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This topic comprises 2 pages: 1 2
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Topic: 91st Academy Awards reactions
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Mark Ogden
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 943
From: Little Falls, N.J.
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 02-25-2019 09:21 AM
I thought Green Book was a weak movie and a bad choice for Best Picture, in fact I thought any of the other seven would have been a better pick. But my view on this is practically charitable compared to the film critic of The Los Angeles Times.
Oscars 2019: ‘Green Book’ is the worst best picture winner since ‘Crash’
“Green Book” is the worst best picture Oscar winner since “Crash,” and I don’t make the comparison lightly.
Like that 2005 movie, Peter Farrelly’s interracial buddy dramedy is insultingly glib and hucksterish, a self-satisfied crock masquerading as an olive branch. It reduces the long, barbaric and ongoing history of American racism to a problem, a formula, a dramatic equation that can be balanced and solved. “Green Book” is an embarrassment; the film industry’s unquestioning embrace of it is another.
The differences between the two movies are as telling as the similarities. “Crash,” a modern-day screamfest that racked up cross-cultural tensions by the minute, meant to leave you angry and wrung-out. Its Oscar triumph was a genuine shocker; it clearly had its fans, but for many its inferiority was self-evident.
“Green Book,” a slick crowd-pleaser set in the Deep South in 1962, strains to put you in a good mood. Its victory is appalling but far from shocking: From the moment it won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival last September, the first of several key precursors it would pick up en route to Sunday’s Oscars ceremony, the movie was clearly a much more palatable brand of godawful.
In telling the story of the brilliant, erudite jazz pianist Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali), who is chauffeured on his Southern concert tour by a rough-edged Italian-American bouncer named Tony “Lip” Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen), “Green Book” serves up bald-faced clichés and stereotypes with a drollery that almost qualifies as disarming.
Mortensen and Ali, who won the Oscar for best supporting actor, are superb performers with smooth timing and undeniable chemistry. The movie wades into the muck and mire of white supremacy, cracks a few wince-worthy jokes, gasps in horror at a black man’s abuse and humiliation (all while maintaining a safe, tasteful distance from it), then digs up a nugget of uplift to send you home with, a little token of virtue to go with that smile on your face.
There is something about the anger and defensiveness provoked by this particular picture that makes reasonable disagreement unusually difficult.
I can tell I’ve already annoyed some of you, though if you take more offense at what I’ve written than you do at “Green Book,” there may not be much more to say. Differences in taste are nothing new, but there is something about the anger and defensiveness provoked by this particular picture that makes reasonable disagreement unusually difficult. Maybe “Green Book” really is the movie of the year after all — not the best movie, but the one that best captures the polarization that arises whenever the conversation shifts toward matters of race, privilege and the all-important question of who gets to tell whose story.
I’ll concede this much to “Green Book’s” admirers: They understandably love this movie’s sturdy craft, its feel-good storytelling and its charmingly synched lead performances. They appreciate its ostensibly hard-hitting portrait of the segregated South (as noted by U.S. Rep. John R. Lewis, who presented a montage to the film on Oscar night) and find its plea for mutual understanding both laudable and heartwarming. I know I speak for some of the movie’s detractors when I say I find that plea both dishonest and dispiritingly retrograde, a shopworn ideal of racial reconciliation propped up by a story that unfolds almost entirely from a white protagonist’s incurious perspective.
“Green Book” has been most often compared not to “Crash” but to an older, more genteel best picture winner, 1989’s “Driving Miss Daisy,” another movie that attempted to bridge the racial divide through the story of a driver and his employer in the American South. “Driving Miss Daisy” was adapted from Alfred Uhry’s play; “Green Book” was co-written by Nick Vallelonga (with Brian Currie and Farrelly), drawn from the stories he heard from his father, Tony. The truth of those stories has been called into question by many, including Shirley’s family, which wasn’t consulted during production and which dismissed the movie as “a symphony of lies.”
Historical accuracy is, of course, just one criterion by which to judge a narrative drawn from real events, and a movie could theoretically play fast and loose with the facts and still arrive at a place of compelling emotional truth. Distortions and omissions can be interesting in what they reveal about a filmmaker’s intentions, and “Green Book,” whether you like it or not, does not have a particularly high regard for your intelligence. In its one-sided presentation and its presumptuous filtering of Shirley’s perspective through Vallelonga’s, the movie reeks of bad faith and cluelessly embodies the white-supremacist attitudes it’s ostensibly decrying.
That cluelessness has been well-documented. Earlier this season, Vanity Fair critic K. Austin Collins pointed out the gall of a white filmmaker blithely psychoanalyzing a black man’s alienation from his own blackness (especially when it takes the form of jokes about Aretha Franklin and fried chicken). Vulture’s Mark Harris aptly described “Green Book” as “a but also movie, a both sides movie” that draws a false equivalency between Vallelonga’s vulgar bigotry and Shirley’s emotional aloofness, forcing both characters — not just the racist white dude — to learn something about themselves and each other.
It’s a tactic, Harris noted, whose echoes can even be found in a terrific older movie (and best picture winner) like “In the Heat of the Night,” and it exists mainly to reassure any audience that might be uncomfortable with a black man gaining the moral high ground.
