Countdown to the Academy Awards: Whatever happened to baby Oscar?

Throw in the faux outrage, a sprinkle of controversy and a touch of the awkward and there you have it; the smorgasbord of satin that is the Academy Awards. What a year of radical change it has been, not all of it welcome. Entertainment giants Netflix and Marvel finally receive their first Best Picture nominations, but has the Academy struck a bum note by failing to recognise a female nominee in the best director category?

Scenery-chewing veteran Sam Elliott can smile at last after a first nomination in the Supporting Actor category while Glenn Close claims her seventh shot at Oscar, and fourth in the best actress category. It’s not before time also for prince provocateur Spike Lee to get his first nomination for best director. It’s baffling to think the Academy looked right through the Yankees fanatic when considering the five nominees in both 1989 for Do the Right Thing and 1992 for Malcolm X.

Elsewhere? Omissions dominate discourse more than the nominees. Bradley Cooper recently admitted his “embarrassment” at not being nominated amongst the five in the directing category. Perhaps it’s the Academy which should be blushing and not the multi-talented Cooper.

Equally surprising that the Academy couldn’t find room on the ballot to endorse retired screen legend Robert Redford with a final nod for his charming swansong in The Old Man & The Gun and there’s still no love for Emily Blunt - one of Hollywood’s best and brightest - despite two brilliant turns as Mary Poppins and a grieving mother living in a world of silence in A Quiet Place.

Trying to read the collective minds of the 7,000 Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences affiliates is a fool’s errand. Despite surprising absentees and inclusions in many categories, it’s the Best Picture layout that’s caused the greatest intake of breath.

The ballot for the blue riband is possibly the most mundane in Oscar history and it isn’t that they’ve shortlisted a slimmed list of eight entries for Best Picture.

This is a quality, not quantity issue. How they could find room for Black Panther and Vice and exclude the likes of If Beale Street Could Talk?

This year’s underwhelming Best Picture ticket showcases only three movies worthy of the name: Bradley Cooper’s remake of the fabled success story A Star is Born, Yorgos Lanthimos’ clever period comedy The Favourite, and arguably the pick of the bunch, Alfonso Cuaron’s semi-autobiographical masterpiece, Roma.

Without labouring the point, the folly of the Academy’s decision in 2010 to extend the number of nominations to ten has only served to dilute the quality on offer, and lessen the cachet of nomination. Case in point being the inclusion of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close in 2012, or American Sniper in 2015 and at least half of those this time around. Black Panther with seven Oscar nominations? Riddle me that.

Not only does Black Panther fail to measure up as the best superhero film of the year, it’s not even the best black-oriented superhero film - that goes to the gorgeous Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, featuring Black-Latino fan favourite Miles Morales in his first screen appearance.

There’s an awkward sense of pandering to the Black Panther nominations. And for every one of its seven nods, a superior production was being elbowed out of contention. That’s the galling part.

The likes of Barry Jenkins, who led his incredible Moonlight to a successful Oscars campaign two years ago, was left outside the velvet rope with If Beale Street Could Talk, a stunning effort about black lives that has so much more to say than Black Panther and stands above the majority of the Best Picture candidates.

That Black Panther is superficial is indisputable. Whatever Ryan Coogler – a very talented helmsman - is seeking to achieve, it comes off as low brow, cookie-cutter fare. Its supporters might argue it’s a progressive production for the black community and an ultra-feminist one at that; I can get on board with the first part but not the latter. Why? The world of Black Panther, that of Wakanda, is a traditionalist patriarchy. Feminism, in the pure sense of the word, seeks to end that, yet the women of Wakanda seem happily compliant with the running of their ‘utopian’ society. Coogler has made smarter, sharper films than this - Fruitvale Station or Creed, and without the need for excess political baggage. ‘Panther’ is many things (boring, predictable, cheesy among them) but it isn’t a groundbreaker in the technical or narrative sense.

On the topic of superficial, Bohemian Rhapsody – the long-awaited Queen biopic - comes off as a by-the-numbers, shallow adaptation of the life and legend of Freddie Mercury, taking liberties with events and their place in his chequered career. The movie portrays the band, and their gritty idiosyncrasies as secondary, background noise as the film hurries towards the admittedly impressive final segment.

The monstrous Harvey Weinstein episodes have brought about a heightened awareness of any controversial directorial ticks and the inconsistent behaviour of Rhapsody director Bryan Singer frustrated more than the people at Fox.

While Singer is still credited as the director, Fox stripped him of producing credit. Nominating ‘Rhapsody’ for Best Picture is a tone-deaf decision by the Academy.

This brings me onto Black Klansman. An at-times alluring police procedural drama with some respectable performances but nothing in the way of a beguiling cinematic experience and not a patch on the aforementioned Spike Lee joints. Son of Denzel Washington (a Spike Lee regular in the past) John David, proves he’s a talent to be reckoned with alongside everybody’s favourite Sith Lord Adam Driver. However that only brings the experience so high and these topliners can’t save the film from its didactic and heavy-handed existence. BlacKkKlansman (as it is annoyingly stylised) still holds up as one of the better nominees in the Best Picture race, but that’s all relative.

It wouldn’t be the Academy if there wasn’t a schmaltzy, message-laden, period piece in the running. Green Book is a film that manipulates with feeling via civil rights issues, all to distract from the argument it’s overly saccharine and factually imbalanced piece of Oscar bait. Yes, some of the performances are brilliant and deserving of recognition but not enough to elevate it from mediocrity.

There are individual moments to relish in Peter Farrelly’s film and one will smile through long sections of its character interactions. You might feel like you’re back in 1989 with Morgan Freeman and Jessica Tandy in Driving Miss Daisy. That’s not necessarily a good thing.

Perhaps one of the most surprising Best Picture nomination is Vice, though it’s far from the worst of the eight. Scattergun is the term that comes to mind and it’s as good as any to describe what Adam McKay is attempting here. Christian Bale’s turn as former Vice President Dick Cheney is outstanding, carrying the film. He’s in cruise control as the political heavyweight. McKay’s direction and editing show that the Anchorman director isn’t overly interested in the idea of nuance but the film has enough energy and texture to keep audiences engaged. It doesn’t come close, though, to the effectiveness of the Big Short, which explained its complex ideas and characters in a detailed, though entertaining manner. Vice felt like more of a history lesson than Michael Lewis’s adaptation, and like Green Book, it takes a broad stroke approach to a lot of its plot points.

None of which still begins to explain the exclusion of several worthy Oscar candidates for Best Picture this year: from Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk to Can You Ever Forgive Me? and many others, not least the wonderful Eighth Grade, the heartfelt Leave No Trace, the horrifying Hereditary, the masterfully directed First Man, Widows, and the harrowing gut-punch that was Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here.

While some are touted in other categories, it’s inexplicable they aren’t candidates for the top prize. The comfort is in the fact there are two bona fide masterpieces in the race - The Favourite provides one of the funniest, sharpest, and most delectable cinematic experiences of the year and, incidentally, boasts three of the best female performances of 2018.

Roma, on the other hand, is the crowning cinematic achievement of the year and one that will make history by becoming the first foreign-language film to ever win the big gong - which it very much deserves.

That may or may not camouflage the question of Oscar criteria this year.

The Academy would appear to be fans of sap over substance.