If the Academy Awards are the premier yardstick by which we measure cinematic achievement then why should any one type of movie be more successful than any other? Over the next few paragraphs I intend to try to define what a typical "Oscar movie" is believed to be, and discuss whether we should be widening our horizons on what films should be nominated in order to make the Academy Awards actually mean something more than our current expectations. Specifically I'm going to look at this year's 'interloper' movie Black Panther as well as its fellow Best Picture nominee (and current favourite to win), Green Book, in order to see which film has more significance as a work of cinema regardless of its hopes of taking home the prize.
The phrase "Oscar Bait" has been in use ever since it first appeared in a 1948 issue of The New Republic in a fairly negative review of John Ford's western Fort Apache. However, it only became a common refrain after film studios began purposefully trying to win awards as part of their marketing strategy. This really kicked off in 1978 when Universal Pictures were struggling to decide how best to sell Michael Cimino's lengthy and depressing Vietnam war movie, The Deer Hunter. Producer Allan Carr came up with a strategy where the film was released in only two screens, one in New York and one in Los Angeles (the minimum required for Oscar eligibility), and only screened to critics and Academy members. Once the film received nine nominations (and eventually won five of them, including Best Picture) it was given its wide release, capitalising on the reputation of its awards success to become an unexpected hit. Soon after that, independent film studios were timing the release of their most 'award friendly' releases to best encourage attention from the Academy. By the 1990s most major studios had their own independent arms which seemed to be acting mainly as Oscar factories. (The most successful of these was Miramax, then later The Weinstein Company, both ran by the now-disgraced media mogul Harvey Weinstein and his brother Bob.) Typically "Oscar movies" would be sweeping tales of tragedy and ambition often set against a backdrop of a significant moment in history, usually featuring a character struggling with their race, religion, sexuality or disability and, where possible, featuring Hollywood itself or similar artistic types (such as musicians) with which Academy members can relate. "Genre movies" should be avoided. Regardless of quality and acclaim, the Academy has rarely rewarded horror, science fiction, action movies or out and out comedies. Biographies, or films which touch on real events and people, also tend to fare better. (Since 2003, more than two thirds of the winners of the Best Actor award were playing real people.) It wasn't long before studios were trying to reverse engineer the perfect Oscar success by simply ticking off all of the boxes expected from a typical Best Picture winner. The fact that a film like Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which was mostly ignored or derided by critics and audiences (it has barely scraped an embarrassing 46% score on Rotten Tomatoes), could still notch up a Best Picture nomination by shamelessly exploiting subject matter such as the horror of the World Trade Centre attack on 9/11 and the lead character's typically Hollywood version of autism suggested that this tactic, unfortunately, works.
There is hope however. In 2008 Christopher Nolan released the superhero sequel movie The Dark Knight. At the time, this felt like a late appearance to the superhero craze which had begun with Bryan Singer's X Men in 2000, although the genre was only just beginning its takeover of the summer blockbuster season. (Iron Man, the first film of the unstoppable Marvel Cinematic Universe, was released that same year.) This was no simple silly action movie though. The Dark Knight was an unprecedented critical and commercial hit which garnered more comparisons to Michael Mann's beloved crime epic Heat than it did to, say, the cartoonish Batman sequels of Joel Schumacher. Nolan became a household name with an obsessive following among young film fans and the villainous performance by the late Heath Ledger was lauded as the greatest ever in the genre. (It eventually scooped a posthumous Best Supporting Actor win at the following Oscars.) Surely this would be the turning point where the Academy finally takes notice of a film outside the usual 'Oscar bait' bubble? Sadly not. The Dark Knight didn't score a nomination for Best Picture, being pushed out of the race by films as blandly forgettable as Frost/Nixon and The Reader. (Ironically, The Reader was the film which finally gained Kate Winslet a Best Actress win after years of brilliant overlooked performances. Four years earlier, Winslet had parodied herself, in an episode of the sitcom Extras, as an Oscar hungry actress, desperate to star in a film about the Holocaust or to "play a mental" [sic] simply to guarantee awards. In The Reader she played an illiterate former Nazi.)
