Predictions Friday: Woke White Oscar 2019

The liberal left is going through a kind of transformational change in our fierce but sometimes off-target response to the Donald Trump administration. A barrage of outrageous injustices have hit us all at once that demand to be dealt with. So much so, in our sense of urgency, we often react in extreme ways to our collective fears about what this country is rapidly turning into. One of those ways this has manifest is the Oscar race, the statement it can make, and how that reflects on the film community that helps shape it. Woke White Oscar is especially careful not to be seen as off-key in any way with the newly formed resistance collective among us and upon us.

Each day, bloggers and critics and other well-meaning white people seek to signal their virtue on Twitter — with round-the-clock vigilance — in their sincere effort to stay on message, lest anyone misstep and be accused of sympathizing with the evil ones.

Of course, the desire to avoid rubbing anyone wrong has been going on for a long while in the Oscar race. Since forever. The risk of bristling has ebbed and flowed onto turbulent shores from the Civil Rights era to this day, though nothing significant changed as a result. There was Steven Spielberg making The Color Purple with all the best intentions but getting slammed all the same for being a white man telling the story of a gay black woman. All that changed after that was studios choosing to stay away from those subjects. While Kim Basinger championed Do the Right Thing on the Oscar stage — shaking her fist to rousing applause from the same Academy members that she accused of neglecting it — nothing really changed. Time and again, Woke White Oscar has led the charge to stand up for change but time and again that change came weakly or not at all.

No, in order to finally be effective, it really took activists from the black community, from black filmmakers, not the Woke White community, to bring that much-needed and long-delayed change. Ava DuVernay has been one of the driving forces of that change. The hashtag #oscarssowhite likewise stands as an effective milestone for change. Look at how the Academy transformed its membership in the past 4 or 5 years.

That is partly, maybe largely, because Twitter has given power to the powerless. Voice to the voiceless. It has gathered and emboldened like-minded groups who can retweet and favorite tweets that can sometimes rally a wave of uplift, and other times lead to boycotts. The Oscars broadcast itself was the target of boycott when it was pointed out that all 20 acting nominees were all white for the second straight year. And indeed, even now, a friend on Facebook has been doing yearly flashbacks to see which actor deserved to win that didn’t — and it’s shocking to see how, in all of these decades, there has been nothing but an endless pageant of white faces.

No one wants to go back, and thankfully there is little chance that we will. In 2018, we see the fruits of the turning point, with an abundance of black storytellers gracing the screen from the beginning of the year on through to the end. It is, in some ways, a renaissance. Not only are there numerous films that celebrate the richness of diversity, but those film are getting rave reviews and making insane box office.

A Wrinkle in Time (42% RT) – $100 million at the box office
Crazy Rich Asians (92% RT) – $173 million at the box office
Black Panther (97% RT) – $700 million at the box office, topping the year
BlackKklansman (85% RT) – $48 million
Sorry to Bother You (93% RT) – $17 million
The Hate U Give (96% RT) – $24 million
If Beale Street Could Talk (94% RT) – n/a
Widows (96% RT) – n/a

There is, however, something else to consider and it matters when making your Oscar predictions now. It’s relatively new element that must be factored into our thinking. And that’s the shitstorm that can erupt at the hands of Woke White Oscar. Both actual legit shitstorms that may erupt, and shitstorms that are fabricated by competitors who seek to sabotage any Oscar frontrunner. This sabotage can be direct — or it can be indirect. It can often be carried out by making a big deal out of something that isn’t a big deal. Woke White Oscar is easy to manipulate in that way because no one — NO ONE — wants to be seen as lenient toward racists or as a sexual predator apologist.