You would hope that in 2019 — even in a 1962-set movie — such strategic pandering would be a thing of the past. But in “Green Book,” we should be especially nauseated by how crudely the deck is stacked against Don Shirley from the get-go. A more honest, complex and tough-minded movie might have run the risk of actually becoming Shirley’s story, of letting the much more interesting of these two characters slip into the metaphorical driver’s seat. (The fact that Ali was pushed as a supporting actor to Mortensen’s lead campaign is telling in all the wrong ways.) But there isn’t a single scene that feels authentically like the character’s own, that speaks to Shirley’s experience and no one else’s.
His intelligence and elegant diction is continually Otherized. (Vallelonga’s intellectual inferiority is mocked as well, but the picture’s sympathies couldn’t be more clearly on his side.) The movie makes little attempt to parse or appreciate his musical gifts critically; Shirley’s artistic brilliance, much like his alcoholism or his homosexuality, is deemed interesting only insofar as it changes Vallelonga’s opinion of him.
It’s telling that what should be Shirley’s most emotionally lacerating scene — he’s busted for having sex with another man in a YMCA shower — instead becomes the movie’s most reprehensible. If you want to know what a profound lack of empathy looks like, take another look at that shot of Vallelonga sweet-talking the cops while, in the background, a naked black man sits handcuffed in the shower, terrified and humiliated.
It’s strangely troubling that Ali — who won his first supporting actor Oscar for 2016’s “Moonlight,” an achingly beautiful portrait of gay black masculinity — has now won another award for playing a gay black man in a movie that has so little respect for his identity. There’s an even ghastlier irony in the fact that the academy that broke new ground by giving its highest honor to “Moonlight” two years ago has now seen fit to bestow the same prize on a movie that is “Moonlight’s” complete aesthetic, emotional and moral antithesis.
It’s one thing to like “Green Book,” but it takes a highly specific set of blinders to declare it the year’s finest cinematic achievement in the wake of this year’s many better alternatives, Spike Lee’s tough, provocative “BlacKkKlansman” not least among them. The fact that the academy embraced “Driving Miss Daisy” in the same year it overlooked Lee’s great, incendiary “Do the Right Thing” gives Sunday’s Oscars broadcast the sickening sense of history repeating itself: “BlacKkKlansman” at least received nominations for picture and director, but in the end it too lost out to a (much worse) two-hander peddling can’t-we-all-just-get-along bromides.
And that’s to say nothing of best picture nominees like “Black Panther,” the rare Hollywood blockbuster that examines the nuances of African and African American identity without undue concern for a white audience’s entry points, or the innumerable terrific, tough-minded movies about racial justice, like “If Beale Street Could Talk,” “Sorry to Bother You,” “Support the Girls” and “Widows,” which voters couldn’t be bothered to nominate for best picture, assuming they saw them in the first place. (The year’s best interracial buddy movie, by the way, wasn’t “Green Book”; it was every exchange between Viola Davis and Elizabeth Debicki in “Widows.”)
Over the next few days and weeks there will undoubtedly be a lot of theorizing about what happened. Some will zero in on the failure of an academy whose taste clearly isn’t quite as evolved as its rapidly diversifying and internationalizing membership would suggest. Still others will be tempted to identify a stubborn strain of Trumpian anti-intellectualism among “Green Book” lovers who dug in their heels in defense of a much-maligned favorite.
They may have a point. I remain optimistic that, as with “Crash’s” ill-remembered victory, the coronation of “Green Book” will turn out to be not a re-entrenchment but a calamitous fluke — the academy’s last concession (for now) to that portion of the white moviegoing audience that still believes stories of justice and progress will always have to be negotiated on their terms. As Shirley tells Vallelonga early on in “Green Book”: “You can do better.” His rebuke might just as well extend to the movie he’s in and to a voting body foolish enough to honor it.
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 02-25-2019 10:38 AM
I thought the Oscar results were fairly predictable. I think the biggest surprise was Olivia Colman winning Best Actress for The Favourite. Glenn Close had won the SAG award and appeared due to finally win an Oscar after 6 previous nominations.
Many of the other winners, including Green Book were telegraphed by previous awards shows. Green Book won the Producer's Guild award, so it was easy to predict it would win the Oscar too. That movie has been dogged by controversy. The latest is the parallel between it and Driving Miss Daisy: Spike Lee had movies that lost out to both. While BlacKkKlansman was a really good movie I don't think it was as serious a contender for the top award as Do The Right Thing in 1990. Spike Lee was still angry about the result and tried to leave the auditorium while the winners were on stage. People claim the Academy is growing more diverse, but is it really? The fact Green Book could still pull off the big win just goes to show many Academy voters prefer stories about race and even racial injustice being told through a white perspective. Hell, that even goes for making money and getting butts into the seats at theaters. Who is the target audience demographic?
I was happy Free Solo won the Best Documentary Feature award out of a pretty competitive group of other documentaries. I would not have been surprised if RBG took the award. But it was annoying the star of Free Solo, Alex Honnold got no mic time on stage (Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi did all the talking).
