It is that time of year again, the yearly calendar date where everyone on Twitter becomes an expert on film and the film industry.
Last year, I wrote a post-mortem of the Oscars and talked about how they were a broken, flawed show, made to do nothing more than pat people on the back.
This year, I am happy to report that I continued to be able to enjoy movies without the Hollywood machine telling me what’s good. The Oscars remain a deeply flawed corporate event for shilling.
The national pastime for the release of the Oscars is to pretend for three days that you know anything about movies and lecture film majors.
While the corner of Twitter who can find anything wrong pointed out the Oscars’ gaping flaws, hardcore film addicts felt as though some hidden gems (pun intended) were being left out.
The film that spawned the most memes this year (that should be a separate award) also earned the most nominations: Joker, directed by Todd Phillips, is up for a whopping 11 awards.
In second was The Irishman, directed by Martin Scorsese, the grandpapa of Cinema, which Marvel movies, according to him, are not. Though Joker has countless homages to Scorsese’s earlier masterpiece The King of Comedy, Scorsese got half the nominations Phillips did. Joker is just a rehash of The King of Comedy with lame comic book easter eggs. It’s Black Panther for gamers who use profanity on Xbox Live.
Left wing ideological critics were mad that it earned more nominations than Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Women. Which if you’re counting, and I sure as hell am, is the fourth adaptation to this classic novel.
Oh, despair. Is originality dead? The short answer is yes. Especially now that poor man’s Sergio Leone and foot enthusiast Quentin Tarantino has retired from making movies. His swansong genre non-conforming film Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood earned 10 nominations.
It’s probably my pick for film of the year. It’s original, quirky, and plotless. Brad Pitt was as excellent in it as he was in Ad Astra, which earned only one nomination.
Once Upon A Time led World War I flick 1917 in nominations, in part because the latter wasn’t nominated in the editing category. This is because it had little editing to appear as though it was shot in one take in order to increase the realism.
Most controversially, no women were nominated in the Best Director category, a prize which in the history of the awards has been won by a woman just once. I’ll save you the google: it was Kathryn Bigelow for her 2008 Iraq war thriller The Hurt Locker.
Absolutely, many great films were made by women this year – among them Lulu Wang’s The Farewell and Olivia Wilde’s Booksmart. Best director has, at best, a shaky definition. It seems to serve as a runner-up prize to the Best Picture category or as a way to recognize the director without the attached production team.
Often films that are overall technical marvels win. Last year, it was Roma. In the past, it’s been epics such as Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan or Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity.
The definition of “Best Director” is confounding and its existence is sort of nonsensical. Especially considering there is already a “Best Picture” category. I’ve personally never stood up after a movie and said “it was good except for the directing, so its overall the best movie I’ve seen but not the best directed movie.”
Everything that happens in a movie is because of some god-like director, some seem to think. Why have two awards?
As many people have pointed out, and rightfully so, no women have been nominated for this award this year. It remains a male prize.
This undeniable truth, to me, points towards a larger point. These odds are incredibly long for a film to get included, as the award has only five nominees.
It’s a systemic issue, and a much larger problem than the Academy, which makes mostly arbitrary decisions about movies.
I am not denying the excellent work of Greta Gerwig on Little Women. I am merely pointing out that the criteria for this award is stupid, and that a nomination for an Oscar doesn’t make or break a movie.
The academy has a long and terrible track record of handing out this prize. Directors to have never won include Stanley Kubrick, Fredrico Fellini, Agnes Varda, and Alfred Hitchcock.
Any sensible person with a grasp on film history would know these directors as giants who changed the art form.
At the core, there is this fundamental problem. The Oscars recognize what has gained critical acclaim throughout the year. The directors who get the best releases and best resources to make a film win.
Hero worship of these directors get them nominated and their notoriety drives this. The Academy sees this buffer and tries to develop new and upcoming directors as a counter-cultural balance to award the films that have been overlooked. So the Academy nominates those films, then certain good films from established directors and their counter-cultural counterparts are never sufficiently addressed.
The ceremony is hemmed in at all sides as it tries to be for everyone. This results in the Oscars becoming a show for nobody, where no one derives any pleasure from it.
So in the future let’s read and write about films, share polite discourse, and watch a broad array of films from a multitude of directors of different backgrounds and origins.
Instead of thinking an award show is going to solve anything.
Fuck Disney.
Graphic by Sara Mizannojehdehi.
