The State of the Race: The Oscars Prepare to Face Down the Weinstein Saga

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This year’s Oscar race is set to begin in earnest just about a month from now when Venice, Toronto, and Telluride showcase the main contenders. We now see how having a long season last year resulted in a surprise winner with CODA, a film that hit Sundance and then mostly skipped the fall festivals, laying low until the final act. That turned out to be a good strategy, given the many weeks where we sat around ruminating on the frontrunners.

Nomadland, the 2020 winner, was first seen in Venice, and the 2018 winner, Parasite, was a much earlier Cannes premiere. There is no doubt the Oscar race has changed over the past few years. If you follow this site, you know I write honestly about what I see happening, which often causes mini whirlwinds on social media. I’m expected to go along with what everyone else is doing, but I’m just not built that way, my dudes.

We know the past two years we’ve had a coordinated effort to ensure equitable contenders, to make sure everything is fair across the board, from the projects chosen, to the casting, to the content of each movie — the message. We’ve had two female directors in a row win Best Director, and we’ve had two films by women winning the top prize.

We’re also living through our eras of long-overdue firsts. First film in a foreign language to win Best Picture, first Best Picture winner by a woman of color, first Best Picture with a predominantly deaf cast… the last thing we seem to be doing is looking for the best and he brightest. They must first meet a set of criteria to even have a shot at consideration. The BAFTA took the option of choosing the acting and directing categories away from their voters entirely, because they could not seem to fix their problem of inclusivity.

We know things changed. We kind of know how we got there. We had built for ourselves a kind of utopia of a fully realized version of the American dream where everyone gets a seat at the table. If you watch any movie made in Hollywood today, they mostly mirror back this ideology — not just with their inclusive casting, but with how the characters deal with problems and talk to each other.

We were so comfortable in that cocoon that our job was simply to continue to tinker with our utopian diorama, our version of what we thought American life should be. It was never perfect enough. We kept trying to get there. When the election of 2016 happened, it was like that utopia had blown a hole in its side and suddenly we were tumbling through space, with a blast of air that sent everything flying off the handle. Who are these people who have just disrupted our otherwise safe haven?

It was bad. It thrust Hollywood into two areas of what some might call necessary reckonings, but others might call moral panic. This has all been made worse by social media and especially Twitter. Humans have never done well when they had access to an arena for public shaming. But that is what we have. We are all used to and accepting of living in a culture that has eliminated due process and the presumption of innocence. Trial-by-Twitter is perfectly fine because if enough people pile on, then sooner or later someone is going to lose their job, or be forced to apologize.

When it comes to the Oscar race, these past six years have been the strangest I’ve experienced in my 22 years on the job. Standing up against racism and rape were the two massive movements that exploded in this country during the Trump years. It isn’t too hard to figure out why that might be — Trump was charged with both and won anyway. It was then a matter of bringing him down, and then a matter of a full blown Cold War online, one we’re still fighting.

Even before Trump, Twitter had, over time, changed from being a place to connect with others to an arena for public shaming. The threat is always there, not because of how people on these apps behave, but because major institutions respond to their ongoing hysteria. If people didn’t lose their jobs, or projects weren’t shelved, or withering apologies didn’t have to be milked out of every person accused of wrong-doing, then it wouldn’t matter. It would just be a dumb app full of dumb people hunched over their algorithm-driven, dopamine delivery system.

The purges and persecutions off of social media have only intensified since Biden was elected, even with Trump banned from Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. In each instance, the person accused is destroyed and that is that. It is a wildfire that hasn’t dimmed even a little bit.

Now, with some films that will be bringing up both of these topics quite profoundly, we’re probably in for another year of equity-based voting. In fact, I’d wager, this is the new normal until we have another massive culture quake like we had in 2016.

There are plenty of films headed for the Oscar race that deal directly with racism, like Till, and other films about strong black women front-and-center, like The Woman King and Shirley. And then there are the films about sexual assault. There are two of them this year: Women Talking and She Said. Both will bring us back to the #MeToo era, and inevitably back to Harvey Weinstein.