Woke White Oscar are prominent voices in the film community who lead with a sometimes strident strain of purity. They set the standard and everyone else must dutifully follow or else be called out for their inability to adhere to the rigid standard. That means, if someone labels a group of films about teenagers struggling with drugs or their sexual identity and those protagonists happen to be white, it’s suddenly a niche of “white boys in trouble” movies. If there is a story by a white filmmaker who tells the story of racism — that, too, is immediately suspect. White filmmakers are scrutinized if they tell black stories (Detroit) but if they tell white stories they’re called out for being “white boy in trouble” movies or whatever similar labels they assigned to First Man.

Mind you, very little of this comes from the black community itself. Why? Because it’s white people that still maintain much of the power in film criticism and in Hollywood. Things have changed but they haven’t changed that much. Woke White Oscar seeks redemption for itself in the era of Trump — with particular effort to distinguish white liberals from white Trump voters. They must prove every day that they aren’t like those racists at the Trump pep rallies. They do that by calling out anyone that stumbles clumsily into racial terrain. This is not unlike the Salem witch trials — which were an example of mass hysteria at the hands of an entire community wracked with fear of the devil’s influence. We are now that community, and we’re fearful of the devil’s influence. The devil, in this case, is Donald Trump and everything he stands for.

All of this to say that Woke White Oscar is jittery. Nervous. Ready and willing to pull the plug on any movie if there is even a whiff that voting for that movie if t might make people think you’re racist. In close contests, it can be enough to tip the balance the wrong way for a Best Picture contender, like La La Land, like Three Billboards.

I was already nervous about Green Book, knowing it was white filmmakers endeavoring to tell a story about race and racism — and the fraught topic of a casual racist undergoing redemption. No matter how well-intentioned the film (and it is; it’s about breaking through ingrained racist ideas and learning to love each other), at the end of the day it’s subject matter is too easy to boil down to a biting tweet and a catchy hashtag. And that will be that. The question that will demand answer is this: does this film adequately represent Woke White Film Twitter? The verdicts in cases like this are usually swift and harsh.

So last night, when an audience member called out Viggo Mortensen on Twitter for saying the N-word out loud, it instantly blew up to become a bone to pick, the Bungle du Jour to dissect. Did Viggo Mortensen reveal himself to be a secret racist? Did he do an unforgivable thing? He quickly released a statement of apology, promising never to do it again.

Saying the N-word out loud is rightly forbidden as something no white person can do — nobody who’s not black can ever say that word. Among the many reasons are the most obvious: that word spoken by anyone white is enormously offensive and traumatizing for African Americans to hear — since it’s symbolic of what can only be described as a holocaust in America, one that is ongoing. By eliminating that word our vocabulary — in any circumstance — a white person acknowledges respect for that trauma, which is the very least we can do to atone for the ugly history of some of our ancestors. It is a small price to pay, and not that big of an ask.

The thing is, though, is that this word is spoken out loud. In movies. It saturates some of Quentin Tarantino’s films. It flares up in Martin Scorsese’s The Departed. It’s in Saturday Night Fever. Coming from the mouth of a character onscreen it conveys a sting that can crystallize a time and place where people said the word, and it serves a brute narrative purpose as a self-inflicted indictment of the type of people who say it. No white person who’s sensitive to this can utter the word offscreen — not even when referencing or quoting an onscreen role. Something tells me Viggo is not plugged into the Woke White Twitter world as many of us are and thus, and doesn’t realize that saying the word out loud, regardless of context, can damage the movie that he’s out there to proudly promote — and perhaps derail his own career. He’s learned his lesson the hard way, but now his potential Oscar nomination (or win) is put in jeopardy.

People can stand on one side of incidents like this, on the finger pointing side, and protect themselves from being accused of understanding the horrible gaffe. And thus, Woke White Oscar is almost always on the finger pointing side of things — as they are fearful of being seen as anything less than stridently unerringly pure. That means that many of them will feel compelled to stand up and condemn Viggo publicly — even perhaps forgo voting for Viggo’s terrific performance privately.

