Oscar myopia

Roma might have been robbed of the Best Picture award but it managed to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language film in a crowded category that had the captivating Polish movie and more

In hindsight, one wonders if 2018 even deserved the quietly poignant and sensitively depicted films on the black experience in America such as Blindspotting, Sorry to Bother You, Black Panther, The Hate U Give, If Beale Street Could Talk and BlacKkKlansman. After all, a movie as basic and sanitised as Green Book robbed these movies of an Oscar for Best Picture. 

“Horrendously mediocre film about race and racism,” thundered Witney Seibold on Twitter moments after the announcement. Hannah Schneider didn’t mince any words either in her tweet: “The fact that the director of Green Book thanked a bunch of white men like Viggo (Mortensen) in his acceptance speech and didn’t even mention or thank Don Shirley (the subject of the biopic) is really telling of its white saviour narrative.” This movie about a black piano virtuoso (Mahershala Ali) peddling his scintillating jazz wares in the Deep South in the 1960s with  help from his Caucasian chauffeur (Mortensen) is laden with enough sugary-sweet clichés to give you Type 2 diabetes by the end of it. That said, Ali won his second Oscar, after Moonlight, for Best Supporting Actor. One wonders how easy it is to hoodwink the predominantly white Academy with such shoddily made movies that purportedly deal with racial strife in America.

This has to be the worst decision taken by the Academy after awarding Crash the same bauble back in 2006. It is equally dismaying to see Rami Malek bagging Best Male Actor for lip-syncing his way through a ho-hum movie like Bohemian Rhapsody as Freddie Mercury. It’s staggeringly absurd that the movie snaffled four Oscars despite it hinting that Mercury died of HIV owing to his debauched lifestyle rather than the inaction by the US and the UK governments regarding the epidemic in the early 1980s. The man who helmed one of the most important rock bands deserves a better biopic by a more sharp-hearted filmmaker than Bryan Singer.

A movie as basic and sanitised as Green Book robbed other movies of an Oscar for Best Picture

Not all was gloom and doom at Los Angeles’ Dolby Theatre though. No one saw Olivia Colman winning the Best Actress award for her weirdly thoughtful portrayal in The Favourite as UK’s Queen Anne who had two cousins fighting eachother to be her lover in the 18th century. As a lazy queen who was content having the country’s affairs handled by a disloyal lover (Rachel Weisz), Colman is a revelation. The controlled turbulence of her face and the hefty gait deserved every bit of the award even though everyone thought Glenn Close would walk away with it for her brilliant performance as the subdued spouse of a Nobel-Prize winning author in The Wife.

Five of the last six Oscars for Best Director have gone to three Mexicans: Alejandro González Iñárritu won in 2015 and 2016; Guillermo del Toro emerged victorious in 2018; and after winning in 2014, Alfonso Cuarón again won in 2019 for Roma, his densely layered semi-autobiographical tale set in 1970s’ Mexico. This string of Mexican successes makes one wonder if President Donald Trump is in an ungodly hurry to build the wall along the Southern border so as to stop such genius Mexican filmmakers from crossing over to Hollywood.

Roma might have been robbed of the Best Picture award but it managed to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language film in a crowded category that had the captivating Polish movie, Cold War, and the much-feted Japanese film, Shoplifters. Personally, I would have loved to see Hirokazu Koreeda’s quiet endurance drama about a family of small-time bodega thieves in Tokyo win the award, but the Academy always goes for overarching themes.

My heart swelled to see Minding The Gap, which I raved about in this column back in September, winning the Best Documentary award for debut filmmaker Bing Liu’s documentary about him and his friends fooling around on skateboards in a sleepy American town. In recent years, there hasn’t been a more affecting documentary on coming to terms with adolescence around parents who are at most a shadowy presence.

An equally amazing winner was in the Best Animated Feature. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse proved to have enough flair and panache to bring the webbed hero into the vivifying world of animation. Where the Academy will go in 2020 is anybody’s guess though.

jagan.520@gmail.com