The 2019 Oscars: A Diverse "New" Academy At War With Itself

A house divided against itself cannot stand, so said Abraham Lincoln, a mostly forgotten historical figure plucked from obscurity by an Oscar-winning 2012 film directed by Steven Spielberg. But if the house was Hollywood’s Dolby Theater on Sunday, February 24, 2019, it stood quite often, especially when not to do so would have seemed racist. So civil rights activist Rep. John Lewis received a dutiful standing ovation, Spike Lee got an immensely hard-earned one, and despite being white, B-Coops and L-Gags doing “Shallow” got a weird kind of swoony standing O because everyone’s knees were so weak by the end of it. So the house stood, and often, but as with so much of the pageantry and luvviness in the air on Oscar night — the generous shout-outs to fellow nominees, the gracious smiles of defeat and the blowing of kisses from the podium all the way down to the stalls — the performative presentation of a rosy image of unity and community masked what is a deeply divided Academy.

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It’s the awards themselves that told a different story. The lead-up to last night was a preamble of approximately 4 million weeks in length, so there was plenty of time for waves of speculation and counter-speculation to happen, and for each new development at a “precursor” award show to be parsed so thoroughly for meaning it was like watching a time-lapse of flesh-eating maggots turning a meaty corpse into a blindingly white skeleton. But even the most categorical of pundits asterisked whatever inalienable conclusion they came to with a bold-print disclaimer borrowed straight from the stockbroker’s handbook: past performance is not a reliable guide to future performance. And this was true in 2019, we were told, because of the membership profile of the “new” (read “improved”) Academy.

Following a shake-up in its admissions process a few years ago, which is widely touted to have directly contributed to the surprise”Moonlight” Best Picture win, Oscar commentators heralded a brave new world of unquantifiables in which the winner of the PGA Award would not always take Best Picture, and sometimes, just sometimes, the most apparently challenging and progressive film on the ticket could actually take the night’s biggest honor. But predicting the unpredictability of Best Picture, among other awards, turned out itself to be a bum steer. Peter Farrelly‘s “Green Book,” the PGA winner, did indeed end up winning (fun, grim fact: the first recipient ever of the PGA Award was “Driving Miss Daisy“), and Alfonso Cuarón‘s “Roma,” the widely fancied alternative, had to make do with only getting Director, Foreign Film and Cinematography.

There are a plethora of reasons for “Roma” “losing” that big award. Anti-Netflix sentiment feels destined to be overstated as one of them— it feels strange to me that an Academy dead-set against rewarding a streaming service would give that film Best Cinematography, of all things. But even if that did have some minimal effect on voters’ ballots, there were other factors that confused the issue more. It would have been a historic moment for a non-English language picture to have won Best Picture, but outside of Film Twitter (which, I don’t want to shock you, can feel a little bit like a bubble at times) is the Academy— Old or New—actually ready for that? So many of the seismic shifts that have happened recently and about which we presume the Newbies care deeply, have been specifically American in nature. From U.S. racial politics, to a push to recognize more commercial, mainstream product, to an industry-wide sexual harassment awakening that started in the black heart of Hollywood itself— suddenly to award the year’s highest honor to a non-U.S. film might have seemed like losing ground, even among this new, ostensibly more open-minded quadrant. And let’s not forget that it has literally never happened that the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar winner also wins Best Picture. Maybe in retrospect “Roma” would have had a better chance in Best Picture if it hadn’t also run (to a presumably easy win) in Best Foreign. Coulda shoulda woulda.

But if there are many reasons why “Roma” didn’t win, there are fewer to account for why “Green Book” did. The Newbies who didn’t go with “Roma” would, one imagines, have been put off by the thick, choking cloud of unwokeness that surrounded Farrelly’s film and gone for a third option—maybe “Black Panther” or “BlacKkKlansman.” And so maybe the simple fact is that we all underestimated the size and collective power of the Old Guard’s voting bloc. But in this era of the preferential ballot (what we wouldn’t give to get the exact tallies this year!), even that doesn’t quite account for the “Green Book” win. According to the NYT’s Ben Kenigsberg in this twitter thread, however marginal a win it was, the voting system means that “Green Book” had to at least have placed on more than 50% of ballots — which would put it on quite a few Newbie lists too, albeit likely not in the number 1 spot. So either the Old Guard still holds the balance of power in the Academy, or quite a few of the Newbies are not quite as New in their thinking as we believed. Or a little from columns A and B brought us to this sorry moment.

The “Green Book” win is the most visible tip of this contested iceberg, and as one of the worst Best Picture decisions in recent memory, it will continue to blot the Academy’s copybook for some time to come, even if it seems to mark a very surprising compromise choice between rival factions. But the feeling of a partisan rift in the Academy runs deep elsewhere, so much so that for every pleasant surprise (first-time nominee and actual, objective—don’t @me it’s a fact—2018 Best Actress Olivia Colman beating out the most vociferous SHE’S OVERDUE narrative in recent memory behind Glenn Close feels like a good example), there was a pick so bizarrely counterintuitive that it didn’t just seem like an oh-well second choice, but like a fuck-you victory for an opposing “side.”

Yes, this is me subtly subtweeting the Sound and Editing Oscars for “Bohemian Rhapsody,” directed by [sound of airplane overhead]. The fact that the biggest winner of the night with four Oscars was by any measure the worst film even mentioned (except maybe for “Tag” which I’m convinced made it into the opening montage just to remind us that things could be worse), and which was directed by an alleged pedophile whose name was itself carefully edited out of the evening, feels so pointed as to be overwritten and on the nose, like the screenplay for “Bohemian Rhapsody.” But hey, how else are Academy dads going to flex other than by showing that they do not care about your namby-pamby accusations of child sexual abuse, or the straight-washing and grotesque simplification of a complicated and tragic life, as long as the tunes remind them of rawking out when they still had hair? Sorry if this sounds harsh, but I am at a loss to understand how you can give Sound Editing (an award that traditionally never goes to music-oriented films) to a Queen movie purely for putting Queen songs in it. Frankly, it deserved that excruciating “Feeling old? This is what the guys from ‘Wayne’s World‘ look like now” intro, and that’s about as damning an observation as there is.

Did the right thing. #Oscars #Oscars2019
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— The Playlist ???? (@ThePlaylist) February 25, 2019