As the weeks of awards season turn over into months, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the Oscars are far more than just an awards ceremony recognizing greatness in film. They’re a promotional cycle for smaller-scale films. They’re Hollywood’s Election Day. They’re a widely televised entertainment special that needs to appeal to suburban moms in Ohio as much as they do entertainment writers in New York. When an event as massive as the Oscars has to be this many things to this many people on top of serving as some sort of barometer for quality in an artistic field, nobody in the audience or watching at home is going home totally happy. From snubbed nominees to upsets to sweeps from mediocre films, there’s always something to complain about. And hey, complaining about the Oscars is half the fun of watching the Oscars (at least when those complaints are about the trivial and not, you know, the lack of diversity in the nominees).
It only makes it all the more special when the Oscars are good. Last night, the Oscars were good.
2019, like 2017 and 2007 before it, proved such a good year for movies that it prohibited any neo-Crashes and Birdmans from hogging all of the awards season oxygen. During years like this the Academy still tends to find a way to be on their bullshit – remember that time Gary Oldman won Best Actor for The Darkest Hour? Remember The Darkest Hour? Of course you don’t – but the sheer volume of quality films in the general sphere of the Oscars puts the Academy in a position where they have to actively try to get it wrong.
That’s something of a curse in and of itself, though. One of the more fascinating narratives that came out of this awards season circuit was the volume of quality ultimately snuffing out the chances of a number of films that would likely have been frontrunners in a less-stacked year. Martin Scorsese’s second career-defining masterpiece went 0 for 10 last night! How wild is that? The Irishman features four or five of the great creative minds of the film industry, people whose careers are synonymous, teaming up for one last ride, one that puts their legacies on the autopsy table and dissects them piece for piece. It is the most Give Us Some Damn Oscars movie you could make without careening into Oscar Bait territory.
Zero Oscars. Zero Oscars for that movie, just a bucket of nominations. And hey, It’s An Honor Just To Be Nominated Trademark Copyright All Rights Reserved but it’s still kind of wild to think about. Noah Baumbach’s ostensible career-best? Nothing. Baumbach’s quiet human dramas have been circling the Oscars for years now but have still never managed to take home a statue. Not even Madagascar 3 could get it done. Early on, Marriage Story seemed like a lock for at least Best Actor, Actress, and Original Screenplay. Both he and the actors in his deeply personal film went home empty-handed.
And then there’s the Quentin Tarantino of it all. The dude has made it abundantly clear that he’s only got one more movie in him, and it seemed like he wanted to lock in his first Oscar wins for Best Director and Best Picture before that with last year’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. Like The Irishman, it screams Give Me One (1) Oscar Please. The film is a star-studded tribute to old Hollywood and “The Magic Of The Movies,” but on top of that it’s a meditation on what it means to make art in this medium, on the fleeting nature of stardom, on failure and triumph and redemption and recapturing The Way Things Used To Be. It is (in my humble opinion) Tarantino’s best work. It took home exactly one Oscar for Production Design, and there’s something of a bittersweet irony to what it lost to.
Tarantino has championed director Bong Joon-ho’s work long before Parasite made him something of a household name. Bong himself noted this in his acceptance speech after winning Best Director (an award for which he beat out, among others, Tarantino). There’s clearly an incredible shared respect and admiration for the other between the two of them, and while you’d have to be a lunatic to take issue with Parasite taking home the top prizes, you’ve gotta feel for Tarantino. The dude made his masterpiece and seemed like a lock for a bunch of big wins at the Oscars, only to get shut out by another masterpiece by a director he’s admired for decades.
That’s the thing about a great year at the Oscars: at the end of the day, something has to win, and that win always comes at the expense of other great films. That said…holy shit y’all, Parasite won Best Picture.
It looked dicey there for a minute. After the Golden Globes and the various guild awards it seemed that Sam Mendes’s one-shot war epic 1917 would be the frontrunner for the top prizes at the Oscars. 1917 found itself in a pretty unenviable position, that of a very good film taking awards that should very clearly be going to any number of truly great films. Going into the Oscars last night, I think most of us were hoping for the best but preparing for the worst. Bong made it clear months ago that the Oscars are pretty superficial to him, infamously calling them a “local awards show” which like, oh man, absolute GOAT move right there. Still, the Oscars aren’t just for them. They’re for us, too.
Seeing movies like Parasite win means a lot to film fans, to Asian-American viewers, to all the people who worked so hard to craft such a meticulous, stunning depiction of the absolute worst case scenario of late-stage capitalism. Seeing a movie take home Best International Feature AND Best Picture in a single night is a historical accomplishment. Seeing Bong Joon-ho begging to not be given any more awards so he can leave and get absolutely plastered and instead continuously getting called up to be handed MORE AWARDS is good television!
What we saw last night was a shining example of how much fun the Oscars can be when they get it right. Sure, Renee Zellweger’s win for Judy is a head-scratcher and maybe it would have been nice to see Quentin or Marty or even Greta Gerwig (who was shut out of major categories for the masterful Little Women and I, personally, will never forgive the Academy for this) take home something if only for the sense of acknowledgement. But ultimately, they managed to do the impossible: wash the still rotten aftertaste of Green Book and Bohemian Rhapsody running wild on the Academy Awards last year out of our mouths by giving us not only what we wanted but what the Oscars needed: the best movie of the year taking home Best Picture. It’s frustrating just how rarely that happens. It only makes sense that a movie as undeniable as Parasite proved the exception to the rule.
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