The fallout of this decision was instant and effective. Complaints that the Academy were out of touch with the filmgoing audience were taken seriously (not least because Pixar's brilliant Wall-E, another massive success with critics and audiences, was similarly snubbed) and it was decided, that from that year onwards, the Best Picture nominees would be increased from five to ten nominees. This changed the game considerably. Over the next two years, a diverse mix of films scored nominations from Christopher Nolan's sci-fi action thriller Inception, Darren Aronofsky's psychological horror, Black Swan, Quentin Tarantino's controversial WWII pastiche, Inglourious Basterds and Pixar's two family friendly classics: Up and Toy Story 3. (Although the big prizes ended up going to the dour war tragedy, The Hurt Locker and the blandly inspirational, historical 'overcoming disability' drama, The King's Speech.) For the following year it was decided that the Academy wouldn't have to pick ten films if less than that were 'worthy' of nomination and could select anywhere between five and ten depending on perceived 'quality.' Although this sounded fair in concept, it merely resulted in a return to the predictable. 2011 saw the release of a wide variety of great films including Drive, Take Shelter, Another Earth, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, A Separation, Contagion, Hanna, Melancholia, Shame, Bridesmaids, Tyrannosaur, Warrior, The Muppets, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and We Need To Talk About Kevin. None of them garnered a nomination despite only nine of the ten available slots being filled (one of them being the much hated Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close).
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| The much maligned nominee Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close |
But it wasn't just in genre that the Oscars were lacking in diversity. Being made up mainly from veterans of previous eras of filmmaking, the Academy's membership was overwhelmingly white, male, straight and, well, old, and this was clearly being reflected in their choices of nominees. In January 2015, in reaction to lack of recognition given to actors and filmmakers of colour, a tweet by April Reign coining the phrase #OscarsSoWhite instantly went viral. Sensing that the tide was changing, then Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs vowed to try to update the Oscars to catch up with the times. It was decided that Academy members who had not been active in the filmmaking community for over ten years would now be ineligible to vote and there would be a drive to bring in younger members with less conservative views on the type of films deserving rewarded. On top of this, she set a target to double the number of women and people of colour within the Academy's voting block. The change has been incremental but noticeable for both the people and the types of films being recognised. Last year we saw the top award go to the offbeat genre mashup, The Shape of Water, directed by Mexican monster movie master Guillermo Del Toro. In addition, a few nominations went the way of the brilliant Get Out (which used horror tropes to satirise racial politics) and coming of age comedy-drama Lady Bird (including Greta Gerwig scoring the fifth ever Best Directing nod given to a female director.) Even in the previous year, the film earning the most nominations was the explosive action movie lunacy of Mad Max: Fury Road, an absolutely deserving piece of masterful filmmaking but which would have seemed unthinkable to garner awards just a few years earlier.
Yet, when Black Panther earned itself a Best Picture nomination, many reacted with scorn rather than encouragement. Even stranger, much of this disdain came from the exact same "film geek" communities which were championing The Dark Knight just ten years previously (or, more recently, James Mangold's reflective superhero western Logan). Was there a distinct difference in quality between this film and the other nominees? Or was this simply a reactionary sneer from white critics unable to accept that a film made and starring a predominantly black cast and crew could succeed at something where decades of white filmmakers had failed?
So to judge Black Panther fairly, let's break it down to its individual strengths, starting with its various nominations. First of all, it has two nominations in the Sound categories. This should not be a surprise as this was supplied by the celebrated Skywalker Sound who have been doing exceptional work in this department since the legendary sound technician Ben Burtt first decided what a lightsaber should sound like (and created the voice of R2D2) back in 1977. Black Panther offered them a particular challenge as they not only had to create the resonating sonic effects of the title character's kinetic energy suit and the other vibranium based weaponry but also the ambient atmospheres of the temple gardens and the ethereal ancestral plane. It should be no surprise that they gained themselves a nomination for their complex and layered work, not least as one of the named nominees is none other than Benjamin Burtt Jr who has been honing his father's craft at the highest level since he was in high school.
