Throughout last year’s presidential election, my friend and I would spend our mornings on the phone fretting about Donald Trump winning the presidency. We knew he would win, or thought he would, feared he would. She believed he would win since he was a celebrity and Americans lose their rationality when it comes to celebrities. I knew he would win because twenty years of predicting the Oscars has taught me a thing or two about how large numbers of people vote. It took me a while to understand it. Predicting a consensus is not about speculating what individuals are going to do. We never like to think that we’re similar to others — that we’re individuals who don’t herd like sheep. But when it comes to thousands and thousands of people voting, suddenly human behavior does become a thing that can be predictable based on similarities and patterns. We don’t learn from our past and are thus doomed to repeat it. While nothing like Moonlight’s win had ever happened at the Oscars before, and no movie has won Best Picture since Braveheart without winning a single other major guild award, I predicted Moonlight winning based on how I saw people were ranking their votes.
History Matters
I knew three things at the beginning of the election: 1) It was the GOP’s to lose, 2) Hillary Clinton was getting the nomination, and 3) Bernie Sanders would divide the liberals enough so that they could not win with him and could not win without him.
Steve Bannon knew, after seeing Republicans lose in 2012 despite Mitt Romney being financially backed by the Koch brothers and Tea Party groups, how the election would come down to a few million votes in a handful of swing states. Bannon said the Trump campaign had only to focus on those states. They didn’t even need more votes for Trump; they just needed fewer for Hillary. That’s what they set about to achieve, and the plan was brilliantly executed. They could not have attacked Hillary from the right — they had already tried that. For decades. They needed someone inside, on the left, to make her look bad and to divide Democrats. Enter Bernie Sanders, the ultimate weapon of choice to do just that.
Most people on the left thought that the 2016 would be much like the 2008 primary, just like Oscar pundits thought 2016 would be like every other Oscar race. They thought: hey, no problem if Bernie and Hillary fight — so did Obama and Hillary, and when Obama won that battle he proceeded to win it all. But when it came time for many of Bernie’s voters to do as Hillary’s camp had done, millions of Bernie folks became so enraged. Misled and egged on by some brilliant strategists on the right, this Bernie-or-Bust faction became convinced that the primaries had been rigged. They thought if Obama could beat Hillary then Bernie should be able to as well. When he didn’t, a few million Bernie supporters refused to get behind Hillary. What difference would it make if they wasted their vote on a 3rd party candidate? Trump would be defeated anyway, and they could sit back with smug satisfaction while a Republican Congress ripped into Hillary for her entire term.
Except there was just one problem: they weren’t looking at history. After a disastrous eight years with George W. Bush, an unpopular two-term Republican, voters were happy to kick the GOP out of the White House. While that worked to the Democrats’ advantage in 2008, in 2016 the opposite situation existed. Winning a third consecutive term to control the executive branch is nearly impossible for either party, because after two terms the public is almost always ready to give the opposing party its turn. One notable exception was Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. But that’s the only exception in modern history (at least where the pattern wasn’t disrupted in the ’60s and ’70s due to assassination and resignation).
If another contender on the Right had stepped up to challenge Bush, and by extension Reagan, that might have weakened their hold on the American electorate. But Reagan had been a successful, popular president, and Bush 41 rode in on his coattails. Likewise, Obama had also been a popular, successful president. So the only Democrat who could succeed him would have to be someone who would preserve and continue his legacy, *not* someone who criticized and opposed it, like Bernie. It would have to be Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton — whomever Obama himself got behind. Hillary likely would have beaten Biden in the primary, and both knew the battle would cause a fracture and divide Democrats. After the tragic death of his son, Joe dropped out and Hillary stepped up.
If Obama’s approval ratings had ever slipped, the way Jimmy Carter’s had in 1980 or LBJ’s had in 1968, it might have perhaps made logical sense for another Democrat to challenge a sitting president’s path of governance. But only a fool challenges an enormously popular sitting president from the same party. Only a fool would think that is a path to victory. Sadly, Bernie’s main role in the election was to be that fool. He was, and by the way still is, a chronic agitator. That’s all he’s ever been in Congress and that’s all he continues to be now. He is not a uniter and never will be. He became a Democrat long enough to be played as a pawn, and he stopped being a Democrat as soon as that charade was played out.
