Tuesday, February 26, 2019

Ruminations on Oscar Gold (Part Two)

I was going to talk about the Oscars again, but then I remembered that, well, I’d already done that. I thought that, well, maybe my opinions had changed or improved in the year since I’d last written about it, but it turns out that actually, well, they really hadn’t. My previous post even contains some of the same buzzwords that I’ve used to describe my opinions this year (“Cultural touchstone” stands out, for example).

But I still want to talk about it, I think. Like, I’m not going to directly comment on any of the results, largely because, not having seen either Bohemian Rhapsody or Green Book -- the two major pushbacks focus on the Best Editing and Best Picture awards to these two movies respectively -- I can only comment on the metatext of these two films. To put it another way, being blissfully ignorant of these two films means I can only talk about what people are saying about them, and there are dozens of takes now that the awards are over about how these were bad choices, enough that that’s not something that really interests me.

I do enjoy some of the trivia, though, like how this is the second time a Spike Lee joint has lost to a “solving deep south racism through the medium of cars” film (Driving Miss Daisy won in 1990, while Do The Right Thing was snubbed), or how Best Actor winner said the ghost of Freddie Mercury protected him from director Bryan Singer, who has had multiple sexual assault allegations pointed at him.

In fact, it’s really easy to get caught up in the bread and circuses of it all. I was working during the ceremony itself and I was still checking, poking around to see which film won what and the associated reactions therein. And that’s kind of how I put it last year. The reactions are more important to me, I think, than the awards themselves. So while I’m disappointed that some of my picks didn’t get chosen, I’m glad the discourse around those picks is there.

-F

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