture, but it’s unlikely he’ll repeat that here with
Hacksaw Ridge. Plenty of War Movies have won Best Picture over the years, everything from
Gone with the Wind and
Casablanca to
The English Patient and
Schindler’s List, and including War movies that focus on combat like
All Quiet on the Western Front, Patton, The Deer Hunter, Platoon, and
The Hurt Locker.
Hacksaw Ridge won’t win, but its inclusion, in addition to signaling Mel Gibson’s true return, is part of a long tradition.
Moonlight is Barry Jenkins’ second feature (2008’s
Medicine for Melancholy was his debut). A film festival hit that got indie distribution and heaps of critical praise, it built slowly and surely through word of mouth, sticking around the art houses where it played for months. For those who have only heard the title but don’t really know what it’s about, it follows one character in three stages of his life, divided into three chapters of the film: when he’s about ten and in middle school, when he’s sixteen and in high school, and when he’s in his twenties. Living in the harder sections of Miami, when we meet him he is physically small and just beginning to realize that he is gay, which makes him the target of bullies, his drug-addicted mother, and seemingly the world at large. The only thing that saves him is a chance meeting with a local drug dealer who recognizes himself in the withdrawn, scared boy and begins mentoring him. The screenplay is adapted partially from an uproduced play that Jenkins infused with his own perspective and characters.
Moonlight has surprising turns and builds to a beautiful emotional climax. But does it have a chance of winning Best Picture?
It has a shot, yes. But it’s a long shot. It took many years, but starting with
Midnight Cowboy the Academy has nominated films with gay themes, if not outright narrative focus and protagonists, for Best Picture:
Dog Day Afternoon, Kiss of the Spider Woman, The Crying Game, The Hours, Capote, Milk, The Kids Are Alright, The Imitation Game, and of course
Brokeback Mountain. None of them has managed to win, though presumably
Brokeback got closest. Is
Moonlight going to be the one that clears that bar? In addition to homosexuality it also deals with race. Not counting period pieces like winners
12 Years a Slave and
Diving Miss Daisy but instead looking at contemporary racial issues, there have only been a handful of Picture noms over the years:
The Defiant Ones, Lilies of the Field, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, Secrets & Lies, Beasts of the Southern Wild, and
In the Heat of the Night. That last one listed, Norman Jewison’s 1967 film about a black Philadelphia police detective who unwillingly becomes involved with a local sheriff and a murder investigation in a small segregated Mississippi town did win Best Picture. But while its look at racial dynamics is rightly what it is known for, it was also couched in the familiar genre of a murder mystery and police procedural. Will
Moonlight’s stylized, empathetic depiction of a gay black man be the barrier breaker for the Academy in terms of their own history? Possible…though probably not. It would be an upset, but at least it is realistically in the discussion.
Which leaves
Manchester by the Sea as the nominee with the best chance to spoil
La La Land’s run and deny it Best Picture. If you haven’t seen it you have no doubt heard than Ken Lonergan’s film is a tear-jerker. And that is certainly accurate. With themes and depictions of loss and regret, there are some very sad, emotionally draining scenes. But it’s also not
just that. For me I found as many hearty laughs and as much genuine humor as there are tears and drama. Which is a neat trick, really. So often films are one or the other, either they go for the tears and lean towards being overwrought and manipulative, or they are lighthearted and go for laughs with maybe an emotional bumper or two to add a dose of pathos, which leads to tone problems and can steer dangerously into cheap sentimentality.
Manchester deftly looks at the lives of these characters without pulling punches or laughs. Led by strong performances, three of which are nominated, it feels like it is in the tradition of former winners like
Kramer vs. Kramer, Ordinary People, and
Terms of Endearment. But will all of those strengths be enough to put it over the top?
Like just about any frontrunner there are plenty of people who don’t like or even outright hate
La La Land. I don’t think it’s any more divisive than
Birdman or
The Artist or any other number of recent and long past winners. How it will endure in terms of film history and pop culture relevance time will decide, whether it is named Best Picture or not. But trying to gauge what the Academy voters themselves are thinking right now as they are filling out their ballots, I find it hard to imagine huge swaths of them being either so enamored with one of the other eight choices or voting against it out of spite or in backlash to its popularity in numbers significant enough to have it not be Best Picture.
Musicals were one of the dominant Hollywood genres in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and the number of them that won Best Picture shows how respected as well as popular the form was. Ten Musicals have won Best Picture, starting with
The Broadway Melody and
The Great Zigfield in Oscar’s earliest days, and
Going My Way in the ‘40s. But it was the middle of the 20th Century when the genre truly ruled. In the ‘50s and ‘60s
An American in Paris, Gigi, West Side Story, The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, and
Oliver! all won the Academy’s top honor, and all of these films were nominees:
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, The King and I, Auntie Mame, The Music Man, Mary Poppins, Doctor Doolittle, Funny Girl, and
Hello, Dolly. But as the Studio system officially crumbled and both times and tastes changed, from the ‘70s onward Musicals became fewer and further between. The only nominees in the ‘70s were
Fiddler on the Roof and
Cabaret, there were none in the 1980s, and only Disney’s animated
Beauty & the Beast in the ‘90s. The new century found a nomination of Baz Luhrman’s
Moulin Rouge! and a win for
Chicago. Until this year, the only other nominee since
Chicago was
Les Misérables four years ago.
What isn’t included in that list of Musical winners and nominees is
Singin’ in the Rain, widely considered the greatest Musical ever made. It wasn’t even
nominated in 1952. In hindsight it is one of the most glaring Oscar omissions ever. It will take decades and a couple generations of cinemagoers and filmmakers to see if
La La Land holds up anywhere nearly as well as
Singin’ in the Rain and becomes the 21st Century standard for the genre, but as beloved as it is by those of us who do indeed love it, it’s difficult to imagine the current Academy votership making a similar mistake twenty days from now.