Why the Underdogs Took Over the Oscars
Why the Underdogs Took Over the Oscars
#122: Oscar nominations, "Another Round," "Echoes in the Canyon," and where to stream all the Best Picture nominees
Edition 122:
Hey movie lovers!
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In this week’s newsletter: Finally we’ve got some Oscar nominations to talk about! As the campaigns crystallize it’s clear we’ve entered a new era for the industry’s top prizes. As for recommendations, I bet you aren’t expecting a Danish midlife crisis comedy or a documentary about 60s pop music? Plus where to stream every Best Picture nominee, and in this week’s “Trailer Watch,” we’ve got Idris Elba in a cowboy hat. Nuff said.
Why the Underdogs Took Over the Oscars
Rarely does a passing of the torch from one era into another come as emphatically and definitively as the 2017 Academy Awards ceremony. In what is now one of the most iconic moments in Oscars history, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway mistakenly announced La La Land had won Best Picture, setting up the awkward acceptance speech interruption correctly awarding Moonlight as the winner.
La La Land was a traditional Oscars powerhouse: a starry-eyed musical celebrating Hollywood featuring beautiful white people and made for the all-inclusive audience of “dreamers.” It was a smash hit at the box office and tied the all-time record of 14 nominations. Moonlight, on the other hand, tells the incredibly personal and specific story of a poor, gay, black boy coming of age in South Florida. It had a micro budget and made basically zero commercial impact.
Moonlight won, thanks in part to the Academy’s efforts to greatly expand the voting body by adding hundreds of younger and more diverse members, but also because no one who saw the movie could say a single negative thing about it.
Enter the Advocacy Era. The Best Picture race has become a fight for survival across a months-long campaign of publicity, schmoozing, jockeying and mudslinging, where the least assailable project is the one that wins the marathon race to the stage at the Dolby Theatre. These new market forces favor Davids over Goliaths, small movies with little-engine-that-could narratives and heartwarming messages that a few people are really rooting for and everyone else would be cruel to root against.
This era’s Best Picture winners are an aww-shucks love story between a shy woman and an alien fish from an under-appreciated master director (The Shape of Water), a Korean family drama about class disparity from an under-appreciated master director (Parasite), and…Green Book, the exception that proves the rule. The only reason Roma, a beautiful portrait of a poor Mexican maid from an under-appreciated master director, didn’t win in 2019 was because voters revolted against the idea of rewarding its distributer Netflix, the industry’s encroaching Goliath.
That long-winded ado sets the table for this year’s Oscar nominations, which were released on Monday. The momentum of an emerging juggernaut is squarely behind Nomadland, an imminently lovable indie about the victims of capitalism that could result in just the second female to win Best Director and direct a Best Picture winner. That’s an invincible narrative.
(This is the part where I pause to tell you all that my cynicism, or in this case realism, does not mean I don’t love any of these movies. Every single movie I’ve mentioned so far is one I’d recommend you watch…even Green Book.)
It’s another reason why I believe Netflix’s dominance on Monday is a bit of a mirage. The streaming giant nabbed 35 nominations, more than its two closest competitors combined (Disney 15, Amazon 12). But while a marketing budget can muscle you onto the ballot, it can’t pay the way into people’s hearts.
Just ask Martin Scorcese, who last year brought Netflix original The Irishman (an ultimate Goliath) to the party with a field-leading 10 nominations and left empty handed. The same fate could be awaiting Mank, which lead all movies this year with 10 nominations.
You can see evidence up and down the ballot. The late great Chadwick Boseman is unassailable. He’s a shoe-in to win Best Actor. Delroy Lindo gave an incredible performance as a Trump supporter in Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods. That’s assailable. He was snubbed from the Best Supporting Actor category. The largely international director’s guild nominated Thomas Vintenberg for the small Danish film Another Round over a widely celebrated screenwriter trying to muscle his way into the Best Director category in Aaron Sorkin.
