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The Academy's documentary branch blows it again and snubs Mr. Rogers |
Pardon the late commentary but it’s been a crazy day and I
don’t simply mean because of the Oscar nominations. This morning’s spectacularly
pleasing and infuriating announcement of the Academy Award nominations yielded
a mix of outrageous snubs and wonderful surprises. It’s hard to be mad about
what went down with the list of contenders rhymed off by announcers Kumail Nanjiani
and Tracee Ellis Ross, but it’s tough to be completely satisfied. Any way one
looks at it though, this morning’s live stream had about one upset per
category, yielded myriad formulae for possible outcomes, and made a case that
every category emphatically deserves to be in the ceremony broadcast. We need
to see every win if the Oscars are going to be as engagingly unpredictable as
their early morning nomination announcement. Every category matters.
It’s hard to speculate about the snub. Perhaps the doc branch,
notorious for passing over previous winners, simply didn’t feel like giving
Neville another trophy when 20 Feet From Stardom won only five years ago. They also have a reputation for giving the
cold shoulder to box office hits with a bizarre pattern that essentially
punishes documentaries for being successful. Maybe even the political winds influenced
voters to an extent – even colloquially speaking, a colleague I share an office
with made a point of praising the Academy for “thankfully not nominating yet
another film about a white guy.” My response to her was that’s a very
narrow-minded way of looking at this specific film. Won’t You Be My Neighbour? invites audiences to recall Rogers’
message for empathy, inclusion, tolerance, and love when being a toxic parasite
is now the knee-jerk response too often for far too many people. Why the aversion to kindness, Oscar voters?
I say the same to the members of the documentary branch: you
missed the point. I think it’s incredibly sad if one overlooks superior
filmmaking simply because it is “isn’t woke enough” on a superficial level. (Doubly so when when a film explicitly engages with such concerns.) I
say the same if one diminishes a film’s artistic merits if it is also accessible
and connects with audiences. Perhaps it’s worth revisiting an article that Adam
Benzine contributed to The
Hollywood Reporter last year that did a fair bit of digging and
proposed that the Jane snub was
reflective of something rotten in the documentary branch with members leaving
it off the ballot to prevent it from netting a win. One can argue a win for Neighbor might have been inevitable if a
nomination served it up to the greater membership in the final round of voting.
But vote as a group to bolster a potential contender, not to take one down.
With that being said, I do really like the five
documentaries that are nominated: Free Solo, Of Fathers and Sons, RBG, Minding the Gap (woo hoo!), and Hale County This
Morning, This Evening. I find it a bit silly to see RBG there in lieu of Mr. Rogers in that it is far more simplified
as a straightforward, borderline hagiographic portrait of Ruth Bader Ginsburg,
but there’s no denying that it’s one of the movies of the moment that made a
major contribution to documentary in 2018. But why the double standard?
Other snubs that stung included the shafting of nice guy Bradley
Cooper in the Best Director category for his impressive debut A Star is Born. But boohoo to Bradley:
he has to settle for nominations for Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Adapted
Screenplay. Hopefully this snub gives him some momentum to win the Best Actor prize
he deserves. I'm also bummed, but not surprised, that Destroyer's Karyn Kusama missed out for her riveting direction, while Nicole Kidman came up empty for her two contenders, Boy Erased and Destroyer, my favourite performance of 2018.
Cooper’s omission made room for one of the morning’s best surprises: a Best Director nomination for Cold War’s Pawel Pawlikowski. Don’t miss this exceptionally crafted and heartbreaking film when it opens Friday. In a war, it’s A Star is Born set in post-war Poland with two tragic alcoholics for the price of one.
Cooper’s omission made room for one of the morning’s best surprises: a Best Director nomination for Cold War’s Pawel Pawlikowski. Don’t miss this exceptionally crafted and heartbreaking film when it opens Friday. In a war, it’s A Star is Born set in post-war Poland with two tragic alcoholics for the price of one.
On the foreign language film front, I was sad to see Birds of Passage miss the cut, but not
entirely surprised. The film had virtually no campaign. The team behind the
film just didn’t make it available to critics’ group and other players throwing
support, exposure, and momentum to the contenders. I lobbied for the film’s
inclusion at both the Toronto Film Critics Association awards and the Online
Film Critics Society awards, but we were told a flat-out ‘no’ in both cases. If
you don’t make a film available to people, they can’t vote for it.
The good news, however, is that this year probably has the
best field of foreign contenders in a very long time. Poland’s Cold War faces off against Japan’s Shoplifters, which won the Palme d’Or at
Cannes; Germany’s Never Look Away,
which also scooped at out-of-nowhere cinematography nomination that it
completely deserved; Nadine Labaki’s devastating and impeccably crafted Capernaum; and Alfonso Cuarón’s stunning
Roma, which scored a whopping 10
nominations and might make history with a Best Picture win for Netflix. All in
all, this might be the most internationally-oriented field of overall nominees
in years with two foreign films in the director category, three in
cinematography (two of which are black and white), and Roma’s Yalitza Aparicio and Marina de Tavira scoring surprise
acting nominations.
Roma doesn’t have
the perfect formula for a win, though. The film missed a key nomination, Best
Film Editing, which traditionally is essential for a Best Picture win. Since
1981, only one film has won Best Picture without landing a film editing
nomination: Birdman, the long take
wonder by Cuarón’s amigo Alejandro González Iñárritu.
However, the nominations in the acting categories indicate a strong show of
support for Roma and the 10
nominations suggest that the perceived aversion to Netflix is all but over. The
streaming site also scooped four surprise nominations for the Coen Brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs to make for
a very good morning. After putting my money on A Star is Born since September, I’m inclined to shift my bet to Roma.
Like Roma, no Best
Picture nominee has all the boxes checked for a win. Green Book, dubbed the frontrunner by many pundits after scoring
the People’s Choice Award at TIFF, three Golden Globes, and the PGA win, missed
a Best Director nomination for Peter Farrelly. The consoling point for Farrelly
might be that one of the only films to win Best Picture without a Best Director
nomination is Driving Miss Daisy, to
which Green Book is frequently
compared. To add historical parallels, Spike Lee is finally in the running, but
seems destined to lose to Driving Miss
Daisy again.
The Favourite, on
the other hand, ties Roma with the
most nominations, but it doesn’t have the all-important Directors Guild of
America nomination behind it. You have to back again to Driving Miss Daisy to find a film that won Best Picture without a
DGA nom. But it’s spectacular to see Yorgos Lanthimos’s darkly funny romp
receive so much support, especially for the performances by Rachel Weisz, Emma
Stone, and Olivia Colman, the latter having a fair chance to upset Glenn Close
or Lady Gaga in a fairly tight Best Actress race.
It’s also hard to be completely cheesed about the
nominations when Canadian filmmakers received lots of love. Canuck talent
cleaned up in the shorts category. Alison Snowden and David Fine’s Animal Behvaiour (the NFB's 75th nominee) faces off against Hamilton’s
Trevor Jimenez with Weekends and
Toronto’s Domee Shi with Bao in
the animated category, while Jeremy Comte and Maria Gracia Turgeon’s Fauve joins Marianne Farley and
Marie-Hélène Panisset’s Marguerite in
the live action race. Unfortunately, Charlie Tyrell’s My Dead Dad’s Porno Tapes missed in the documentary short category,
but hopefully a title like that (and a film that great) will find more love
from the Canadian Screen Awards when the nominations are announced in two
weeks.