As I made the party stops this weekend, you could tell there was more tension and nervousness than usual about this year’s Academy Awards.
“Sunday night could be an earthquake and change the industry as we know it — and not in a good way,” one indie distribution head told me before the Spirit Awards on Saturday. He was referring to a potential Roma Best Picture win, which the majority of pundits (not this one) were predicting, and of course that means Netflix would win Hollywood’s biggest prize with its streaming model and nothing would ever be the same again. Or so the fear factor would have you believe. “We are not really going to give our Best Picture to them, are we?” complained one Academy voter. On the other hand, with Netflix now on its way to employing half the town, there were many members to whom I spoke in recent days who had no problem with the idea. At Saturday night’s The Night Before party, there was much talk about it, but most I ran into (all Academy members) were not worried about impending doom for the industry, even confident the Best Picture award would go elsewhere. And so it did. There definitely was a growing effort on the part of a larger number of members than I initially realized to prevent Netflix from taking the big one this year.
One veteran film company head with some nominated films this year told me at the Governors Ball he quietly was doing things to help Green Book despite the fact he had nothing to do with the movie. There certainly seemed to be no ill will against Alfonso Cuarón’s masterful Roma, which picked up three wins, only the belief of the collateral damage its not-to-be Best Picture victory would cause. I heard a similar story about another top executive who had a competing film in the Picture race, felt it didn’t have a chance and cast their No. 1 vote for Green Book instead, presumably to try and put the brakes on Netflix’s ascension.
I believe this was a win for the movie, the movie itself, and how it spoke to these Oscar voters in the same way it speaks to audiences. This is not a film that is retro, a step back or old fashioned, as some of its detractors in the Twitterverse would have you believe — that is unless you think, in these dark Trumpian times, wanting to feel good about being a decent human being is “old fashioned.”
The film won at Toronto, it won at the National Board of Review, it won at the Golden Globes, it won at the Producers Guild (which employs the same preferential ranked voting system as the Academy). Should it be a surprise? Hardly. Throw all the campaign money in the world against it, play every dirty trick you can imagine, get every critic to pile on, but people are people — whether subscribing to a screening series or being a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. We like what we like, and don’t tell us otherwise. Oscar recognized it, and that’s a very good thing at this point in time. The Netflix earthquake didn’t happen, diversity reigned supreme, Donald Trump’s name was never mentioned, the Oscars are still the Oscars, and the 91st Academy Awards were about the movies, which is exactly what it should be about.
– Courtesy: Deadline.com