Again, the reason this matters in the context of the Oscar predicting game, you have to factor the impact of Woke White Oscar. You have to know the people doing the predicting and whether they’re predicting purely on the basis of the performance — or if they’re subtracting points for the admittedly awful gaffe of saying the worst word that it’s possible to say.

Erik Anderson is currently predicting Ryan Coogler, Barry Jenkins and Spike Lee all to earn Best Directing nominations. He claims these as his predictions but what they may reflect — as they may reflect for many — are his own his heartfelt desires, his best Christmas wish list of what might be, of what could be. A roster of what should be, in a perfect world where no voters have any hidden or unspoken internal quota for how many black directors should be nominated in any given year.

Might there be enough voters who don’t think that way? There very well might. I think we would all dance for joy if one day we could get to a point where we believe change like that has truly and finally arrived. But we might also want to be pragmatic and understand the reality that adding 1500 new open-minded Academy members doesn’t immediately change the attitudes of some of the other 5500 people that have been Oscar voters since the far less enlightened 1950s.

The thing is, it probably hasn’t. White privilege is something you’re born with.  Brought up with. That’s one of the messages of Green Book. You have the choice to be woke or not. But the choice is perhaps not so easy if you were born and raised 60 or 70 years ago when the wrong attitudes were baked into your childhood. One the other hand, if you’re born black in America — no matter what decade — you know the terrifying consequences of ingrained racism. You know that it means some shopkeepers will suspect you’re going to steal something. You know that playing with a water gun can scare some cops into shooting you first and checking the facts later, too late.

All of this said, I do not know how it all falls into place once the dust settles. How many of these successful films driven by black filmmakers will get nominated? How many that are not woke-white enough will be rejected? And every who’s concerned where this quandary has led us will wonder at what point do we start talking about art again.

All I can say to you, Oscar watchers, is that I’m just not sure how it’s going to go. But anyone who’s predicting would be wise to consider the power of Woke White Oscar. Many of them are so adamant and vocal because they want people to know how good they are, and to see them striving to eradicate racism from American culture one film award at a time. Can they help the starving children in Yemen? Nope. Can they do anything about child rape and enslavement at the hands of Isis? Nope. But this? Bringing a movie or an actor down on a bogus suspicion of racism? This they can do. And so they will.

Let’s do this. If any of you are still reading. Ask yourself, why is Green Book still my number one to win? It is an arbitrary thing. I think it’s the movie people like best. It will not be Woke White Oscar’s favorite movie. They fear they will lose their cred if they embrace it. But each frontrunner has its own obstacle. A Star is Born is a remake. Roma is black and white, in a foreign language and will win in the Foreign Language category already. Black Panther is a superhero movie.  Can BlackKklansman win over the old-timer white dudes who have been neglecting Spike Leee over and over for nearly 30 years?

It’s a wide open race and with that in mind I have to go with the movie the people like the most and so far, that’s Green Book, which beat A Star is Born and Roma in Toronto.

Best Picture
1. Green Book
2. A Star is Born
3. Roma
4. BlacKKKlansman
5. First Man
6. Black Panther
7. The Favourite
8. If Beale Street Could Talk
9. Can You Ever Forgive Me
10. Widows

Still in play:
First Reformed
8th Grade
The Front Runner
Leave No Trace

Best Actor
Bradley Cooper, A Star is Born
Christian Bale, Vice
Viggo Mortensen, Green Book
Rami Malek, Bohemian Rhapsody
Hugh Jackman, The Front Runner

Also in play:
Ryan Gosling, First Man
John David Washington, BlacKkKlansman
Ethan Hawke, First Reformed
Matthew McConaughey, White Boy Rick
Lucas Hedges, Boy Erased
Lucas Hedges, Ben is Back
Chadwick Boseman, Black Panther

Best Actress
Lady Gaga, A Star is Born
Glenn Close, The Wife
Melissa McCarthy, Can You Ever Forgive Me
Olivia Colman, The Favourite
Viola Davis, Widows

