The two big winners at the Oscars on Sunday night were “The Shape of Water” and “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” which were nowhere near the best movies in competition but were the flashiest and the showiest, the former flaunting design and the latter flaunting drama. Their successes—“The Shape of Water” won for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Score, and Best Costume Design, and “Three Billboards” took Best Actress and Best Supporting Actor—suggest the Academy’s brazen self-celebration of the old-school pomp of classic moviemaking, as well as the Academy’s general obliviousness to the moment, despite efforts on the part of the broadcast’s producers to emphasize what’s different this year.
By putting Ashley Judd, Annabella Sciorra, and Salma Hayek Pinault onstage together to introduce a videotaped segment featuring a diverse set of Oscar-adjacent Hollywood figures (including Mira Sorvino, Ava DuVernay, Lee Daniels, Greta Gerwig, Kumail Nanjiani, Geena Davis, Yance Ford, Sarah Silverman, and Barry Jenkins), the Academy and the producers made sure to honor those who’ve been subjected to sexual harassment and violence in the industry and those who’ve broken the wall of silence surrounding it. But they did so while keeping the tone of the proceedings cheerful, optimistic, and, above all, commercial. The capper of the segment was Nanjiani’s exhortation of Hollywood professionals to pursue diversity not only because it’s the right thing to do but because it’s profitable to do so. Judd, in her introduction, spoke fervently of her hope for a future of “equality, diversity, inclusion, intersectionality.” But the most prominent intersectionality reflected in this year’s awards is the one that Nanjiani suggests, the intersection of doing good while getting rich.
Further Reading
New Yorker writers on the 2018 Academy Awards.
The most decisive action on behalf of uninhibited speech was the host Jimmy Kimmel’s announcement that winners wouldn’t be blared to a close by the orchestra, but he dispelled the fear of endless speechifying by offering a Jet Ski to the winner who spoke for the shortest time. (In practice, it went to Mark Bridges, who got Best Costume Design, for “Phantom Thread”—the only award that the movie won.) And, by far, the freest speech was delivered by Frances McDormand, who, in winning Best Actress, for “Three Billboards,” exulted uninhibitedly in her victory and then addressed the audience with an ardent intensity. She joyfully urged all the female nominees in the room to stand, and urged the decision-makers in Hollywood to listen to their pitches for movies—and then left the audience with two words, “inclusion rider,” to bring about change. (An inclusion rider is a clause in a contract that requires producers to hire gender-equal crews and/or meet other measures of diversity.)
Yet the movie that McDormand won her award for is cavalierly, brazenly racist, not because it depicts racists but because it treats the very subject of race and the political effect of race on black individuals as a mere backdrop for the personal growth of white characters. “The Shape of Water” is different—it’s an altogether unexceptionable film, taking on with an uncontroversial sentimentality the long-settled controversies of the early sixties. The writer and director, Guillermo del Toro, depicts, with what he seems to consider audacity, the ambient resistance to a woman’s romance with a male humanoid sea creature. He emphasizes that his film is an allegory, though I dread even to imagine for what. With its depiction of narrow racism in the milieu surrounding its characters, “The Shape of Water” comes off as a fantasy version of “Loving” or, for that matter, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” a surrogate for a film about an interracial relationship. It’s a movie that struggles, by means of ludicrously and garishly overwrought decorative and narrative complications, to endorse an absolutely minimal baseline of recognition of the “other.” It’s exactly the sort of wan and impotent message of bland tolerance that gets Hollywood to join hands in a chorus of self-congratulation.
The predatory destructiveness of white people’s self-love for their good feelings is exactly the subject of Jordan Peele’s “Get Out,” which was up for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Daniel Kaluuya), and Best Original Screenplay. It’s good news that Peele won in the latter category, and no surprise (though still a disappointment) that his movie didn’t win in any other. As presenters, Tiffany Haddish and Maya Rudolph stole the show with their speculation that, because of the corrective to #OscarsSoWhite, some in the audience might find this year’s Oscars to be “So Black,” and with their reassurance that lots of white people would soon be coming onstage. (Their follow-up joke about white people with clipboards and headphones was equally on target.)
The jokes were funny, but, for the most part, the events of the evening were extraordinarily tame. The industry seems, above all, to be protecting itself—shielding itself from any sense that its corruption is built into the system. The subject of the Oscars is Hollywood’s own self-celebration, and it’s hard to know, at the present time, what’s being celebrated. The sense of change, the sense that there is a sudden, drastic shift in the norms of behind-the-scenes behavior and onscreen representations, is well worth celebrating, but warily. A few of the mighty have fallen, a few of the less mighty have been embarrassed, but the institutions that protected them remain unshaken, their potentates still in power. The history of Hollywood is, in part, a history of depredation, of abuse, yet the celebration of Hollywood’s traditions and the assertion of continuity between the classic era and today’s movies was on view in the ceremony from the outset, with the black-and-white faux-newsreel introductory shtick that started the show.
The montage sequences from classic movies that punctuated the action offered similarly festive assertions of continuity—but one such clip, showing Eva Marie Saint in “On the Waterfront,” resonated strangely. It’s a McCarthy-era movie that affirms the morality of denunciations; it’s the work of Elia Kazan, who himself named names of suspected Hollywood Communists to the House Committee on Un-American Activities; and, tonight, the morality of naming names seemed suddenly to ring differently, with a new realm of implications.
Last year’s Oscars, held during the first shock of life under a depraved new Administration, lent a sudden rush of authentic outrage to the notion of liberal Hollywood standing defiantly together. But now the enemy is within, and, under the guise of a collective embrace of new mores, the Oscars look bewildered, straining, with a handful of well-chosen speakers and well-intentioned gestures, to maintain a confident and hopeful air. Ultimately, the self-deception that Hollywood fears most involves the box office, which dropped six per cent in 2017. With awards to “Darkest Hour” and “Dunkirk,” the Oscars display their particular enthusiasm for fighting the enemies on the outside. Increasingly, for Hollywood, the most frightening foe is Netflix.
Sourse: newyorker.com
