A chaotic awards season has come to an end. While nothing nearly as dramatic as the last Oscars ended up occurring, this season was a far more compelling one, at least on the Best Picture end, in quite some time. After taking some time to reflect, here are my final thoughts before putting the 2018 Awards season to bed.

Inclusion, Inclusion, Inclusion

There has been a lot of upheaval in Hollywood over the past year as the sins of the industry are coming to light and a lot of its rotten foundation is being burned to the ground. Hopefully we will look back on this as a time when the industry truly got itself on the right track. This year we got one of the most diverse slate of nominees of all time. The Academy showed some real progress when it came to giving nominations to women, including a Directing nomination for Greta Gerwig and a historic nomination for Rachel Morrison in the Cinematography category. On Oscar night, a large number of women were front and center as presenters, on top of people like Casey Affleck not participating because everyone involved realized that was a bad idea. The biggest moment for me from this season was during Frances MacDormand’s victory speech, and no, it is not the mention of inclusion riders (though those are really important and you should read more about them here). Instead, it was when she asked for all the female nominees to stand, and then told the room that each and every one of them had a project they would like to get made and that the room should be doing everything in its power to help get those made. The reason this is so important is that if Hollywood is ever going to be fixed, one of the big things that need to happen is that more movies by female creators, like Lady Bird or Mudbound, need to get made.

The Oscars have at times gotten an unfair amount of flack for the lack of diversity in Hollywood. Not because it is acceptable for there to be years with no minority acting nominees, or because it is okay that it took 90 Oscars for a woman to get a Cinematography nomination, but because the Oscars can only vote for what is given to them. The sad truth is that there simply aren’t enough films from minority perspectives being made, and because of that, minorities have a hard time getting award nominations, because you can’t get nominated for a movie that doesn’t exist. If the industry allows more of these projects to exist, more nominations will come. That doesn’t mean that the Academy is blameless, and rule changes like the ones that allowed more diverse members into the voting bodies are necessary in order to make sure that every film gets a fair shake, but the key going forward is actually making these damn movies. McDormand was right to bring this up, and hopefully the situation will change, because as important as inclusion riders are to ensuring films look like the real world and provide the proper amount of work to everyone in the industry, it is even more important that movies like Wonder Woman, Lady Bird, and Get Out, which involve minority filmmakers representing minority perspectives, become the norm and not the exceptions.

Speaking of Get Out, the one thing that Hollywood needs to be careful of is the temptation to feel that, as long as it is doing well with one minority, it is doing well with all of them. It has been a fun joke seeing women like Natalie Portman at the Golden Globes and Emma Stone at the Oscars bring up how ridiculous it is that women are so rarely highlighted in the Directing category. In Portman’s case, it was especially understandable, because it was ridiculous that Greta Gerwig got snubbed for Ridley fucking Scott; but it brought up a trend that became especially true with Stone’s statement–while it is true that the category has done a poor job with women, its track record with PoC has been trending upwards for years without getting any real mention. Four of the last five winners have been Mexican, including during the #OscarsSoWhite year of 2015, where Alejandro González Iñárritu won. The winner before this run started was Taiwanese director Ang Lee. This does not absolve the Academy of everything, but it does highlight that a lot of progress is being ignored, to the point that no one really acknowledged what a big deal Guillermo del Toro’s win was. Nor has enough noise been made about Jordan Peele for being a triple nominee and ultimately becoming the first African American man to win a Best Original Screenplay Oscar.

These issues are large, and there are going to be growing pains, but the Academy and its members need to remember not to allow themselves to be content until everyone is getting the accolades and opportunities they deserve. Hell, considering how many winners on Oscar Sunday were still white and male, they shouldn’t be content with the fact that the nominees were so diverse, considering this year’s progress only showed up in 20% of the nominees, a figure that only looks good if you have a record as bad as the Oscars’.

Overall, though, this year showed a real push for inclusion, and hopefully a real push for change that can build upon the incremental progress that has been happening for some time now. That doesn’t mean this is going to be fixed overnight, but everything is finally going in the right direction… now seriously, though, get on those inclusion riders.