Also in play
Julia Roberts, Ben is Back
Felicity Jones, On the Basis of Sex
Rosamund Pike, A Private War
Carey Mulligan, Wildlife
Elsie Fisher, Eighth Grade
Saoirse Ronan, Mary Queen of Scots
Kiki Layne, If Beale Street Could Talk
Nicole Kidman, Destroyer
Yalitza Aparicio, Roma
Toni Collette, Hereditary
Charlize Theron, Tully

Best Supporting Actor
Mahershala Ali, Green Book
Timothee Chalamet, Beautiful Boy
Richard E. Grant, Can You Ever Forgive Me
Adam Driver, BlacKKKlansman
Sam Elliot, A Star is Born

In play:
Sam Rockwell, Vice

Best Supporting Actress
Regina King, If Beale Street Could Talk
Emma Stone, The Favourite
Claire Foy, First Man
Nicole Kidman, Boy Erased
Margot Robbie, Mary Queen of Scots

Also in play:
Emily Blunt, A Quiet Place
Thomasin McKenzie, Leave no Trace
Marina de Tavira, Roma
Rachel Weisz, The Favourite
Vera Farmiga, The Front Runner
Danai Gurira, Black Panther

Best Director
Alfonso Cuaron, Roma
Bradley Cooper, A Star is Born
Spike Lee, BlacKKKlansman
Barry Jenkins, If Beale Street Could Talk
Peter Farrelly, Green Book or Damien Chazelle, First Man

Also in play:
Ryan Coogler, Black Panther
Marielle Heller, Can You Ever Forgive Me
Yorgos Lanthimos, The Favourite
Paul Schrader, First Reformed
Ryan Coogler, Black Panther
Jason Reitman, The Front Runner
Joel Edgerton, Boy Erased

Original Screenplay
Green Book, Nick Vallelonga, Brian Hayes Currie, Peter Farrelly
Roma, Alfonso Cuaron
The Favourite, Deborah Davis, Tony McNamara
Eighth Grade, Bo Burnham
First Reformed, Paul Schrader

In play:
Vice, Adam McKay

Adapted Screenplay
Nicole Holofcener, Jeff Whitty, Can You Ever Forgive Me
Eric Roth, Bradley Cooper, Will Fetters, A Star is Born
Barry Jenkins, If Beale Street Could Talk
Josh Singer, First Man
Gillian Flynn, Steve McQueen, Widows

In play:
Matt Bai, Jay Carson, Jason Reitman, The Front Runner
Joel Edgerton, Boy Erased
Charlie Wachtel, David Rabinowitz, Kevin Willmott, Spike Lee, BlacKkKlansman
Debra Granik, Anne Rosellini, Leave No Trace

Cinematography
Roma
A Star is Born
First Man
The Favourite
If Beale Street Could Talk

Editing
Black Panther
A Star is Born
First Man
Roma
Green Book

Production Design
Black Panther
The Favourite
Mary Poppins Returns
First Man
Crazy Rich Asians

Sound Mixing
A Star is Born
Mary Poppins Returns
First Man
Black Panther
A Quiet Place

Sound Editing
Black Panther
First Man
Roma
A Star is Born
A Quiet Place

Costume Design
Black Panther
Mary Poppins Returns
The Favourite
Mary Queen of Scots
BlacKKKlansman

Original Score
If Beale Street Could Talk
First Man
BlacKkKlansman
Widows
Black Panther

Makeup and Hair
The Favourite
Black Panther
Mary Queen of Scots

Animated Feature
Incredibles 2
Isle of Dogs
Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch
Ralph Breaks the Internet
Early Man

Documentary Feature
Won’t You Be My Neighbor
RBG
Three Identical Strangers
Minding the Gap
Free Solo

Foreign Language Feature
Roma (Mexico)
Cold War (Poland)
Capernaum (Lebanon)
Burning (South Korea)
Shoplifters (Japan)