It used to be relatively simple to predict what was going to win Best Picture. Used to be.
From 1950 to 1997 there were only
seven times where the Best Director didn't come from the Best Picture. Seven times in forty-seven years. Which probably isn't so surprising, that when voters filled out their ballots they assessed the person who directed the best movie also did the best job directing. The six times they did make a distinction in all those years...
1951:
An American in Paris/George Stevens (
A Place in the Sun)
1952:
The Greatest Show on Earth/John Ford (
The Quiet Man)
1956:
Around the World in 80 Days/George Stevens (
Giant)
1967:
In the Heat of the Night/Mike Nichols (
The Graduate)
1972:
The Godfather/Bob Fosse (
Cabaret)
1981:
Chariots of Fire/Warren Beatty (
Reds)
1989:
Driving Miss Daisy/Oliver Stone (
Born on the Fourth of July)
But since then it has become more common, and of late even the norm! After only seven instances in nearly fifty years, since 1998 it has already happened eight times in those nineteen years of Oscars, including four of the last five...
1998:
Shakespeare in Love/Steven Spielberg (
Saving Private Ryan)
2000:
Gladiator/Steven Soderbergh (
Traffic)
2002:
Chicago/Roman Polanski (
The Pianist)
2005:
Crash/Ang Lee (
Brokeback Mountain)
2012:
Argo/Ang Lee (
Life of Pi)
2013:
12 Years a Slave/Alfonso Cuarón (
Gravity)
2015:
Spotlight/Alejandro González Iñárritu (
The Revenant)
2016:
Moonlight/Damien Chazelle (
La La Land)
Like I said, it used to be easier to predict. The Best Director and Best Picture were usually the same, and the DGA Award was a very accurate predictor to who would win Best Director, thus Best Picture. Now it’s the wild, wild west. We can only guess as to why. So are we set up for yet another Picture/Director split? Eight or ten years ago I would have said the prospect of it happening three years in a row and five out six is almost impossible. But now I almost have to expect it.
Guillermo del Toro won the DGA Award, and that makes him the prohibitive favorite to win Best Director. The DGA Award is not an infallible predictor of course, Gerwig or Peele could upset him. But let's work through this assuming Guillermo does in fact win the Best Director Academy Award. Will
The Shape of Water follow and be named Best Picture? It could, but I kinda don't feel like it is going to happen, no matter who wins Director.
The Shape of Water also won the Producers Guild of America Award. Though the last two years they have not matched the Oscar's Best Picture, choosing
La La Land over
Moonlight and
The Big Short over
Spotlight. Could they be off THREE years in a row? The only other stretch where they were was 2004 - 2006:
The Aviator instead of
Million Dollar Baby,
Brokeback Mountain instead of
Crash, and
Little Miss Sunshine over
The Departed.
The Shape of Water is very much a del Toro through and through, and as far as sticking it in a genre I suppose Science Fiction is the easiest bag to throw it in? The relationship between Elisa and the amphibious man is a romantic fantasy, but it's difficult to classify it as a Romance the way
Casablanca and
Gone with the Wind and
Titanic are. It is structured like a fable, but when you get a few minutes in and the main character is masturbating in the bathtub you can't rightly call it a movie geared toward children like
The Wizard of Oz,
E.T., or
Babe. So Sci-Fi, while not perfect, is probably the best fit, all in all.
A Sci-Fi movie has never won Best Picture, and depending on how strict your definition is the former nominees are:
A Clockwork Orange (1971),
Star Wars (1977),
E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982),
District 9 (2009),
Avatar (2009),
Inception (2010),
Gravity (2013),
Her (2013),
The Martian (2015),
Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), and
Arrival (2016). George Miller's
Fury Road was even better reviewed, made much more money, and had much more rabid fan support going for it than
Shape of Water, but it lost to
Spotlight.
A Science Fiction film
will win Best Picture some day. I just can't believe it is going to be the one where somebody fu*ks a fish. Not
2001 or
Star Wars or
E.T. or
Avatar, but
The Shape of Water? It may well happen, but I just don't feel like it is going to. Too many of the less adventurous voters are going to find it just too darn weird.
The former Best Picture nominee it is probably closest to in theme and blending of fantasy and romance and difficult to pin down comfortably in a genre is Fincher's
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Like
The Shape of Water it too received thirteen nominations, just one shy of the record of fourteen set by
All About Eve,
Titanic, and
La La Land.
Benjamin Button won only three of those thirteen: Art Direction, Makeup, and Visual Effects. All the big awards - Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Picture - it lost all of them.
Slumdog Millionaire was named Best Picture, the final year of the Picture nominees being limited to five instead of as many as ten (the other nominees were
Milk, The Reader, and
Frost/Nixon).
That was nine years ago. I think
The Shape of Water will win more Oscars than
Buttons did and Guillermo may get Director, but I do have a hard time seeing the votership going for it as Best Picture.
So if
Shape of Water doesn't make it, what will?
Dunkirk and
Darkest Hour are both looking at the same moment in history from different perspectives. England at the beginning of WWII at the pivotal moment when the wrong decision could have ended the U.K.'s part in the war.
Darkest Hour shows Churchill ascending to power and deciding to send civilian yachts across the Channel to rescue as many men as possible and regroup for another day all while fending off political attempts to unseat him as Prime Minister, and
Dunkirk shows those men waiting on that decision and then Churchill's plan in effect.
Darkest Hour is all dimly lit corridors and meetings and Gary Oldman's performance, while
Dunkirk is beautifully shot sometimes poetic spectacle of horrors starring Christopher Nolan. Neither has a very realistic shot of winning Best Picture.