Traditional awards indicators are back with a vengeance

After two years of swinging and missing, the PGA matched up with the Oscars again. So, too, did the DGAs, after years of the Oscars trending away from the Best Picture and Best Director winners matching. A rapidly changing voting block and a wacky voting system combined with a way too long awards season are making historical awards indicators less important, but this year proves they aren’t dead yet. If a film like Get Out or Lady Bird had won, besides making Twitter overjoyed, it would have meant that Oscar voters have truly embraced going their own way in the Best Picture race. Instead, The Shape of Water won, and Hollywood is back to awarding movies that in some way or another are love letters to Hollywood. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it adds back a degree of predictability to the Oscars, which it could use less and not more of.

Not to bring things back to last year’s Oscars again, but a lot of this season was spent wondering if La La Land‘s loss was simply an abnormality or a sign of things to come. The answer seems to be… both? Chances are it will be quite some time before we have a film dominate the season before ultimately losing the way La La Land did, but the factors that led to La La Land‘s loss aren’t going away. Voters are having more and more trouble coming to a consensus, which was apparent in a year in which it could be argued that five films, Dunkirk, Call Me By Your Name, Lady Bird, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and The Shape of Water were all frontrunners at one point or another. While a sixth, in the form of Get Out, was culturally significant enough that it lingered as a threat until the end (and ended up getting a well-deserved Best Original Screenplay Oscar). But despite the crowded field, Oscar night went according to form, demonstrating that a PGA and DGA agreement is still a powerful indicator of Oscar success.

…Except when they aren’t

Even with this year returning to form in many ways, it definitely didn’t in others. First, The Shape of Water overcame not getting a SAG nomination, and became the first film to win without one since Braveheart (though unlike in that case, this was not an upset). Second, the film managed to be just the fourth film this century to win without a Writing Oscar as a part of its haul. This, combined with losses at the Golden Globes and BAFTA, was why it was so hard to confidently predict The Shape of Water‘s eventual victory. Hopefully, this develops fully into a trend where the Best Picture race is chaotic simply because different groups honor different movies. Honestly, that should have been how things went last year, as opposed to the La La Land dominance followed by a surprise Moonlight win.

The most important thing for a Best Picture Nominee is to not be hated

Being liked helps, and it is not like The Shape of Water won without being liked, but it is looking more and more as we go forward that being divisive is going to cost you. This was always the logical progression of the preferential voting system and has increasingly been more apparent ever since the voting system was changed for the 2010 Oscars. Just look at the winners: The Hurt Locker, The King’s Speech, The Artist, Argo, 12 Years a Slave, Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), Spotlight, Moonlight, and now Waterlight, err, The Shape of Water. All of those movies if nothing else never found themselves involved with that much negative press, with the exception of maybe Birdman (and maybe 12 Years a Slave, if you count racists). These films ended up being the ones that at the very least everyone could live with winning–even The Artist, which while somewhat mocked now, is a charming movie that doesn’t do anything wrong, per se, it just shouldn’t be a Best Picture winner. It is likely that few or none of the movies that won ended up with the most first place votes, but each managed to get the most votes in the top, we’ll say five, to be safe. Would it really be that shocking if Avatar had more first place than The Hurt Locker (although, as a note, anyone that did do that should no longer be allowed to vote), or if The Revenant and/or The Big Short had more first places than Spotlight, or if just last year that La La Land had more first place votes than Moonlight? In all cases that answer would be no, but in all cases, it is very likely that those voters who hated those movies ranked them last, especially in the cases of Avatar and La La Land. Meanwhile, the films that won were consistently ranked a bit lower than first, but still quite high.

Ultimately, this is all a way to say that this is why Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri lost. It had just fallen too far out of favor with too many people, and honestly for many, it winning would have been simply unacceptable, in a Crash or Driving Miss Daisy kind of way. The voting has always been designed to get a winner that everyone can live with, even if it isn’t your favorite movie, which is a rather logical system. This has been especially true the past couple of years, and makes me really wish we could see the actual voting results–because you can’t help but wonder how close Get Out came to winning, considering it was liked by virtually everyone. Hell, same with Lady Bird. It is likely that if The Shape of Water had been made by someone who was not as likable as Guillermo del Toro, it would have been more affected by the last ditch bad press that conveniently seemed to come out just as voting began. Especially in a genre that is not generally the most Oscar-friendly (of course, the same could be said for Get Out). The only worry going forward is that filmmakers will be more concerned about making sure people don’t have a reason to hate their movie, instead of, you know, giving them reasons to love them, but that seems unlikely, and at the very least we can all take solace in knowing that something like Crash or Driving Miss Daisy happens less often, especially as the voting block continues to expand and become more diverse.(The other danger, though, is that the Academy will over time reward movies which are less interesting, less unique, or which take fewer artistic risks. – Ed) Instead, the worst we have to deal with is The Artist, which is just a silly winner as opposed to an infuriating one.

