Yesterday, I posted quite a lengthy piece on what defines a Best Picture winner – they have to tell THE story. That has changed over time, from telling a universal story that included most people who turned out to see a movie, like Gladiator, to telling a niche story, specific to the industry — and a community of people who still care about the Oscars. It’s shrinking every year, or at least until a small handful of films tweaked the algorithm. Last year’s Top Gun Maverick landing in the Best Picture race, and now, Barbenheimer.
When Barbie lands in the Oscar race it is going to be a very big deal for a lot of people, many of whom have not been invited into the Oscars, or do not care. My daughter’s generation has long since checked out. She used to tell me her friends never cared about the movies nominated because 1) they were always the same movie, and 2) the fix was in. By that, she meant her friends — those who paid any attention at all — believed the game was rigged to make the industry look good, not to award most deserving.
But of course, “most deserving” is in the eye of the beholder. The Oscars, like political elections, must measure a consensus. When you throw in the ranked-choice ballot you have to accept even more bland choices that offend no one. Not that the winners have been bland, necessarily. A ranked-choice ballot winner has to be passionately loved and well-liked. Even if people would not vote for it as the winner, they would put it high on their ballots, at number 2 or 3.
The old way (from 1944 onward) was a majority vote. That meant all the film needed was passionate support. Even if some people hated it, the number one was all that mattered. But obviously, that’s no longer the case. Opting for a ranked-choice ballot makes more people in the industry happy – they can all have their cakes and eat it too, with a diverse slate of options. Still, it eliminates much of the thrill of watching the Oscars, where a majority vote represents the passion in the room. Most of the time, can most people go along with the winner (Green Book is the lone exception)? Sure. Does that make for an exciting evening for those watching at home? Sometimes yes, most of the time no.
The Oscars have become too insular and industry-focused to matter to the audiences expected to watch them. On top of that, they’ve become overtly political in recent years, which turned viewers off. It’s easy to see how the Trump years crashed viewership, and not just because Conservatives couldn’t stomach the show, but because politics was suddenly everywhere.
The industry won’t face this truth, as they won’t face other truths — this graphic from the Hollywood Reporter proves it. The blame the competing media landscape for the drop since 2016. Um, okay.
But that is going to change this year, thanks to Barbenheimer. Greta Gerwig’s film,Barbie, and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer both have very good stories to tell this year. These kinds of narratives can drive a Best Picture contender to a win in ordinary times. These are not ordinary times. But let’s say, for the sake of it, that they were, and that we still measured success the old-fashioned way – the people mattered because the box office mattered.
Then, how do we distinguish between these two? Right off the bat, we have to look at Greta Gerwig’s history-making box office feat. It’s never been done that a movie not just directed by a woman, but a film that is Gerwig’s creative expression from the production design to the choreography to the writing to the ultimate theme. Barbie is the kind of movie that grows on you the more you see it because Gerwig’s sensibilities start to shine through, not to say co-writer Noah Baumbach’s contribution should be ignored.
The story Barbie tells is twofold. The first, a critical look at a corporation’s need to rebrand for Generation Woke and sell more crap people don’t need. The second, taking that concept and turning it into a work of art made by an auteur … who is also a woman. It’s both of these things at once, but its value to American culture in 2023 is significant. And that makes it a potentially strong winner for Best Picture.
Oppenheimer would be the film to beat in an ordinary year because it, like Barbie, has become too big to ignore. Suppose Barbie is “important” because it’s mostly rooted in identity. In that case, Oppenheimer is important for reasons films about identity can’t ever be: it’s much more of a macro-view of humanity than it is a specific tale of a specific kind of person’s lived experience. Big themes, big ideas, big problems like nuclear war, like McCarthyism, like antisemitism, like Hitler and Stalin and WWII. Like the nukes dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
That kind of importance used to matter to Oscar voters of a different generation. We call them “Old Academy,” not because they’re old but because they represent the previous generational shift. There was the WWII generation of old-timers who more or less aged out in the past ten years and were replaced by younger, hipper, more international voters, and many voters for whom identity matters more than, say, WWII and Hitler.
For instance, the latest attack by Hamas against Israel would be a no-brainer for Old Academy. This would be a rallying cry against rising antisemitism, and films like Oppenheimer would have more relevance. But New Academy is likely to be the #freepalestine types. Though I won’t accuse them directly of antisemitism just for criticizing Israel, they’re not necessarily going to feel the same way as Old Academy about the specific topic of being a persecuted Jew during the Cold War.
So you might think the top two prizes have to split somehow. Barbie wins Director, and Oppenheimer wins Pciture. Maybe that’s the story of Oscars 2024. Maybe it’s not. What other films have a story to tell, and what could that mean as we head into January and February?
Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon has cultural relevance in the way these two films do not. It speaks directly to a generation for whom “colonization” is the biggest crime in American history. This film delves directly into the subject of abuse and exploitation of Native Americans — to put it mildly. It was a near-genocide of the Osage people. This film will likely land high atop the ballots of most voters who will view it as important even if it wasn’t their favorite movie. What it also needs is passionate love at the top. It needs both of these things to pull in a win.
Passionate love will not be Barbie’s problem. It likely won’t be Oppenheimer’s problem. But Killers of the Flower Moon is a depressing and dark story, which means it will be a slightly harder sell when it comes to expressions of pure love. Oppenheimer has this problem to a degree, but the love for the central character overcomes the depressing theme, and that could work in Killers’ favor – if love for Lily Gladstone and for her character drives love for the film, they could overcome it, and take the top prize.
But there’s another story that involved Killers, and a movie like Maestro or even The Killer and that’s the ongoing cold war between theatrical and streaming. There’s no getting around it, particularly in a year where the actors went on strike to strong-arm the streamers. Was the settlement to their liking? Are they happy with the outcome? Will they be prepared to embrace a Netflix movie at long last? Apple’s already done it. Will they be able to do it twice?
Nolan, in particular, is a die-hard in-cinema guy, and that adds to his “Oscar story” this year particularly, since he just proved you could make almost a billion worldwide with a three-hour rated-R movie about a moody scientist many hardly even heard of before and take us into his mind and heart. Oppenheimer is only partly about Oppenheimer. It’s also a movie about Christopher Nolan, with Oppie as his stand-in. Like Barbie is a movie about Greta Gerwig, with Barbie as her stand-in. Oppenheimer lives!
Both Netflix and Apple are honoring the desire by fans to run their films in movie theaters come what way. Killers has done pretty good so far for a nearly four-hour movie. It’s made around $140 million worldwide. No one is going to punish this film, or The Killer, or Maestro for not profiting from their high budgets. That only matters if the profit model is theatrical, which it isn’t anymore. The Killer played in movie theaters but since dropping on Netflix it’s already zoomed to number one and been seen by around 27 million households. Two paths for Hollywood, two paths for audiences – where will the Academy land?
The problem for any movie is that they have to compete with Barbenheimer, which will be difficult to do unless there is an overriding reason for the film to leap to number one.
Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction, which won the audience award in Toronto, critically examines “Good White Liberals” and their desire to be inclusive. I haven’t seen it yet, but by all accounts, it’s more of a comment on how American culture shifted over the past 20 years — at least how it used to be before 2020, when everything dramatically changed. It is about the years wherein Precious and The Help were strong Oscar contenders because they nestled into the stereotypes about the Black community. It’s also funny and winning, and if we’re in the business of making history, no Black director has ever won, despite two films by Black directors winning Best Picture.
American Fiction, like Poor Things, like Past Lives, like Anatomy of a Fall, and Killers of the Flower Moon are all films driven by “identity.” They’re about the people they are in society right now, who they used to be and whether they’re breaking free from what oppressed them. Feminism drives Anatomy of a Fall and Poor Things, not to mention Barbie (with a nudge nudge, wink wink). The plight of the Native Americans at the hands of white barbarians in Killers of the Flower Moon is more about the plight of Native Americans and their treatment by Hollywood.
Then there are the gay-themed films like Maestro, Rustin and All of Us Strangers, which are more or less about our recent past when being gay was something that had to be hidden or not discussed. Though much has changed, the past still haunts the present enough that these films are relevant to New-Academy.
David Fincher’s The Killer and Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers exist outside these kinds of “Oscar stories.” They stand on their own as examples of brilliant filmmaking and storytelling. It’s not a secret that they are collaborations, not written and directed by the same person, but drawing from all disciplines at once. The Holdovers exists almost out of time, when everyone was invited in to the picture show, to sit under one roof and contemplate the characters’ struggles on screen. Yet, it might have trouble finding a foothold in an era where actors especially see what they choose for awards as defining who they are and what they stand for.
The Killer evokes the truth about the film industry in 2023, but a truth no one wants to talk about. They’re isolated. They’re paranoid. They’re alone. It exists purely as a work of art, not for profit. That’s the irony of it. Perhaps some see it as a Devil’s bargain because it drives subscribers to Netflix. Yet, it’s because of Netflix that it was made as uncompromising and glorious as it gets.
Right now, I think Best Picture is likely down to:
Barbie/Oppenheimer vs. Poor Things/American Fiction. At least right now