The Surprisingly Decent Oscars

This one surpassed my (admittedly low) expectations!

The 2020 Oscars

Likes: Wow, I really wasn’t expecting a foreign movie to do that well. I’m surprised at how happy it makes me.

Dislikes: Lampshading the controversy about your typically out-of-touch voters doesn’t make it go away.

Bottom Line: Are the Oscars important? Yes and no, the most boring and useless of all answers…

3 out of 5. ◆◆◆◇◇

Every year, around the same time, plenty of think pieces are written about the Academy Awards. Does this industry awards show matter? How much money does it take to fuel a “For your consideration” campaign? What kind of benefits do Oscar winners (actors, studios and otherwise) see? Why doesn’t the voting populace resemble the diversity of our modern era?

These notions can end up exploding like the #OscarsSoWhite in 2015-2016, the controversy over Best Picture initially being awarded to La La Land instead of Moonlight in 2017, and a movie about black and white people driving (Driving Ms. Daisy, Green Book) beating out a more pertinent movie about racial tension from Spike Lee (Do the Right Thing, BlacKkKlansman) just to name a few recent ones.

And before this year’s Oscars were awarded, it felt like a really similar moment was coming. Diversity and women in film took a backseat to other considerations this year. Jordan Peele’s Us was a nailbiting horror with social commentary up the wazoo and some incredible dual performances (in particular, Lupita Nyong’o) to boot. No nominations. The Farewell highlighted an Asian experience through a typecast demolishing performance by Awkwafina. No nominations. Jennifer Lopez was a force in the female driven Hustlers. No nomination. Little Women received a few nods in the nomination categories, but not for Greta Gerwig as director. In fact, Cynthia Erivo and Antonio Banderas were the only thing keeping an all-white sweep of acting categories from occurring.

I guess I mean to say by all this is that I wasn’t optimistic about feeling satisfied with the ceremony or the awardees. For a majority of the time, that did stay true. Janelle Monae’s female and minority affirming opening performance felt deflated to me and Chris Rock pointing out the diversity problem seemed like a hollow effort. Like shrugging and just accepting it. (I’m not saying that Chris Rock has to come up with jokes that make us feel better, I think they were actually pretty truthful jokes.) It just didn’t feel great to live in that space where this was the reality. Seeing the same stories over and over.

But then, against all odds, things started to change. First, Parasite won Best Original Screenplay. A surprise, but this wasn’t totally unforeseen. I expected that to be the only win for the film and I was happy. I thought it was a great work the moment I saw it and was glad other people felt the same way.

It seems like I misjudged other people, because they felt the same way as me a lot more. Parasite went on to win Best Foreign Language Film over some healthy competition. Then Bong Joon-Ho won Best Director which made me sit up straight in my seat. Then the “little South Korean film that could” won Best Picture and I leapt out of my seat and yelled which woke up my dog.

Parasite made history by being the first non-English language film to win the big prize of the night. That accomplishment, silly as it may sound, left me in an unexpectedly happy mood. Its win maybe signifies that the Academy is changing and is open to different perspectives and types of people being seen as worthy. As Bong Joon-Ho himself said while accepting a Golden Globe award, “Once you overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.” I really hope that this win is a move in that direction. Because that would be a really cool world to live in.