The race for Best Picture has focused on several films that were also written by their directors. With three big prizes up for grabs, it seems plausible that we could have a three way split between Picture, Director, and Original Screenplay. Has that ever happened in the era of the expanded ballot? Has it happened at all? I feel certain it used to happen a lot, considering there didn’t used to be writers who directed, with the exception of a few, like Billy Wilder.
Best Picture appears to be down to three movies: The Shape of Water, Get Out, and Lady Bird. The question to ask yourselves is what is the movie for right now?
The answer will vary for different people. For millennials it most clearly is Lady Bird. I was just in a debate with a few of them on Twitter after a famous celebrity tweeted about the “poverty” in Lady Bird. When I responded that I didn’t see poverty in Lady Bird, I was swarmed by hundreds of millennials calling me delusional because of course that film represented poverty. It took me several debates with them to realize that they really did think they saw a girl living in poverty when they watched the film. That tells us a lot about the millennial generation and perhaps explains why the film has become such a phenomenon. It speaks to them as they wake up into a world that isn’t giving them everything they want (expensive college, nice clothes, access to the latest technological goodies, etc). This is the same generation that lost their minds during the primary, attaching themselves to the Bernie way forward rather than the Hillary way. The only president they had ever known was Barack Obama. Their lives seem full of pain and agony because they can’t have what they want, and traditional Democrats weren’t enough for them (many of them not seeming to realize that all the progress we’ve made in the past 75 years is thanks to Democrats.)
You don’t have to go far in America to see poverty. It’s everywhere, even on the toniest streets of New York where “culture” sits right next to despair, even in Sacramento where Lady Bird is. 17% of Sacramento’s population right now lives below the poverty level, just above the national average. The highest poverty rate in this country is in Mississippi. And yes, many of those kids in destitute families are millenials, but Lady Bird really isn’t one of them. I would take some of these young people who don’t realize that on a road trip, stat, to blow their minds about how bad life can be in this country. But there is no doubt that Lady Bird speaks to this generation the way The Graduate spoke to the 1960s generation. That year it was an old generation on its way out with In the Heat of the Night, while a new generation was being ushered in with The Graduate. Lady Bird taps into the angst of the youth in the same way that movie did, where Benjamin’s choices were so limited. He left on a bus with Elaine, destination unknown, prospects unknown. Lady Bird ends much the same way. That could make it the movie for right now in one sense, but in a another sense it’s more about opportunities for women in Hollywood. A writer/director whose world was made into a film like this one has something usually only afforded to male directors whose oeuvre we know well. How many women filmmakers have that? Well, Jane Campion is clearly one who does. The genius Anna Biller is clearly another. Now Greta Gerwig is one. It’s hard to not feel excited about that, and that she could become the first female writer/director to win Best Picture. That’s not nothing.
Get Out is the film for right now because everyone knows in ten years time people will still be talking about Get Out: its impact was felt far and wide, across all cultural groups. The fervor started at Sundance as the secret screening, then it opened one year ago in late February. Since then, it has not just maintained its prominence but it has risen, topping the most prestigious critics surveys all around the world. It is that rare movie not necessarily made for the insular Oscar voters but a movie that everybody saw. Art still has the power to tell the truth, even when that truth might be an uncomfortable one. It has the power to do more than just make us feel good, or offer up an idealistic vision of American life. Get Out has entered the mainstream so that everyone knows what you mean when you say the “sunken place.” The easy read of this film is to say that it condemns whites who think black people are cool. The more expansive read, the more universal read, is that the greatest horror in life can sometimes be in something as mundane as feeling not a part of the community you live in. Feeling like an outsider, or expected to ignore what seems plainly obvious to you because everyone around you is acting like what you know is there isn’t. I’m sure than no one on Get Out ever saw it as an Oscar player. In fact, most of the prominent pundits I knew were certain it would only get screenplay. Our very own Marshall Flores was the first and only person in our circle who suggested it might get more than that, like gasp – Best Picture and Best Director (and he began saying this not even a week after the last Oscars). That’s because we’re trained in our line of work to reject the “genre” movie because “they” won’t go for it, because they like their traditional dramas of good people doing good things.
It’s to the Academy’s and the DGA’s credit that they have recognized the brilliant work of Jordan Peele on this film, which is exceptional, ambitious, tightly-wound and expertly made. It feels like the film for right now because it tells the story of right now: America just elected its first blatantly white supremacist administration since the Civil Rights movement splintered the country. Every day we wake up to that. So many of us wake up angry, hopeless, in need of art to address that. Thankfully, Peele went with his alternative ending which seems to offer some hope in, if nothing else, finding that one person who sees what you’re seeing — to find them and hold on tight for whatever is coming next.
