Categories One-by-One: Best Picture

For the films of 2019
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Okri
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Re: Categories One-by-One: Best Picture

Post by Okri »

Really well reasoned, Tee. One thing I'd add is that you can make the argument that the screenplay nomination for 1917 is indeed the prize, as it's the type of film that is easily dropped from the category. So if 1917 wins (my current prediction), I'm not even sure it disproves your rule about paying attention to the screenplay as the canary in the mine, so to speak.

I find Sabin's arguments also really interesting. It may just be that we have to focus on that type of thinking more with the preferential ballot, expanded academy, and (relatively) limited background we have to go on.
dws1982
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Re: Categories One-by-One: Best Picture

Post by dws1982 »

I'm going to also throw in Cinematography as a variable worth looking at. To wit:
2018:
Green Book - Picture, Screenplay (not nominated for Cinematography)
Roma - Director, Cinematography

2016:
Moonlight - Picture, Screenplay (nominated, but lost, for Cinematography)
La La Land - Director, Cinematography

2015:
Spotlight - Picture, Screenplay (not nominated for Cinematography)
The Revenant - Director, Cinematography

2014:
Birdman - Picture, Director, Screenplay, Cinematography (the only film post-expansion to win these four awards--a combination that used to be fairly common)

2013:
12 Years A Slave - Picture, Screenplay (not nominated for Cinematography)
Gravity - Director, Cinematography

2012:
Argo - Picture, Screenplay (not nominated for Cinematography)
Life of Pi - Director, Cinematography

Meanwhile, in post-expansion years with no Picture/Director splits, you have The Shape of Water, The Artist, The King's Speech, and The Hurt Locker all nominated for Cinematography but losing to a big effects-driven film.

While the predictions used to be Director -> Picture, now it seems to be more along the lines of Cinematography -> Director, which I expected to hold this year. Just ten years ago, many of us said we would never bet on a Picture/Director split, but after seeing how preferential voting works in Best Picture, we're all much more open to the possibility of splits there. A Cinematography/Director split is the one I would be much more cautious to predict.

What does it all mean for this year though? I'm not sure. 1917 is my prediction for Cinematography and Director. It's definitely one of my top two for Picture. I think it's helped by the shortened season and by its late release date. People generally liked it a lot, but haven't had a ton of time to think and reflect on it. Unlike several of the other nominees that are on streaming/DVD already, Twitter hasn't reduced it to meme status. (Marriage Story got hit hardest by that; over one weekend it went from a potential three-acting award winner to almost a joke, due to people posting the fight scene out of context.) I don't see it getting hit hard by the preferential ballot, the way some people may reflexively put a film like Jojo Rabbit at the bottom of their ballot.

But there is still Parasite, and I don't think anyone has a clue how it'll do tonight. It could win only International Film, and we'll all be a bit disappointed but not surprised. It could bring in a few extra awards--Editing or Production Design and Screenplay--without surprising anyone. It could go all the way to Best Picture, and maybe even sweep in and take Director too.

I'll definitely be looking at the Production Design award. It's really the only award before Best Picture where 1917 and Parasite will both face off and where they both seem to have fairly equal shots at winning. (I don't think anyone is expecting 1917 to genuinely contend in Screenplay, and Mendes is being much more widely predicted in Director.) My gut would say that if 1917 wins, it's in for a big night, probably Picture and Director, and maybe even Newman finally gets to make a speech. If Parasite wins, I would think that's a good omen in its favor--no one is arguing that it wouldn't be deserving, but it's very far from the type of designs that are typically rewarded in this category. But Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is probably at least on equal footing with those two, and if it wins, we could be in for a fun night.
Last edited by dws1982 on Sun Feb 09, 2020 5:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Sabin
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Re: Categories One-by-One: Best Picture

Post by Sabin »

Instead of looking at the movie, I’m going to look at the race. Which recent Oscar race does 2019 remind me of between 2012 and 2018.

I’d say 2017 in that there were several contenders that were beyond viable. Very advance speculation pointed to Dunkirk and The Post. Then Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and Lady Bird had their moment in the sun. Then a slight backlash set in, and moving right into Oscar night wins from the DGA, PGA, and BAFTA strongly favored The Shape of Water, but the blogosphere tirelessly pushed a narrative that Get Out was a possibility, which today reminds me of the famous Megan Kelly quote on election night 2012: “Is this just math that you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better?”

I see a few parallels between 1917 and The Shape of Water's positions in the race.

Like 1917, nobody was predicting The Shape of Water for a screenwriting win in that their directors are more known as directors than writers. The screenplays of both movies are easily their weakest quantity but somehow they’re both tied to the director’s vision, and thus rubber-stamped. The difference of course is that The Shape of Water had three acting nominations (two of them quite hokey) and 1917 has zero. And that matters. But despite Parasite’s SAG victory, how does the “The actor’s love Parasite” narrative play out if nobody from the cast was nominated? How does an Anthony Hopkins nomination over Song Kang-Ho make sense?