Poor Lady Bird

It would have been inconceivable early in the season to think that Lady Bird, which was a clear favorite for Best Picture multiple times during awards season, would go home with zero Oscars, but here we are. It is a shame, but not quite the grand injustice it is likely going to be made out to be. It’s kind of hard to feel like the film got robbed in any of its categories. Allison Janney and Laurie Metcalfe gave roughly equally good performances. Sure, I preferred Metcalfe, but not enough to act as if Janney didn’t deserve to win. Saoirse Ronan is going to win eventually, but as much as I loved her in that movie, she is not definitively better in it than Frances McDormand was in hers. Greta Gerwig’s nomination was nice and well-deserved, but the strength of that movie was the writing and it is really hard to say she did a better job than anyone else in that category, let alone Guillermo del Toro. The Best Original Screenplay category was the film’s best shot, and the true strength of the film, but at the same time is anyone really mad that Get Out won instead? (I mean, I know there are, but just go with it.) So that leaves Best Picture, and while I would have picked Lady Bird over The Shape of Water, not only because I think it is a better movie (but plenty would disagree on that), but also and more importantly because then the Oscars would have truly spread the love between the major movies in a way that reflects how much this year lacked a clear leader in a field of excellent contenders.

That didn’t happen, however, and that is okay. The fact that we are considering a film like The Shape of Water to be possibly too boring and safe a choice shows how far things have come. Lady Bird will be fine, and Greta Gerwig is just getting started. She will be back with likely better movies in the future, so we should appreciate this as a beginning and not lament that things didn’t go quite as well as many people would have hoped. One note, though, for the people screaming that Lady Bird was the most well-reviewed movie of the year. That is a dubious claim that was perpetuated by Rotten Tomatoes, as they continue to act as if their ratings mean anything more than whether a film does or does not suck (with I guess extra layers for this film super doesn’t suck and this film super does suck). My point is, please stop using Rotten Tomatoes wrong. Once you get past the “yes, movie is good” stage those ratings are useless and harmful to film discussion.

Now that I have gotten that off my chest, let’s just be happy once again that Three Billboards didn’t win.

The Shape of Water may be the most ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ winner in quite some time

Seriously, The Shape of Water made it impossible to really commit to it throughout the Oscar season. It won just enough to be a contender, but not enough to be sure it would win. The film constantly found itself compared to Pan’s Labyrinth, which made it look like an inferior movie to many people (not all people, but a lot). It just never really resonated like some of the other films this year did, but it was always there, and no one really had any reason to dislike it. There is a good chance ten years from now we will look back at this and wonder how a movie about a love story between a woman and a fish man beat Get Out or Lady Bird (though there is also a good chance that once Peele and Gerwig make even better movies we won’t notice this as much). This race got so confusing I wonder if a lot of people simply found no reason not to pick The Shape of Water and so that is how it won. Still, that is unfair to this film, which once again is a love story between a woman and a fish man. Fantasy has always been a mistreated genre by the Oscars, with only really The Lord of the Rings finding success after three movies of pure excellence forced the Academy’s hand. Del Toro has long been a proponent of how fantasy can be used as a lens to tell any kind of story of any amount of importance, and this film is a good example of that. Sure, it was also a love letter to Hollywood, which allowed a lot of viewers to look past the weirder parts, but we really should be celebrating what a weird choice this film is as a Best Picture winner. It’s part of a continued growth for these awards, and not a step back like many probably feel after Moonlight‘s win.

Guillermo del Toro is the Best

There is not much more I can add to this that is different from what I have already said, but it is really hard not to like this guy. He is so earnest, and even those he beat on Oscar Sunday couldn’t be all that angry about it, because everyone loves this dude. Still, the fact that this man has devoted himself to using genres like fantasy and horror as lenses to tell important stories (or just stories about giant robots punching each other, which is fine too) is something that can’t be understated. (Pacific Rim is too about important themes, I will fight you – Ed) Del Toro’s love for movies and the magic they can have is infectious, and while it is certainly true his filmmaking at times can be, well, out of fucking control, no one can argue with his passion and desire to not allow genre stigmas to stop him from doing the stories he wants to do. Seriously, once again, this dude won multiple Oscars for making a film about a woman falling in love with a fish man. That is bonkers.