The Shape of Water is probably the film that most captures how American life feels in 2017, what Trump’s presidency threatens, what we stand to lose, where we could be going, what it is exactly we’re fighting against. A film that doesn’t waste a second of screen time, a story that is as full of magical realism as it is with the truth. It captures so much about its maker, Guillermo del Toro, his dark sense of humor (“It’s a wild creature. We can’t expect it to be anything else.”), his fascination with cinema, cinema history, and the internal lives of women. It is wildly intersectional, giving side characters whole story arcs, while never losing sight of the film’s beating heart, what lies beneath everything else. It is captured in moments, juxtaposing something as magical as Eliza tracing the water on the window (the water follows her), to something as intrusive as Michael Shannon treating the two cleaning women as though they don’t exist, pissing in front of them but explaining why he doesn’t wash his hands afterwards. He is a world class villain, the embodiment of the competent evil that drives the Trump machine. So much of what drives The Shape of Water is how the resistance pushes back against the dirty capitalist at the film’s center. Marginalized people who mobilize to enact justice is what 2018 is supposed to be about. Someday film historians will look at this film as a film that might not have resonated as powerfully under any other president as it does right now. Yes, some people are fixated on the interspecies sex, or the fact that del Toro includes sex at all — that he would show the only female character in the entire Oscar race that cares, even the slightest, about having an orgasm on a daily basis. But the movie is so much more than that.
I’ll never forget taking my daughter to see The Shape of Water, with my niece. They were both on the edge of their seats the entire time, involved in the plights of these wayward, lost characters. Loving movies is a thing that happens to you. Most of us old folks can pinpoint that moment where movies became an essential escape from the real world. In the 1970s, parents took their kids to movies like The Exorcist and The Godfather. They weren’t kid movies, but we were expected to know what was happening on screen. I think I watched my daughter and niece fall in love with movies again — and with movies in a theater especially — when they watched The Shape of Water. The entire audience of random people in Burbank applauded at the end. There are few things in life that can give you that kind of fulfillment, sitting in the dark, with a story that good taking you somewhere you never expected to go.
These are the three movies that, for whatever reason, seem to have captured something about the right now. I would also add Three Billboards, The Post, Dunkirk, Phantom Thread, and Call Me By Your Name — each of them have awakened us in different ways. Only one can win Best Picture.
In terms of finding three-way splits, we first have to look at all of the years where Picture and Director split. Since it didn’t really happen that directors also wrote their own screenplays much until fairly recently, let’s just go back 30 years.
Let’s look at them:
1989 — Best Director — Oliver Stone, Born on the Fourth of July (ye auld Driving Miss Daisy stat)
Driving Miss Daisy — Best Picture + Screenplay
2000 — Best Director — Steven Soderbergh, Traffic + Screenplay
Gladiator — Best Picture
2002 — Best Director — Roman Polanski, The Pianist + Screenplay
Chicago — Best Picture
2005 — Best Director — Ang Lee, Brokeback Mountain + Screenplay
Crash — Best Picture + Screenplay
2012 — Best Director — Ang Lee, Life of Pi
Argo — Best Picture + Screenplay
2013 — Best Director — Alfonso Cuaron, Gravity
12 Years a Slave — Best Picture + Screenplay
2015 — Best Director — Alejandro G. Inarritu, The Revenant
Spotlight — Best Picture + Screenplay
2016 — Best Director — Damien Chazelle, La La Land
Moonlight — Best Picture + Screenplay
I could probably go back further and find a year where there was a three-way split, but Christ, even Around the World in 80 Days won Screenplay. That would indicate that the film that wins Best Picture will most likely also win Screenplay. Also it’s somewhat possible that the film that wins Director will also win Screenplay. So if you’re predicting Lady Bird for Best Picture you also have to predict it in Original Screenplay. Unless you’re going for that once in a lifetime three-way split.
Here are my current predictions. Skipping the shorts, Documentary Feature, and Foreign Language Film until I see all of them.
Best Picture:
Call Me by Your Name
Darkest Hour
Dunkirk
Get Out – long shot for this
Lady Bird – predicted winner
Phantom Thread
The Post
The Shape of Water – but maybe this
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Lead Actor:
Timothée Chalamet, Call Me by Your Name
Daniel Day-Lewis, Phantom Thread
Daniel Kaluuya, Get Out
Gary Oldman, Darkest Hour – Predicted winner
Denzel Washington, Roman J. Israel, Esq.