No casual observer would know what a risk this was unless they looked at history. Democrats had let the same thing happen in 1968 between rivals Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy. Similarly, anyone who ignored Oscar history and followed what many in the media were saying would have been certain that La La Land would win Best Picture. For a while I thought it would win too, but I was always bothered by its lack SAG ensemble nomination. Just like I knew the election was the GOP’s to lose because of history, so too was I aware that not having a SAG ensemble nod spelled trouble for La La Land.
Now, of course, without Bernie Sanders in the race it’s possible Trump still would have won — Vladimir Putin had a multi-pronged attack strategy that was durable enough to do damage without the Left’s self-inflicted wound. But a united Democratic Party would have had a far better shot at overcoming history and Russian interference than a divided one.
La La Land may not have needed that SAG ensemble nomination if the film had not been hit with such a strong wave of backlash of voter conscience right before the Oscars. And ironically, a lot of that self-reflection had to do with Trump’s win. People were angry, they were desperate to make a significant statement, they were searching for something deeper that would make them feel good, something more noble to hold up to show what America represents. Aside from some of the murmurs that Hollywood should do more than reward a story about Hollywood, La La Land was a sad movie ultimately. Its bittersweet ending was not satisfying to those who wanted the lovely couple to ride off into the sunset together. What a beautiful ending but what a sad ending. Moonlight, by contrast, gracefully carried its weight of social awareness and had a cathartic ending that made us feel glad and hopeful. It was the perfect storm for a Moonlight upset.
I can’t pretend like I saw it coming all along. I do have bragging rights with Trump because you can see my frantic freaked out posts for an entire year on Twitter and Facebook, right up until the last election night when I posted a poll that showed Trump winning in a four-way match-up with Hillary. The multi-tentacled strategy by the Right had worked: divide, divide, divide. People say “Russia meddled in the election to hurt the campaign of Hillary Clinton.” But keep in mind, that everything Russia accomplished had mostly to do with dividing the Left. Knowing how hard it would be to win a third term, the Left should have known to maintain an unwavering united front. After all, we’d all lived through 2000 when a few thousand liberals strayed from the flock in Florida. Say what you will about Ralph Nader — whether it was his entirely fault or not, the fact that you had people like Michael Moore, Susan Sarandon, Bill Maher championing Nader meant that there was enough division on the Left to blow that election. And now we know there was. It goes back to primary voters mistaking 2016 for 2008. You’d think, after all that, we would have learned a lesson. But we didn’t. No, the only people who seemed to learn anything from 2000 were Russian.
Still, we had polls to tell us where we thought the election was going, whether we chose to pay attention to them or not. But polls are only as good as good as their samplings and methodology. The same goes for the Oscars. For a while, I actually thought Hidden Figures might take Best Picture. Looking back, it lacked a DGA nomination and that is central to a Best Picture win. I didn’t realize Moonlight was going to win until I ran a series of polls on Facebook with a healthy cross-section of people voting. I fully expected to see either La La Land or Hidden Figures emerge as the winner but they did not. Moonlight did. Each and every time. People were ranking it higher on their ballots than any other film. It even won on the first count each and every time. It couldn’t lose. Nothing else even came close. So I hastily switched my official prediction on the off chance it would win.
Even before Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway opened that envelope, I got up and left the Dolby Theater believing La La Land would win. I was already on the freeway until our own Marshall Flores called me and tried to explain to me how Moonlight had emerged in a surprise triumph. It was almost as dramatic of a moment as the night Trump won. I had predicted both things but I didn’t actually think I would be right. But I turned out I was.
Keep in mind, this sort of thing is only possible under the current preferential system of voting. In a year with five nominees, there would probably have been no way that La La Land could lose — well, there is still the problem of the SAG ensemble nomination, which might have dogged it at the end. After all, only one movie has ever won without it and that was Braveheart in SAG’s first year handing out an ensemble award. But still, Braveheart did win because it had the momentum. Moonlight had momentum but it really did get a lot of help from the preferential ballot. As did Spotlight the year before, and 12 Years a Slave before that. These films beat the films that were bigger and seemingly more popular because people felt the urgency to vote for them. That’s what Hillary Clinton needed — a sense of urgency to vote for her. But too many people took it for granted and already thought she would win, and since she couldn’t lose, that the sullen torches they carried for Bernie and Jill Stein and Harambe could do no harm. And the rest is, well, history.
