Monday, March 5, 2018

#oscarsowhat 2018

The Academy will be forgiven, presumably, for failing to bestow Oscars on actors of color this year, since they went progressive behind the camera. By now there's nothing new about naming a Mexican as Best Direction, of course, since Guillermo del Toro is the third such person to win the vote in the last five years, but his The Shape of Water, which also won Best Picture, is some sort of milestone depending on whether you count it as a fantasy, horror or monster movie, and its message was no doubt suitably inclusive for Academy voters. Another horror movie, Get Out, earned Jordan Peele a historic  first original screenplay Oscar to a black writer, while veteran scribe James Ivory of Merchant-Ivory fame overcame ageism, if you will, when his adapted screenplay for the gay-themed Call Me By Your Name made him the oldest-ever competitive Oscar winner. On the acting front the Academy fell back into old habits, not so much by honoring whites only but by honoring half of them for biopics, including Gary Oldman for his (to judge by advertising only) preposterous turn as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour. Apart from applauding del Toro while insisting that Shape of Water isn't really his best stuff, I can only make superficial judgments because I didn't watch as much Oscar bait as I probably should have. No doubt I waste too much time on superhero films, but I sometimes think that I learn more about cinematic storytelling, good and bad, from those films than from those whose virtues are more strictly literary. I don't think any of 2017's comic book films belonged on stage last night, but I don't take it for granted that yesterday's honorees really were the year's best films, either. I do have a better idea of what to look at now before making up my own mind.

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