But let’s say Parasite wins. What year does that resemble? 2016? With Moonlight’s stunning upset over La La Land amidst a crushing backlash? Except, there is no 1917 backlash. Voters get it and largely like it.

2015? With Spotlight taking it at the last minute over The Revenant? Maybe, except 1917 is for the most part a more beloved film than The Revenant. It may not have any acting nominations but it has a writing nomination which points to more emotional engagement from audiences. That is a far more meaningful tradeoff. In this scenario, Parasite is objectively weaker than Spotlight and 1917 is stronger than The Revenant.

And then I ask myself another question: if I voted for Green Book, which do I like more, Parasite or 1917? I think I prefer 1917. I understand 1917. We’re ultimately talking about a movie about a victory in the past vs. a movie about the failures of the present. The Academy may be changing but they will always love stories of victories over failures. And maybe that’s something we should always be looking for. Which movie is about the victory (evil is defeated) and which one is about the failure (life gets in the way).

2018: Green Book (victory) vs. Roma (failure)
2017: The Shape of Water (victory) vs. Get Out (victory) or Three Billboards… (failure)
2016: La La Land (mixed failure) vs. Moonlight (mixed victory)
2015: The Revenant (mixed victory) vs. Spotlight (big victory)
2014: Birdman (mixed failure) vs. Boyhood (it’s Linklater so there is no good or evil)

That sure points to 1917 over Parasite to me. If anything, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Jojo Rabbit have better claim on victory.

A Parasite victory will not be as earth-shattering as Moonlight but it will make me happier than any Oscar win since when I first saw Braveheart win at my first Oscars in the Spring of 1996. I am holding out hope this transpires.
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Mister Tee
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Re: Categories One-by-One: Best Picture

Post by Mister Tee »

Sabin wrote:
Mister Tee wrote
As noted, Birdman is the only film to win both, and even it had a battle with Grand Budapest Hotel. Meantime, Gravity, The Revenant and Roma weren’t even nominated for screenplay.
Roma was nominated for screenplay.
Thanks. I guess I was thinking of the Editing omission. there.
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Re: Categories One-by-One: Best Picture

Post by Sabin »

Mister Tee wrote
As noted, Birdman is the only film to win both, and even it had a battle with Grand Budapest Hotel. Meantime, Gravity, The Revenant and Roma weren’t even nominated for screenplay.
Roma was nominated for screenplay.
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Mister Tee
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Categories One-by-One: Best Picture

Post by Mister Tee »

I’ve been striving for a week to work up something on this category, and could never get it concise enough. I guess it’s my last shot.

The big one. Nominees:

Ford v. Ferrari
The Irishman
Jojo Rabbit
Joker
Little Women
Marriage Story
1917
Once Upon A Time…in Hollywood
Parasite

A saving grace of the expanded best picture category has been introducing suspense into the evening’s final award. The different voting system has liberated the category from its historic lockstep with best director, and yielded more unexpected results than in any period I can remember. Acting awards may be more drearily predictable than ever, but best picture can offer a regular jolt. Maybe we ought to think more about WHY. I’ll try not to make it too deep a dive.

Start with this: current Oscar history began with the 1957 race – the year voting rolls were reduced from an everybody-including-extras 15,000 to a far more elite 1200 or so (now inflated to somewhere over 8000); and – as important -- the screenplay categories were changed from a sometimes-overlapping three to a binary adapted/original.

In the first 41 years of that system (1957-97), best director and best picture were mostly synonymous. I remember one old-time pundit saying “nine times out of ten, you can go to bed after best director” – and he was almost exactly correct: over that 41-year stretch, film/director differed a mere four times (1967, 1972, 1981, 1989), nearly exactly his 90% perception. Then things changed: first, we don’t know quite why, differing four times between 1998 and 2005; then, thanks significantly to the diverging straight-vote for director/preferential for film, a seismic five times in the past seven years. Taken together, it’s nine disagreements in 21 years -- which even those with no head for math can tell is far afield from the 9-of-10 days.

It turns out, there’s another category important to figuring out best picture these days – one which has been connected all along, but never so obviously as now: screenplay.

I might have been slow to pick up on this, because I began my Oscar-participation during the first decade of that post-1957 era – a period I now recognize as anomalous. AMPAS was in love with musicals and big epics, giving them the majority of their best picture wins. Their love, however, didn’t extend to the screenwriting categories -- half the best picture winners between ’57 and ’68 didn’t win screenplay trophies (one, The Sound of Music, wasn’t even nominated). It was natural to latch onto the director correlation instead, since, in all of those cases, the winning film had taken the directing prize. I’m not sure I even fully noticed that the one year where film/director split – 1967 -- the adapted screenplay category turned out key to predicting best picture.

But over the ensuing decades, screenplay was nearly as significant a signifier of a looming best picture as the director prize was. Of the 26 best pictures awarded from 1969 through 1994, 19 of them won a screenplay trophy, compared to 23 that won best director – not a staggering disparity. The 19 films that won BOTH director and screenplay all waltzed to best picture wins. When the results diverged, it was close to an even split: the directing winner triumphed 4 times, the screenplay winner 3.