And to the Future
I could go on and on about this subject. You know I could, both in terms of politics and the Oscars. But what you really want to know is this: is it possible for Trump to win again in 2020 and what is going to win Best Picture this year.
To the first question: yes, I believe Trump will win in 2020. Here’s why: the Bernie Sanders problem still exists. The most bitter of his die-hard supporters still (falsely) believe that the primary was rigged. That was all part of the plan designed by Steve Bannon, Vladimir Putin, Julian Assange, and Team Trump: make people think that Hillary could and would rig an election. They still think it and even if some are now starting to doubt it, there are still enough ratfuckers that have infiltrated the Left’s ranks to keep that delusion alive. That means it’s a little red panic button that can be pressed any time the Democrats look like they’re going to win. Just push the button: “Cheating, rigging! Corrupt DNC! Corporate Dems!” That has to cycle through the Democratic Party like toxic Drano through damaged pipes before it can be flushed out. Also, historically, it’s incredibly hard to take out a president after only one term. As I said, I could go on and on, but for reference, just look at the Democratic Party in 1968-1972. Then look at Carter’s one term. Then look at Reagan’s reign. Look at how hard it was to rebuild after the whole thing blew up. Even after the Republican debacle of Nixon, the GOP wrangled its grip on the White House for 20 years. But for Carter’s momentary blip, it took Bill Clinton to finally break the Democrats losing streak. Whomever will break it for Democrats probably won’t be able to do it till 2024. Assuming we still have any democracy left by then.
In terms of Best Picture, well, we still can’t say how things are going to go because we have not yet seen any consensus picks emerge. We don’t have a long history to go by. We’re dealing with a newly expanded ballot that doesn’t always work in favor of the most popular film of the moment. It rewards the film that most everyone likes and no one hates. In addition, we have a deliberately rejuvenated and diversified Academy membership whose attitudes and tastes are hard to gauge. They seem more open to movies that depart from traditional Oscar fare.
We don’t yet know whether this will be a Birdman kind of year — where there is one movie to rule them all — or whether it will be a year like last year where things feel more topsy turvy in terms of what film can win which categories. Pulling off the hat trick of winning PGA/DGA and SAG ensemble seems to indicate a movie will win Best Picture no matter what. If there is any disturbance in that pattern, then there is potentially an indication that it won’t. Or there will be a split.
We know that the frontrunner will suffer potential backlash. We know that there will probably be a “scrappy underdog,” and we know that the key to the Oscar race is figuring out what movie makes voters feel good, both in terms of feeling happy but also feeling like they’re doing some good in the world. Voting for Moonlight or Spotlight or 12 Years a Slave did that.
For Best Picture, we’re looking for all guild nominations. We’re looking for something that people love and that no one really hates. We’re looking for that elusive thing called buzz and momentum.
Each year is different. We won’t really know for sure until we see the whole picture laid out in front of us- who has what and why. What movie are people talking about? Buzzing about? What movie did they love vs. what movie do they think is going to win (“I love Bernie but Hillary is going to win.”)
Sometimes, Shit Just Happens
You know, ultimately anything is possible. Anything. That tiny splinter of hope that forms in our brains often leads us down paths of where we believe the impossible can become possible. Obama’s re-election in 2012 was one of those times. That kind of thing can only be guessed at. Sudden shifts will always blast through all of the best laid plans, all of the stats, all of our knowledge of history. In some sense, we really know nothing and nothing can be predicted. But I will always be fascinated by it nonetheless. It’s a lifelong obsession of mine.
One thing is for sure — I’ll probably never get as lucky as I did last year to predict both things that seemed unpredictable. They weren’t that hard to see coming, though, if you just thought about them for a minute or two, and most importantly, looked at history. History isn’t everything, of course, but it can give you a good starting point.
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