After the surprise Best Picture victory by 2016’s Moonlight (an identity-politics win that suffered from an inconclusive and strangely cast third act), progressive Academy members told themselves “no more Best Picture wins by white-guy directors!….the worm has turned!”
The following year Guillermo del Toro‘s The Shape of Water took the prize…a sexy monster flick about a homely and isolated woman’s sexuality, and created by the Mexican Orson Welles, an enormously well-liked fellow.
Eureka! We’re on a whole new path! The world transformed!
And then Green Book won the following year, and your extreme wokesters and BIPOCs totally freaked out…”Eeeeee!” A period flick (1962) about racial rapprochment between a thuggish Italian racist and an elegant gay pianist (essentially a parent-child road movie) was adored by Hollywood Elsewhere and tens of thousands of average sane people throughout the industry and the country but widely condemned by Film Twitter. To Spike Lee and many others on his side of the divide, the Green Book white-guy factor was intolerable…and yet it won! Wheeeeee! Wokesters can go fuck themselves!
But that was it. Older white guy movies were henceforth unofficially banned from serious consideration. Hence the dismissal of Martin Scorsese‘s brilliant The Irishman and the triumph of Parasite, despite the drunken scammers nonsensically letting the fired maid into the house during a rainstorm.
This was followed by last year’s triumph of Chloe Zhao‘s Nomadland — proper gender focus, ethnically correct, white guy characters strictly marginalized.
It follows that Jane Campion‘s The Power of the Dog, a movie that average viewers are mostly (almost entirely?) dismissive of, will win for Best Picture and Best Director. Not because anyone “out there” cares about this grim, tortured, glacially-paced melodrama about closeted gayness on the open range, but because of the “Campion rules!” factor.
From Sasha Stone‘s recent Awards Daily assessment…