Lead Actress:
Sally Hawkins, The Shape of Water
Frances McDormand, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri – predicted winner
Margot Robbie, I, Tonya – stealthy threat
Saoirse Ronan, Lady Bird – possible if film gets nothing else
Meryl Streep, The Post
Supporting Actor:
Willem Dafoe, The Florida Project – remains a threat because lots love this movie
Woody Harrelson, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Richard Jenkins, The Shape of Water
Christopher Plummer, All the Money in the World – you never know
Sam Rockwell, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri – predicted winner
Supporting Actress:
Mary J. Blige, Mudbound
Allison Janney, I, Tonya – predicted winner
Lesley Manville, Phantom Thread
Laurie Metcalf, Lady Bird – very possible if LB wins big
Octavia Spencer, The Shape of Water – also possible in Shape sweep
Director:
Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan – remains a threat
Get Out, Jordan Peele – make history as the first black director to win ever.
Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig – depends on how fast the buzz burns
Phantom Thread, Paul Thomas Anderson – could just Soderbergh the whole thing.
The Shape of Water, Guillermo del Toro – predicted winner
Adapted Screenplay:
Call Me by Your Name, James Ivory – predicted winner
The Disaster Artist, Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber
Logan, Scott Frank & James Mangold and Michael Green
Molly’s Game, Aaron Sorkin
Mudbound, Virgil Williams and Dee Rees – would make history as first black female writer to win, only second ever nominated in all of Oscar history.
Original Screenplay:
The Big Sick, Emily V. Gordon & Kumail Nanjiani
Get Out, Jordan Peele – definitely a strong possibility
Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig – predicted winner
The Shape of Water, Guillermo del Toro, Vanessa Taylor – in a sweep or if it wins BP
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Martin McDonagh
Animated Feature:
The Boss Baby
The Breadwinner
Coco – predicted winner
Ferdinand
Loving Vincent
Cinematography:
Blade Runner 2049, Roger Deakins – frontrunner, he’s overdue
Darkest Hour, Bruno Delbonnel
Dunkirk, Hoyte van Hoytema – major threat
Mudbound, Rachel Morrison – ready to make history?
The Shape of Water, Dan Laustsen – which film will be the tech champ?
Film Editing
Baby Driver, Jonathan Amos, Paul Machliss – if it wins the Eddie maybe
Dunkirk, Lee Smith – predicted winner
I, Tonya, Tatiana S. Riegel
The Shape of Water, Sidney Wolinsky – in a sweep
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Jon Gregory
Sound Editing:
Baby Driver, Julian Slater – challenger
Blade Runner 2049, Mark Mangini, Theo Green
Dunkirk, Alex Gibson, Richard King – predicted winner
The Shape of Water, Nathan Robitaille
Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Ren Klyce, Matthew Wood
Sound Mixing:
Baby Driver, Mary H. Ellis, Julian Slater, Tim Cavagin – might Bourne it, winning sound and editing
Blade Runner 2049, Mac Ruth, Ron Bartlett, Doug Hephill
Dunkirk, Mark Weingarten, Gregg Landaker, Gary A. Rizzo – predicted winner
The Shape of Water, Glen Gauthier, Christian Cooke, Brad Zoern – in a sweep
Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Stuart Wilson, Ren Klyce, David Parker, Michael Semanick
Production Design:
Beauty and the Beast
Blade Runner 2049
Darkest Hour
Dunkirk
The Shape of Water — predicted winner
Original Score:
Dunkirk, Hans Zimmer
Phantom Thread, Jonny Greenwood – possible challenger
The Shape of Water, Alexandre Desplat – predicted winner
Star Wars: The Last Jedi, John Williams
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Carter Burwell
Original Song:
Mighty River from Mudbound, Mary J. Blige – predicted winner
Mystery of Love from Call Me by Your Name, Sufjan Stevens
Remember Me from Coco, Kristen Anderson-Lopez, Robert Lopez
Stand Up for Something from Marshall, Diane Warren, Common
This Is Me from The Greatest Showman, Benj Pasek, Justin Paul
Makeup and Hair:
Darkest Hour — predicted winner
Victoria and Abdul
Wonder
Costume Design:
Beauty and the Beast
Darkest Hour
Phantom Thread — predicted winner
The Shape of Water
Victoria and Abdul
Visual Effects:
Blade Runner 2049 – a challenger
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
Kong: Skull Island
Star Wars: The Last Jedi
War for the Planet of the Apes – predicted winner