The In Memoriam segment was kind of surprising for how many big names (like Burt Reynolds) were in it. There were still very glaring omissions like Carol Channing and R. Lee Ermey. I liked the music choice: John Williams' score for Superman: The Movie (specifically themes from the Death of Jonathan Kent and Leaving Home). I didn't know Richard Greenberg of R/Greenberg and Associates had passed. Greenberg did a lot of notable movie title designs (Superman: The Movie, Alien, Flash Gordon, Altered States, The Untouchables, The Matrix and many others). His firm even did visual effects on movies like Predator. Both Greenberg and Pablo Ferro died in the same year. Greenberg had actually worked with Pablo Ferro early in his career. The loss of both Ferro and Greenberg is a pretty big loss for the graphics world, maybe not quite on the par of Saul Bass, but it's up there.
Perhaps the most entertaining moment of the show was the duet between Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga, performing Shallow from A Star is Born. Lady Gaga killed it. It's hardly a surprise the song took home the Oscar.
quote: Mike Blakesley
I didn't watch the show but was very happy to hear that "Green Book" won Best Picture. I'm just so glad that Netflix's short-window scam and mega-millions advertising campaign didn't manage to buy them the win. Hopefully they realize that if they release a movie the way the good Lord intended, they might have a better shot at their much-coveted Best Picture Oscar.
Roma didn't win Best Picture, but snagging Best Director, Best Foreign Language Film and Best Cinematography isn't too shabby.
quote: Terry Monohan
The Academy/ABC saved some stage backdrop money this year with the 'Gaga' song as they turned the live TV cameras around and shot back stage to the front of the audience. No fancy sets.
It looked like they had a huge, modular full color LED jumbotron backdrop for some of the performances. That's a good bit of $$$ there. The decor framing the stage opening and the graphics on the floor probably had some substantial cost.
quote: Terry Monohan
If you are lucky to see It in 70mm B&W on a large screen in a big theatre you will enjoy It. The surround sound on 'Roma' was some of the best if you are into split surround.
The movie was shot with the Arri Alexa 65, which has a big 6.5K resolution image sensor roughly the same size as a 5/65mm film frame. However, Roma (like most other movies shot with the Alexa 65 or other high res cameras) was finished with a 4K digital intermediate. It's not quite as ridiculous as the situation with the 2017 version of Murder on the Orient Express: shot on 65mm film but post produced via a resolution killing 4K digital bottleneck and then spat back out onto 70mm. In fairness that movie used a bunch of digital back-lot imagery, so maybe the all digital post work flow was necessary. Still, 70mm kind of demands an all photo-chemical process as long as the digital stuff won't go above 4K (and the vast majority of it is still stuck at 2K).
Roma had a Dolby Atmos sound mix. But did the movie actually play in Atmos at any commercial theaters in the United States?
I can't fault Alfonso Cuarón for not bringing Yalitza Aparicio or other cast members onto the stage when he accepted the Best Director award. They have that time clock thing going. I thought it was a bit weird Hannah Beachler hogged all the speech time when Black Panther won the Production Design and Set Decoration Oscars. Jay Hart (set decorator) just had to stand silent. Of course this is a common thing with Oscars shows. When two or more people get up to the podium the first one to speak usually selfishly hogs much of the speech time with an overly long speech. By the time anyone else can get a chance to whip out their big speech the music is already playing them off the stage. Maybe all those long acceptance speeches ought to be delivered back stage at the press conference area and then posted online for anyone who cares to listen to them. As long as the awards show is broadcast live on TV there is still a clock and a TV broadcast schedule to observe. Spike Lee can yell "stop that motherfucking clock" but time stops for no one.
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Mike Blakesley
Film God
Posts: 12767
From: Forsyth, Montana
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 02-25-2019 10:46 PM
quote:
compared to the film critic of The Los Angeles Times.
Oscars 2019: ‘Green Book’ is the worst best picture winner since ‘Crash’
(On the L.A. Times article) What a ridiculous self-important pile of monkey shit. This guy is probably still butt-hurt from some political election that didn't go his way, and now he's butt-hurt from the Oscars not going his way.
The Oscars are voted on by people who see movies and decide whether they liked them or not, simple as that. Or maybe a person might vote for their best friend's movie, or their spouse's movie. In short, it's just like any other thing that's voted on. It's a popularity contest, not a referendum on society.
Plus, it's not voted on by the public at large -- it's voted by Academy members. Maybe that's the reason for all the butt-hurt... certain people feel that EVERYONE should feel the same way they do, and when it turns out that some don't, they react almost violently, as if it couldn't possibly be true that everyone doesn't fit their own particular mind-set.
I like to think Green Book won not because it was an outstanding movie, but simply because it wasn't Roma. A lot of people probably didn't want to give the Best Picture honor to what is basically a straight-to-video movie, so they wanted to vote for something else, and maybe not enough of them liked the music in Bohemian Rhapsody or A Star Is Born. Or maybe people just didn't want to give the Oscar to a black-and-white foreign-language movie, because they figured they already did that when they gave it to "The Artist" a few years ago.
That's just my theory. I guess theories are like assholes, everybody's got one.
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