Lost at the last: the 2019 Oscars plucked bathos from the jaws of reputability

Who cares about the Oscars? Lots of connoisseurs of the event do but not enough TV viewers, it’s said. No one capable wants to present it solo – it’s become a poisoned chalice. It’s rightly become a focal point for progress in matters of diversity, and rightly people are fearful of making mistakes in that arena.

And whoops, right at the end of this year’s tentatively improving-seeming ceremony, with its capacity for lightly handled speeches with a point to make and its successful pass-the-parcel approach to presenting the awards, the Academy’s voters, despite its efforts to expand its constituency with many more diverse members, went and made a whopper of an error in awarding Green Book the Best Picture prize.

If you want a close analysis of all that’s wrong with Green Book as a biopic of African American jazz pianist Don Shirley (beautifully played by Mahershala Ali) and as an on-the-road cross-racial buddy movie based on the disputed raconteur stories of Shirley’s one-time Italian American driver cum bodyguard Tony ‘Lip’ Vallelonga (a strong Viggo Mortensen performance) do read Justin Chang’s takedown in the Los Angeles Times, where calls the film “the worst best picture winner since Crash”. You can get a hint of the problem just by noting Chang’s point that Mortensen was pushed for Best Actor and Ali just for Best Supporting.

The producers of Green Book on stage at the 2019 Oscar awards
Credit: Valerie Durant/A.M.P.A.S.

But even without the film’s racial-politics flaws, if anyone had told me just after I saw the film last autumn that this quite modest crowd-pleaser would actually win best picture against the gamut of films from Black Panther to Roma, that it would feature when really excellent films like You Were Never Really Here, Leave No Trace and If Beale Street Could Talk would not be nominated for Best Picture at all, I would have been astonished.

Since Roma, winning Best Director, Best Cinematography and Best Foreign Language film, is obviously the title that ran Green Book close, must we conclude that Green Book won because it was the only film about race – from a field that also includes BlacKkKlansman – that allows white viewers feel relatively good about themselves? There’s already a Green Book spoof online called White Savior.

I watched the Oscars at the Academy’s swanky party at a London hotel. Everyone dresses up for this. You get excited as you’re meant to. It’s a celebration of the art and craft of filmmaking, and delight is infectious. There’s a lot of drinking. Little teams of one-film supporters cluster.

On the screening theatre balcony there was strong support in the corner for Bohemian Rhapsody. I really enjoyed watching that film, corny and trite as it is. It won both sound categories, which is fair enough, but when it won Best Editing I gasped. I mean, there’s even a clip doing the social media rounds that’s entirely based on how bad the editing is. It’s as if there was a policy that every Queen band member had to have an equal number of reaction shots. The corner gang had their big reward when Rami Malek won Best Actor, against which I have no argument, given that he was pretty good and it was the weakest Best Actor field for years.

There were terrific speeches from Alfonso Cuarón (“I watched a lot of foreign-language films growing up, films like Citizen Kane, Jaws…”), from Regina King, Best Supporting Actress for If Beale Street Could Talk (“to be standing here representing one of the greatest artists of our time, James Baldwin, is a little surreal…’), from Olivia Colman, Best Actress winner for The Favourite (“It’s genuinely quite stressful. This is hilarious. Got an Oscar…) and from Spike Lee, co-winner of Best Adapted Screenplay for BlacKkKlansman (“let’s all mobilise, let’s all be on the right side of history, make the moral choice between love versus hate, let’s do the right thing”). These made it feel qualitatively different than previous years, like it really was changing for the better.

Even so, the minute one is asked to ‘think’ about the Oscars the mind reels. Variety called this edition “volatile”, which is probably why it was more enjoyable than usual. But what’s disturbing is the way the whole film calendar has shifted over the past few years so that every element revolves around this effusive half-cocked climax. We are a couple of months away from Cannes, which in order to maintain its eminence among film festivals now is thought to need to establish candidates for next year’s Oscars. What a curious business.