Correcting Oscar 2018

[Big Magilla]

Big Magilla wrote
Placing Mahershala Ali in support for Green Book was not. Although he and Viggo Mortensen were co-leads, the story is told from Mortensen's perspective so if they had to split them, that was the right choice.

Right, but assuming that they didn't have to split the two actors up. Do you think Ali should be considered a lead in the film or a supporting actor?

They didn't have to split them up, they chose to do so. Was it the correct choice? In a perfect world, no, and if it were the first time that they split co-leads like that I would say it was the wrong thing to do but given that this kind of a split was nothing new, it didn't bother me in the way that some other splits have.

[Sabin]

Big Magilla wrote
Placing Mahershala Ali in support for Green Book was not. Although he and Viggo Mortensen were co-leads, the story is told from Mortensen's perspective so if they had to split them, that was the right choice.

Right, but assuming that they didn't have to split the two actors up. Do you think Ali should be considered a lead in the film or a supporting actor?

[Big Magilla]

I'm going to have to go with the Academy on this one.

There was a lot I disagreed with in this year's acting nominations, but not these.

No Ethan Hawke in Best Actor for First Reformed was a travesty. Placing Mahershala Ali in support for Green Book was not. Although he and Viggo Mortensen were co-leads, the story is told from Mortensen's perspective so if they had to split them, that was the right choice. Of his fellow nominees, Adam Driver in BlackKklansman and Richard E. Grant in Can You Ever Forgive Me? were close to co-leads as well but none of them had the screen time that Rami Malek did in Bohemian Rhapsody which would have worked against their placement in lead.

Poor Glenn Close. Just when it looked like she was finally going to win an Oscar for The Wife, along came Olivia Colman who early on it was assumed would be a supporting actress nominee for The Favourite in which she had the toughest role despite her screen time being less than that of Emma Stone. I think that's more an acknowledgment of great work being elevated as opposed to category fraud which more appropriately describes a major role being shoehorned into a supporting category. That could describe what happened with Emma Stone but there was no way she was going to win over Regina King in If Beale Street Could Talk.

[Sabin]

In this year, we see two different types of category debate, one of which is very common and the other less so.

The very common debate is whether Mahershala Ali is leading or supporting in Green Book. Despite his very heavy-screen time (66 minutes to Mortensen’s 90, 51% to 70%), I understand the argument against. We spend quite a bit of time with Viggo Mortensen before Mahershala Ali enters the screen. An argument could be made that Mahershala Ali’s character is the story that the journey that Viggo Mortensen is on. We certainly rarely see Ali on-screen without Mortensen but the same is not true for the reverse. And yet again, this isn’t the case of one character changing the other. Green Book may not be a very effective narrative but the filmmakers are clearly making the choice to show both characters growing and learning from each other and the finale involves a choice made by Mahershala Ali to welcome community into his life, not a choice made by Viggo Mortensen. That makes this film a two-hander in my book.

I think Mahershala Ali should be considered a lead and I think he would’ve gotten a nomination that year had he been effectively pushed. Best Actor of 2018 was not a very strong field and Willem DaFoe was quite a left-field choice.

That bring us to The Favourite, a film that I’ve been interested in talking about since I first proposed this category. Can we make the case that The Favourite has three leads?

To rattle off the details:
*Olivia Colman: 49:48 (42%)
*Emma Stone: 57:20 (48%)
*Rachel Weisz: 42:51 (36%)

From a top-level, the film would appear to be about the battles for power between three women. One woman to keep it (Weisz), one woman to obtain it (Stone), and one woman whose awareness remains mysterious (Colman).

Certainly, a case could be made that the film is about Olivia Colman’s character and how Stone and Weisz vie for her attention. But a case could be equally made that the film is largely told through Stone’s character’s POV, that she enters into the world and has an active journey, far more specific than tourist characters like Eddie Redmayne in My Week with Marilyn/James McAvoy in The Last King of Scotland. But we could also make a case that the film is written in such a way that the film is really about two women (Stone/Weisz) battling it out over the affections for another (Colman). I don’t know how I feel about this argument because Weisz serves too much as a story function, providing opposition and support.

To widen that point out, the A Story of The Favourite concerns the power struggle between Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz while the B Story concerns the larger world events that The Queen must attend to and does to varying degrees of attention, but it’s still her story and it’s largely independent from Emma Stone’s arc. In that A Story, Rachel Weisz largely serves as an obstacle for Stone.

I think what I find so interesting about this film as a case study is that anyone reading the screenplay for The Favourite might walk away with a very different interpretation than anyone watching it.

I’d love to be contrarian and say that all three are the leads of the film but I think Olivia Colman and Emma Stone as leads makes the most sense with Rachel Weisz in support. Would Emma Stone have made the final lineup in lead? I'm not sure. I think it's possible. The 2018 Best Actress race was weak enough that some were predicting Emily Blunt for Mary Poppins Returns over eventual nominee Yalitza Aparicio. Stone doesn't quite have enough meaty scenes to make it a slam dunk, but I'm going to say yes.

What do you think?