It’s simple: Just don’t watch the movies.
Oscar night, 2006. I still feel foolish about it. The award for Best Picture was widely assumed to be a two-horse race between Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee’s devastating neo-Western about a pair of gay cowboys and their doomed love affair, and Crash, a tapestry of intersecting stories about race and reconciliation in modern-day Los Angeles. Brokeback Mountain had swept the critics awards and was the presumptive favorite, right up until Jack Nicholson opened the envelope onstage and announced the winner like he was spoiling a plot twist: Crash.
The audience was shocked. I was shocked. No one seemed more shocked, in fact, than the cast and crew of Crash. How did we all get this wrong? How had I not seen this coming? In hindsight, the answer was simple: because I’d actually seen the movies. Silly me—I’d let myself get distracted by the fact that Brokeback Mountain was an instant classic, whereas Crash was smug, tone-deaf, and sanctimonious.
Awful films have been winning the Oscars’ top prize since the Oscars were invented. Oppenheimer may well be the “best” movie of 2023—it’s certainly the most critically admired—but if it wins Best Picture this Sunday at the Academy Awards, that won’t be why. Only one rule can be used to spot the winner every time: The movie that takes Best Picture is the movie that makes Hollywood feel the best about itself.
If you think of each nominee not in terms of quality but as an allegory for Hollywood and what makes it so wonderful, you don’t even need to see the movies to check the right box on your Oscar ballot. In fact, you’re better off not seeing them. Sometimes, as in the case of Crash, the key ingredient is right there in the plot summary: Crash told an Academy of largely older, white, affluent voters that, yes, there was a lot of racism in L.A. (a.k.a. “America”), but they (a.k.a. Academy voters) were doing their best, and Crash was evidence that they were part of the solution, not the problem.
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Now, Brokeback Mountain may seem to tell a similar story about homophobia, and tell it far more artfully. But what became obvious to me only in retrospect was how many voters must have despised Brokeback Mountain for taking one of the proudest rock-ribbed masculine genres in Hollywood history—the Western—and gaying it up. The genre whose signature star, John Wayne, was an unabashed homophobe, and whose living avatar, Clint Eastwood—who’d won Best Picture the year before for Million Dollar Baby—reportedly didn’t even bother to see Brokeback Mountain. When she heard that, Diana Ossana, Brokeback’s co-writer, told Entertainment Weekly, “it was like someone punched me in the stomach … You would think being a filmmaker, you would want to see every film. It’s what you do. The fact that he hadn’t seen it, it was kind of like, ‘I see.’”
What makes Hollywood feel best about itself shifts from year to year. The Artist, the 2012 winner, a gently cloying black-and-white silent film about the silent-film era, was a love letter to old Hollywood. Ben Affleck’s Argo, which won the following year, was based on a true story about how Hollywood literally helped liberate American hostages in Iran. Beat that, Silver Linings Playbook.
The winner in 2018, Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, might seem like a strange outlier, especially if you saw it. It’s surely the only Best Picture winner in which a woman masturbates each morning to an egg timer. But take a step back, and you’ll see what Hollywood saw: a modern update on the classic monster movie, in the grand tradition of King Kong and Frankenstein, and a stirring tale about the heart wanting what it wants. It’s also del Toro’s eighth-best movie, depending on whether you’re a fan of Hellboy II, which I most definitely am.
That brings us to 2019 and Green Book, one of the most critically derided movies ever to win Best Picture, and arguably the worst since Crash, in 2006. It’s Driving Miss Daisy without the literary pedigree. (Note: Driving Miss Daisy, based on an acclaimed Alfred Uhry play, won Best Picture in 1990; it was released the same year as Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, a far more enduring—though far less reassuring—movie about race.) BlacKkKlansman was also nominated for Best Picture in 2019, along with Black Panther, but Black Panther was a superhero movie—its honor was just being nominated—and BlacKkKlansman, like Get Out and Django Unchained before it, failed the critical test of being comforting to white voters. Green Book passed with flying colors. It was popular in theaters and was led by a pair of Oscar-minted lead actors, giving it just enough patina of class to make voters forget that it was directed by one of the brothers who made Dumb and Dumber, which, by the way, is a much better movie.
This year, Oppenheimer is competing for Best Picture against its even more lucrative sibling, Barbie, which was the highest-grossing film of 2023 and nearly as well reviewed. But Barbie has no prayer of winning the top prize, and not because, as some have argued, it’s “unserious.” Everything Everywhere All at Once treated audiences to hot-dog fingers and an epic dildo fight, and voters still awarded it Best Picture last year. The real issue, I suspect, is that lots of Academy voters resented Barbie because they thought it was making fun of them.
Which it was! It’s a movie about a beautiful blond doll who dares to think for herself and who possesses far more wit and humanity than the male executives who just want her to smile until they get tired of playing with her. Stay in your box, Barbie! Stop pretending you want more out of life than a hot bod and a Mojo Dojo Casa House! Enough with these ideas! Are you trying to get us all fired?
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It dawned on me that a certain bloc of Hollywood had quietly loathed this assault on the patriarchy only after Barbie’s two principal creative forces—the star, Margot Robbie, who had been trying to get the movie made for years, and the director, Greta Gerwig—were snubbed when the nominations for Best Actress and Best Director were unveiled. (Gerwig did get nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, along with her husband and co-writer, the filmmaker Noah Baumbach.) Those choices seemed like a grudging acknowledgment of the movie’s commercial success alongside a rejection of the artists behind it. Hollywood respects hits, and the whole point of the decision a few years back to expand the Best Picture category beyond five nominees was to ensure that the Oscars feature at least a few films people have actually seen. But that doesn’t mean most voters actually liked Barbie. The lack of nominations for Gerwig and Robbie sure looks like a petty, passive-aggressive way of saying, “You can’t just insult us to our face.”
If this sounds cynical, it is, but so are the Oscars. The event is a television show, a popularity contest, a night of pageant-style self-congratulation, and a three-hour (if we’re lucky) advertisement for Hollywood grandeur and the singular magic of a night out at the theater.
If Oppenheimer wins, this will be why: It was a box-office smash that arrived at a moment when the movie-theater business, still reeling from the coronavirus pandemic, desperately needed a smash—a movie that had to be seen in theaters in order to be fully appreciated. And it was made by Christopher Nolan, who for years has been Hollywood’s loudest proponent of the big-screen experience. When his longtime studio partner, Warner Bros., sent his previous film to streaming after just a brief theatrical window, he was so enraged that he dumped the studio and auctioned off Oppenheimer to the highest bidder. Nolan bet the house on the resilience of movie theaters, and it paid off countless times over. And that—not all of the glowing reviews, not the weighty subject matter—is why Oppenheimer is going to win Best Picture.
Unless there’s another movie that we’ve overlooked. Another contender that reminds Oscar voters just how indispensable their work is, how much we need Hollywood to tell us who we really are. So just in case, I’m keeping my eye on The Zone of Interest, about a German family living blissfully next door to a Nazi death camp—an all-too-relevant film about hatred, complicity, and the banality of evil. Or at least that’s what I gather it’s about. I haven’t seen it yet.
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