(Photo Courtesy of AMPAS©)
So the 90th annual Academy Awards are history, and it’s fair to say that a little bit of history was made… but not a lot. If anything, these awards represented a retreat to the safety of the predictable and the conventional. That shouldn’t be surprising considering the expressed intent of the producers was to avoid controversy, instructing host Jimmy Kimmel and asking winners to avoid any overt posturing that could be construed as unduly incendiary. The ratings catastrophe of the recent Grammy Awards ceremony, which literally shed viewers by the millions every time someone interjected a political message, was a shot across the bow of a telecast that has been on life support for several years. If the Oscars want to still be relevant at their 100th anniversary in ten years, they need to turn this ship around right now. Whether or not this was enough to do just that, only time will tell — it’s my sense that it was certainly a step in the right direction. There were no enormous gaffes or groaners — even the jokes that didn’t quite work (the Star Wars presenters unfairly hamstrung by having to play off a robot) weren’t anywhere close to the eye-rollers of years past. On the other hand, it wasn’t exactly an enthralling evening. Its emotional high points were few and far between, with safe and honorable moments that may have stopped the bleeding and prevented the exodus of viewers seen in previous years, but nothing that would have helped win new viewers or regain those that recent shows had lost.
Most of my previous predictions held, with no real upsets even among the upsets. Phantom Thread winning Best Costume was always a strong possibility, A Fantastic Woman was always a co-frontrunner for Foreign Language, and The Shape of Water was the leader with 13 nominations going into the evening, so its Best Picture win, despite defying some long statistical odds relative to previous nominees and winners, wasn’t much of a surprise or a head-scratcher. Icarus for Best Documentary may have been the one real surprise, but it was a competitive category and the Netflix documentary clearly gained some traction from current political events and the recent Olympics. The remaining two of my six miscalls were in the shorts categories where Documentary Short and Live Action Short went to, respectively, Heaven is a Traffic Jam on the 405 and The Silent Child, both films that deal with triumph in the face of disability. In an evening where diversity and gender equality was a dominant theme, the voters in the shorts categories went in a different direction — a reactionary, but understandable impulse.
As for the major categories, several trends stand out. First, the failure of Lady Bird to secure a single win in any category (expect the Academy to make it up to Greta Gerwig at some point in the future) and secondly, the achievement of Guillermo del Toro’s triumph with The Silence of Water. The last time a film won Best Picture without being nominated for a “Best Ensemble” SAG Award was in 1995, the year the SAG Awards introduced the category. Apollo 13 took the award, but Braveheart won the Oscar. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the SAG Awards have lost their predictive luster — nor that the Producers Guild Awards and the Directors Guild Awards, which failed as predictors last year with La La Land but were in sync with The Shape of Water this year, are back in the driver’s seat. It simply means that in close years, where there is unusual parity between the nominees… anything is possible. But the trend of Best Picture failing to win the most awards was also thankfully reversed by The Shape of Water. Not since the Oscars went to the preferential ballot in 2009 (when The Hurt Locker was both Best Picture and overall champ) has the Best Picture been the outright awards champion. That’s seven straight years where Best Picture either tied (three times) or lost (four times) the title of “most statuettes” in a given ceremony. Certainly nobody objects to spreading the wealth, but the historic bragging rights of Best Pictures that also dominated in technical categories has been painfully missing for nearly a decade — a lackluster period during which the telecast’s ratings have continuously plummeted. While perhaps not the result nor the show many were hoping for, The Shape of Water winning Best Picture is a result that bodes generally well, and which may keep the preferential ballot alive for at least another year or two.
As to the show itself, the lack of missteps also meant a lack of excitement. A smattering of great speeches — Jordan Peele, Gary Oldman, Frances McDormand, Allison Janney, Sam Rockwell, Guillermo del Toro, Roger Deakins — and some wonderful montage work couldn’t overcome the feeling that the show was undercooked, unimaginative and threadbare on spectacle. It was, for lack of a better term, safe. Jimmy Kimmel has never been the showman that Billy Crystal was, and his breezy delivery, while comfortable, failed to inject the evening with a hoped-for sense of grandeur and nostalgia. Put simply, after ninety years, audiences have every right to expect the Oscar show and its presentation to be better than this. Several bad trends from recent years continued this year as well — notably the “reality television” stunts (see Ellen’s pizza delivery and selfie photo four years ago, and Jimmy Kimmel’s “tourist” gag from last year) intended to involve viewers and the general public in some illusory sense of “interaction.” A running gag about a Jet Ski as a prize for keeping speeches short carries very little weight when a solid ten minutes of showtime is devoted to a pointless bit involving stars taking snacks to an auditorium of “regular folks” next door. Give audiences either longer speeches, a shorter show or more movie clips. These gags are neither funny nor endearing.
Meanwhile, Roger Deakins finally won his Cinematography Oscar, Lee Smith finally won his Editing Oscar, and James Ivory finally won an Oscar, period (becoming the Oldest winner in Oscar history).
In the end, none of this means a great deal for the movie industry at large — there are systemic problems accompanying a quantum paradigm shift that has moved the ground beneath the motion picture industry like nothing else in its history. These problems remain and will not be remedied by one, five or ten great Oscar ceremonies. But the Oscars are meaningful to the people whose efforts sustain the business. They represent the respect and validation of their peers. Whatever happens in the business at large, artisans need the Oscars to give their labors some small sense of meaning. Despite all outward appearances, it’s a blue collar business consisting of long days, hard work and uncertain employment. Most people in this business don’t get paid millions, are often unemployed and worry about paying their mortgage. Many have moved to other states to sustain their careers or else abandoned the business entirely. These problems have not disappeared. But for the work to have meaning, for the people who create the illusion of dreams for the general public to enjoy the illusion of dreams themselves — the Oscars are meaningful. So to the extent they are meaningful to the people who make movies, they should be meaningful to the people who watch movies. And yet, increasingly — they are not.
Whatever achievements and milestones we may celebrate this evening, we should temper with that sobering thought — because the future of both the Oscars and the movie business depend on figuring out a remedy.