The Weinstein saga lives inside the heart of Hollywood and the Oscars. He was a looming figure when I started, in 2000, and he and his highly manipulative team strangely dominated the Oscars for years up until he was “me too’d.” The #MeToo movement and Hollywood is a complicated relationship. While many view it as a positive, much-needed reckoning, there was a dark side to it, a witch hunt side, an unfair side.

The story at the center of the new film, She Said, is what broke the Weinstein crimes wide open and forever changed how accusations by victimized women are treated. This was a profound moment for many women in this country, but it also spurred action in the industry, altering how films are made, how they’re written about, who writes about them, who directs them, whether they have intimacy coordinators or not (they all do now), what the power dynamics are in every film, etc. Once you commit yourself to change, there is an army on Twitter watching every move you make.

Weinstein, it seems, is still shaping the Oscar race even if he’s not involved in it. Why the Weinstein story caused such a frenzy when it did was because, essentially, he was hiding in plain sight. Mass hysteria or panic usually hits a community when many people are connected such that they all react at roughly the same time, and when there is a clear and present threat coming from inside the community itself.

The Weinstein Oscar era started all the way back in 1989 with My Left Foot, when he and his brother Bob owned Miramax. Then, in 1992, he had another Best Picture contender with The Crying Game.

After that, the Miramax run kicked into high gear:

1993 — The Piano
1994 — Pulp Fiction
1995 — Il Postino
1996 — The English Patient (first Best Picture win)
1997 — Good Will Hunting
1998 — Life Is Beautiful, Shakespeare in Love (second BP win)
1999 — The Cider House Rules
2001 — Chocolat, In the Bedroom
2002 — Gangs of New York, The Hours, Chicago (third win)
2003 — N/A
2004 — Finding Neverland, The Aviator

Then the Weinstein/Miramax reign ends and we pick up with The Weinstein Co, which didn’t get a Best Picture nomination until 2008, with The Reader. There was such a shock, because it had replaced The Dark Knight, that the Academy expanded their Best Picture lineup from five to ten the next year.

Then we get:

2009 — Inglourious Basterds
2010 — The King’s Speech (fourth win)
2011 — The Artist (fifth win)
2012 — Silver Linings Playbook, Django Unchained
2013 — Philomena
2014 — The Imitation Game
2016 — Lion

That was when everything changed, as we now know. Long time readers of this site have been along for the bumpy ride and this was and remains the bumpiest. The Oscar race has been completely upended by these two major movements that, I think, are a direct response to the shock of Trump’s win.

The way I figure it, once people can mention Trump’s name and people shrug, when there is no fascination, no complete freak-outs, and when the waves of fear and rage evaporate (if they ever do), we will have moved past this era in our history. But that isn’t likely to happen for some time, which means the Oscars are going to be what they are today for a long time.

We will be revisiting the Weinstein story with She Said, and since it’s about the New York Times, there will be lots of press, lots of interviews and attention on social media. That is going to make it very likely a major player in the Oscar race. The question will be whether this opens Pandora’s Box or whether it offers some closure.

It is just one moment in our recent past that will be brought back to life for this year’s race. There will probably be an inclination to reach for escapism right now, and that might be how it goes. But those of us who cover the race and have through the Weinstein era will be reliving all of those years the film depicts, like they were yesterday.

The Weinstein story and the Oscars themselves are still unfinished business. I think the film will likely do well with audiences because Weinstein is still Public Enemy Number One. In an era of purges and persecutions, that was a big fish whose capture felt like progress.

It will be interesting whether or not Oscar voters have a taste for it, to pick that scab and relive all of those bad memories. Maybe they will. I don’t mind movies doing the heavy lifting. When it comes to real life, however, I long for the ongoing waves of hysteria to finally come to an end.  We’re all just about at that point where we’re ready to escape all of it.