The Post seemed like the right movie at exactly the right time. Just as the current discourse was centered on “fake news” and the duty of journalism to check power comes this dramatization of The New York Times and The Washington Post standing up to Nixon’s White House to release the Pentagon Papers, all while Katharine Graham has a girl power moment and takes control of the business after a lifetime of being underestimated and dismissed in roles that kept her from having a voice. Headlined by two of the biggest movie stars of their time, directed by the most famous and successful director in the world.
But the resulting film is….not super amazing. It’s good, but it begs you to compare it to 1976’s Best Picture nominee
All the President’s Men which dramatizes The Washington Post going against Nixon’s White House once again, this time over the Watergate break in/cover up/scandal. And that movie is simply much better and more compelling, even forty years later.
The Post is the TENTH Spielberg movie nominated for Best Picture:
Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, The Color Purple, Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, Munich, War Horse, and
Lincoln. The only one to win so far is
Schindler’s List. That won’t change this year.
Phantom Thread and
Call Me By Your Name are there representing the Art House contingent. Thematically and in setting, Paul Thomas Anderson’s
Phantom Thread harkens back both to melodramas and psychodaramas of yesteryear. Subject matter wise it might have been something Douglas Sirk or Vincentte Minnelli may have tackled, and there are also bits that almost seem to be leaning towards psychological terror as in
Rebecca or
Gaslight. Not to spoil it for those who haven’t seen it, but it doesn’t really wind up being either of those things, and even has a happy ending after setting up what seemed like a dark tragedy. Like
Shape of Water it may be tough to categorize in genre terms, but it is very clearly a product of its director. If you love P.T. Anderson this mostly quiet tale will absolutely blow you away, and if you haven’t grooved to his previous work I cannot imagine this changing your mind. It’s pretty, but it isn’t going to win.
Call Me By Your Name is a lovely coming-of-age romance with gorgeous people in the gorgeous countryside where we mostly observe the romance through moments instead of big plot machinations or spoken declarations of love.
Moonlight was the first Gay movie to ever win Best Picture when they finally got the correct envelope out on stage last year. Will Gay movies win in back-to-back years? Maybe someday, but not out of the gate. Or is it gayte? A star is born with Timothée Chalamet, and though its romance is more pronounced than
Phantom Thread’s, it simply doesn’t have the momentum to win. Quiet, still, passionate movies don’t generally win Best Picture.
They are two exquisite films that have no chance to win.
In contrast to a veteran like Spielberg are the movies from the novices:
Get Out and
Lady Bird. Jordan Peele’s movie is another that is hard to categorize. It’s a thriller, but it has some great Horror elements in there as well. Like Sci-Fi, a Horror movie has never won Best Picture. The only true Horror movie to be nominated for Best Picture is
The Exorcist. No
Psycho, Rosemary’s Baby, The Shining or anything else.
The Silence of the Lambs has been embraced by the Horror community, even though it is a thriller, a mystery, and a police procedural, because the spectre of Hopkins as Hannibal Lectre hangs so much over the entire film (with very little screen time). If
Get Out were to win, I’m sure it would be embraced as Horror, too.
The satirical elements make
Get Out very timely and thus a vote for it a minor political statement as well as rewarding a really crackerjack thriller. Can
Get Out win? Sure. But it would be an upset.
Lady Bird is one of the best reviewed movies in recent years. Greta Gerwig had moved from indie queen toward filmmaking by co-writing a couple of her projects (
Frances Ha and
Mistress America), but with
Lady Bird she went completely behind the camera for a semi-autobiographical tale of a teenager trying to figure out who she is while getting away from her Mom and her hometown of Sacremento. It was never a box office hit, never even cracked the top five once. But it has hung around and hung around, first by strength of those glowing reviews and word of mouth, and now awards season love. In addition to critics, the fans who are connecting with it are doing so strongly. Will there be enough of them and maybe a bit of momentum to have a personal story about a young woman be what is elevated to the highest award rather than a romantic fable about fish people? Gerwig might sneak in as Best Director and see
Lady Bird named Best Picture.
And then there is
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. It had some frontrunner momentum in January, but the inevitable backlash as well as some criticism might have slowed its push. It certainly didn’t have the kind of momentum that
La La Land did this time last year, and you saw how that wound up. It may win Best Supporting Actor and Best Actress, but Best Picture would be a tougher trick. Martin McDonagh was not nominated as Best Director. There have been movies that won Best Picture without their director getting a nomination. Four. This is the 90th Academy Awards, and in the previous 89 there have been four times the Best Picture won without even a nomination for the director. Two of those were very early in the process,
Wings (1927) at the first ever ceremony and
Grand Hotel (1932) at the fifth. But that was before the nomination format normalized with always having five Best Director nods. So in the more modern history of the Oscars it happened only twice:
Driving Miss Daisy (1989) and
Argo (2012). That is it.
Three Billboards could join that short and odd list on March 4th. The site GoldDerby has the Best Picture odds set like this, as of today…
Shape of Water 11/10
Three Billboards 12/5
Get Out 10/1
Lady Bird 16/1
Of course last year they had frontrunner
La La Land as a near La-La-Lock at 2/1 and the surprise winner,
Moonlight, at 18/1. Last year’s win, apart from the jaw-dropping envelope confusion, was one of the biggest upsets in Oscar history. This year the front runner isn’t as clear. That means whatever wins it won’t be as seismic an upset, but the doubt makes it tough to call.
I'm feeling like it's going to go to
Three Billboards, but I'm not sure how much of that is because it's the one I WANT to win. Though I like all four of the main contenders.
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