In the decade-plus between 1994 and the expansion, things weren’t as coherent – there were lot of crazy outcomes in that stretch, which would be interesting to explore but would slow us down. I want to get us to the current situation: the expanded best picture field, and the results in relation to the screenplay and directing categories.

I don’t think people have noticed the near-divorce between the directing and screenplay winners over this stretch. The first two years of the expanded field were calm enough, with both The Hurt Locker and The King’s Speech winning both. But since 2010, only one film – Birdman – has managed to win the two. Think of it this way: over an 8-year period, it’s possible to have 24 different winners covering the two screenplay + directing categories; in this stretch, we ended up with 23. (By contrast, in the 8 years preceding, there were only 17.) Barring a wild upset in directing, we’re almost sure to get another such three-way split this year. This is pretty much unprecedented.

People love to say, referencing film/director splits, that if Ben Affleck had been nominated in 2012, he’d have won, so that was sort of a phantom split. I don’t dispute that. But I think the outcome that year paved the way for this current, new gestalt. In earlier cases where a best picture favorite was denied a directing nomination, voters opted for what seemed the next in line: Out of Africa in 1985, Born on the Fourth of July in 1989, Braveheart in 1995. In 2012, that film, to my mind, would have been Lincoln. But voters instead gravitated toward, and chose, Ang Lee’s showy 3-D work on Life of Pi. Lee was probably partly a sentimental choice – many felt he’d been cheated of full glory in the Brokeback Mountain year – but there also seemed some sense that Life of Pi was more deserving because it was more obviously directed: what Damien used to disparagingly refer to as “Look at me, I’m directing.”

And the voters must have liked that outcome, because it seems, from that moment, all our directing winners have fallen into this showy ghetto. Knock any or all of the winners from 2013 through last year, but you can certainly feel the stamp of directorial style on each one. Not that we hadn’t had some flashy directing winners in years prior – Danny Boyle, Kathryn Bigelow. But we’d also had winners in a more normal range: Tom Hooper, Clint Eastwood, Ron Howard. In the old days, a best picture winner like Spotlight might well have won director as part of the package, the way Hooper did; right now, that seems an impossibility. In Sondheim’s lyric, these days, You gotta have a gimmick

I don’t think it’s coincidence that this concentration on directorial fireworks has coincided with the decline in match-ups between directing and screenplay wins. As noted, Birdman is the only film to win both, and even it had a battle with Grand Budapest Hotel. Meantime, Gravity, The Revenant and Roma weren’t even nominated for screenplay. Which leads to a realization: this new disparity has led to a seeming voter preference for the screenplay winner in the best picture category. It may or may not have something to do with the preferential ballot, but, in these seven split decision years, only two directing winners have yielded best picture -- The Artist and The Shape of Water – while five times a screenplay winner has gone on to the top prize: Argo, 12 Years a Slave, Spotlight, Moonlight, Green Book. This 1) amounts to a revolution and 2) suggests we need to take a long look at our screenplay winners when predicting best picture.

Which finally brings us to this year’s nominees, and also brings us to something of a wall: before we can know how to handicap best picture in this light, we have to be set on what our screenplay winners will be – and neither category is set in stone. This isn’t fatal to anyone’s chances: last year, Green Book seemed hopelessly hobbled by its lack of directing nomination -- until the moment it won best screenplay, at which point it became a hot prospect to win it all. But it does make it tougher for us to predict.

So, by this metric, what are the year’s strongest contenders?

Little Women seems least likely to win best picture, even if it takes the screenplay trophy. Gerwig wasn’t nominated by the Oscar directing branch or the DGA; even Green Book had qualified on that second metric. I rank it below the other screenplay possibilities -- and also below 1917, which of course could still win, a la Shape of Water or The Artist.

Jojo Rabbit may be closer to best picture than we imagine. It’s certainly the front-runner for adapted screenplay, it had a DGA nomination, it won WGA/BAFTA. and comedy editing at ACE. It might be the kind of movie that could score well on a preferential ballot.

Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood could well still win original screenplay. People seem to have bailed on it after WGA/BAFTA – but, of course, it wasn’t eligible at WGA, and BAFTA is hit-and-miss with screenplay Oscars. The inexplicable omission in editing is the only truly negative factor surrounding the film.

And then, of course, there’s Parasite, which won those WGA/BAFTA prizes, as well as the drama ACE, and that SAG Ensemble prize. It’s hard not to feel – from the roars of approval at SAG and the Broadcasters’ ceremony – that Parasite is the most deeply loved of this year’s nominees. Whether that love is deep enough to take the film past the subtitled barrier is what will keep us watching till the end Sunday night.

I feel like it’s 50/50 between 1917 and Parasite. Whichever wins will add weight to either the screenplay or directing side of the current “which leads to best picture?” debate.
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