But oh, look at me go. Giving away these tidbits for free. If I don’t stop now I might lose my competitive edge in the Oscars pool in which I’m competing against all of you. But who am I kidding, even if I’ve seen all the movies I’m still going to do the exact same thing as you and wait until the day before the ceremony and then check out who the oddsmakers like to win in all the categories I’m not sure about.
You can submit your entries at any time between now and April 25th. Good luck!
Something New
Another Round (Hulu): Most of us only know Mads Mikkelsen as a Bond villain, or from bit parts in the Star Wars, Marvel and Harry Potter franchises. That makes this performance even more delightful, as he returns to his home country of Denmark to star as a school teacher who, along with his three teacher friends, attempts to escape a humdrum existence by living life at .05 blood alcohol content. It’s rare to see a movie celebrate the positive effects of drinking (alongside an appropriate amount of negative effects also), and the social lubricant serves mostly to heighten the tension found in middle age monotony. It’s a beautifully shot and constructed film, a kind of traditional low stakes human drama indie with some serious European flare and a jaw-dropping climactic finale.
Last Chance U: Basketball (Netflix): If you’ve followed the football seasons of this documentary series, by now you know the premise: we follow a junior college program full of athletes with big dreams and big obstacles. This time the spotlight is on East LA College, where the athletic director rightly identifies that the players who end up there have problems in at least one of the three A’s: athletics (they aren’t that good), academics (they couldn’t qualify for D1), or asshole (they’ve got personal issues). I’ve never been a huge fan of the series but this dive back into the competitive basketball culture reminded me what I miss about it (and a whole lotta things I don’t miss at all). It’s certainly not for everyone but it is compelling and well done for those who are catching hoops fever this month.
Something Old
Echoes in the Canyon (2019, Netflix): The documentary itself is quite new, but the subject matter is the Laurel Canyon rock-and-roll scene of the 1960s, a creative river delta on par with Paris in the 30s. With interviews from the rockers who came out of that area like Tom Petty (in his last on-camera interview before passing), Neil Young, Jackson Browne, Eric Clapton, Brian Wilson, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash (not to mention Ringo Starr), mixed with revamped performances from modern artists like Fionna Apple, Beck and Regina Spektor, it’s an overwhelming experience of music and nostalgia. If you have any interest at all in 60s pop and rock music, you’re going to love this.
Something to Stream
The 2021 Oscar Best Picture Nominees: There’s still a month before the ceremony, which gives you plenty of time to cram for the exam. Here is where you can find and stream all of the nominees for the top prize, and the hyperlink in each title will take you to my full review of the movie.
Mank: Netflix
Minari: Video On-Demand ($20 for now, will drop to $6 in a couple weeks)
Nomadland: Hulu (currently the heavy betting favorite to win)
Promising Young Woman: Video On-Demand (Just dropped to $6 via Apple/Amazon)
The Father: Theaters (I’m going to the newly re-opened theaters in L.A. this next week to check this movie out, full review coming in next Friday’s newsletter!)
Judas and the Black Messiah: Theaters (HBO Max window ended after 30 days, will be put back on the service after theatrical window ends)
Sound of Metal: Hulu
The Trial of the Chicago 7: Netflix
Trailer Watch: Concrete Cowboys
Most movie trailers give entirely too much away. If it were up to me, movies would only be allowed to release 30-second teasers, instead of the full two-minute trailers that contain the entire arc of the plot.
Then there’s this trailer, which stretches to two-and-a-half minutes and I still have no idea what it’s about. They’re in an urban ghetto but they all have horses? The kid from “Stranger Things” is some kind of estranged son to Idris Elba, rocking a cowboy hat? And the rapper Method Man is like a sheriff of some kind?
It looks to me like the Netflix mad-lib generator spit out a cinematic embodiment of Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road,” and it remains to be see whether first time writer/director Ricky Staub can make a compelling father-son drama out of it. Regardless, it’ll be beamed into 200 million homes on April 2.