Can we seriously end these damn film montages?

This year’s Oscars telecast was rather long, going almost four hours. I am on record saying that that isn’t nearly as bad as most people think it is, because this event happens once a year and the people that are going to watch it are going to continue to watch it, and all of the decreasing viewership comes from things like it just being easier to react to the awards on Twitter than to actually watch them, or, you know, the fact that everything on television is losing ratings now, even live sporting events. Still, the reason I don’t mind these longer run times is that this is a special night for the winners, and they should be allowed (to a reasonable degree) to give whatever kind of speech they damn well want, regardless of how “important” their win is compared to others’. If the choice is twenty less minutes, but a constant stream of the orchestra playing off a speaker versus everyone getting to say their piece (as long as they don’t pull a Roberto Benigni), I will go with the latter every time. Hell, maybe the Best Picture winner could get to give a real speech then, instead of feeling rushed because everyone backstage is panicking about ending things as quickly as possible.

With that said, please end the god damn montages. They are a complete waste of time and exactly the kind self-congratulations that everyone yells at Hollywood about. What’s worse is, they are always so god damn random, and never have a real point. Would it be okay to have some montages every couple of years for specific reasons? Maybe, but right now the best thing for everyone is to get rid of all of them, because even if it doesn’t save all that much time, at least it will make the broadcast feel like it is moving at a faster clip.

Can the rest of the Oscars become as compelling as the Best Picture race now is?

The Best Picture race finally has some question marks to it that hopefully mean it will continue to be very unclear on Oscar night who is going to win, but most of the other major categories could use the same kind of pick me up. The other major awards had been over for weeks before Oscar night, and just kind of forced us to go along as we watched the same people win again and again. Best Original Screenplay ended up being a chaotic category, but Best Adapted Screenplay had been a giant James Ivory coronation for weeks. A consensus isn’t a bad thing, and this was a rather unique year considering how dominant all of the acting winners ended up being, but man it would have been nice to actually be wondering who was going to win in many of these categories come Oscar night (well, as a fan–as a prognosticator I was fine with this, as it brought me much less stress). Part of this is simply that it would be nice to inject as much unpredictability into the Oscars as possible, but the other reason is, honestly, it should feel special when everyone agrees on something, not the norm. Acting performances that get unanimous support should be truly transcendent performances, and as much as I liked all of the performances this year, none of them were definitively better than the others in the category to the degree that would justify such dominance (maybe McDormand, but even that is doubtful). So let’s hope the Academy will get more and more cavalier with their picks so the categories that are easy to pick become the exceptions rather than the norm.

Netflix is On the Board

I am not going to get into this too much, as the overall importance of this may become muted if the Academy tries to change its rules to fuck over Netflix, which it totally could; but Netflix picked up an Oscar this year with its Documentary win for Icarus. This always made sense as the place for Netflix’s first win, as this is the area Netflix has really helped the industry, considering how ignored the documentary genre is by most people. Whether or not Netflix is good for the rest of the industry, it is certainly good for documentaries, so good for them for getting this Oscar. It remains to be seen if the streaming giant can become a true force come awards time, or even simply do as well as Amazon did with Manchester by the Sea last year, but if nothing else, this win did get the company on the scoreboard, and could be just the beginning of things to come.

Roger Motherfucking Deakins

After 14 attempts, Deakins finally ended the ridiculousness that was the second greatest living cinematographer (Emmanuel Lubezki still exists) not having an Oscar. It was a relatively small embarrassment for the Academy (I mean, it is hard to be too outraged by this compared to, you know, the sexism and racism in the industry), but still notable. Now that Deakins has won an Oscar, he can finally leave the list of people with an absurd number of nominations and no wins that is now primarily occupied by Thomas Newman and Greg P. Russell. Seeing him win was a welcome sight, because now we are freed from the constant need to wonder how anyone new can win an Oscar in this category when Deakins has never won at all. Also, you know, I can fully celebrate next year when Rachel Morrison potentially returns and wins this category for Black Panther.

That’s it for this year’s Oscar season. It has been a long and confusing season that offered lessons that probably no one will learn properly. Nothing as crazy as last year happened, but at least the Best Picture race has shown that it is going to continue to be a real cipher going forward. With the end of this year’s coverage, I am going to now retreat into the inner sanctum of the Kraken just long enough to realize it is time for me to start worrying about next year’s Oscars and weep.

-David