Following Sound, naturally comes Music and the score for the film by Ryan Coogler's regular collaborator Ludwig Göransson. Not satisfied with a simple generic superhero anthem, Göransson aimed to encapsulate the world of Wakanda through music while giving distinctive leitmotifs to each of the film's lead characters. Göransson spent time researching at the International Library of African Music and experimented with various ethnic instruments and vocal stylings. He even spent a month in Senegal to gain personal experience of the world he wanted to create aurally and went on tour with world music legend Baaba Maal, to gain insight into his craft and philosophy. He became fascinated with a West African instrument called a "talking drum" which could change pitch to be used to communicate like a voice. Instead of a standard superhero fanfare, this drum was used to create a distinct rhythm to represent the films hero, T'Challa, which would follow him throughout the film. In contrast with these various styles of traditional African instrumentation, the villainous character of Killmonger was represented with modern hip-hop beats which reflect both his outsider status in the film as well as his background living in a violent inner city in America. This musical cue successfully added to both this threat and the tragedy at the heart of his character. Somehow despite all of these intricate elements, the score still absolutely works in supporting a piece of blockbuster superhero action and doesn't sound out of place amongst the 17 Marvel superhero films preceding it. (If you want to hear examples, this Genius video covers some of the background of one of these tracks here.) On top of the score, the film hired acclaimed rapper Kendrick Lamar to write and produce some original songs for the film. Lamar, a winner of thirteen Grammy awards and whose 2018 album Damn was the first non-classical or jazz album ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for music, instead produced an entire album of material inspired by the films themes and score and featuring some of the biggest names in hip hop. The lead single from this album "All The Stars" by Kendrick Lamar and SZA gained Black Panther another nomination for Best Original Song.
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| Ludwig Göransson during recording sessions for Black Panther |
Next we have the Costumes and Production Design. Both of these design elements had unique challenges as they had to visually create the world of an entirely fictional country with unheard of futuristic technology. Production designer Hannah Beachler sat down with director Ryan Coogler and drew out where they pictured Wakanda existing in the world of the Marvel Universe and decided what real life countries it would share borders with. Studying the landscapes and structures of these countries they began to put together an image of what this land may look like. However the backstory of Wakanda rests on it being the only African country not to ever be colonised so they not only had to imagine a modern country from that region but one that was entirely free from any European influence. Even more challenging, they had to extend this thought process into the more science fiction elements of the story which, on one hand, had to look alien in their futurism but also had to feel an organic part of the landscape they had created. Hannah Beachler once estimated that between herself and Coogler they were working from roughly 10,000 reference photos when designing the sets for this world. The costumes designed by Ruth E. Carter were even more complex in nature. Each garment worn by the Wakandan characters had to suggest a combination of both hundreds of years of tradition as well as cutting edge technology while also clearly defining the differences between each of the characters and their separate tribal backgrounds. Influences were taken from tribes from all over the continent to represent the pan-African culture of Wakanda and colours were used to delineate the different tribes and factions within the nation. (i.e. Nakia, as a member of the River Tribe, always prominently wears green while W'Kabi, as a member of the Border Tribe, is always dressed in blue.) For a working example of this, Queen Ramonda's 'crown' has been designed to instantly mark out her royal status but is also based on a traditional Zulu flared hat. However, every section of it is geometrically perfect (the only way this was possible was by mapping and 3D printing the design) in order to display the forward thinking technological power of her nation. Even the shields used by the Border Tribe, while completely fanciful sci-fi technology had a look that was based upon the Basotho blankets worn by the Lesotho people of South Africa and W'Kabi's carries a Ghanaian adrinka symbol on his. (For more details of the intricacies of these costumes and more, this interview with Ruth E. Carter in Syfy Wire is a brilliant primer on some of these designs.)
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| A sample of the unique costume designs by Ruth E Carter for Black Panther |
So we've confirmed that each of Black Panther's technical nominations are all likely deserved. These mean that the film has scored a total of 7 nominations (two more than current favourite Green Book.) However, it does not have a nomination in any acting category, or in directing, which generally are expected for Best Picture winners. How do these elements stack up? Firstly we need to look at director Ryan Coogler, one of the most interesting young voices to appear in Hollywood of late. His debut feature, Fruitvale Station, was a small character drama based around the final hours and eventual murder of Oscar Grant at the hands of the Oakland Police. It roared onto the scene, winning both the Audience Award and Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and ranked high among many critics lists that year. Beyond that, it instantly established Coogler as an emerging talent and made a household name of its lead actor, Michael B Jordan, who many expected to garner an Oscar nomination from the film. With such critical acclaim for his debut, Coogler surprised everyone by moving away from low budget social realism to instead take the helm of the seventh sequel in the Rocky series, a run of films whose popularity and critical respect has wavered and waned considerably since it began 40 years ago. It was therefore even more surprising when his movie, Creed, was a genuinely powerful heartfelt drama about privilege, toxic masculinity, repressed feelings of abandonment and the changing face of inner city Philadelphia that still succeeded in being a faithful follow-up to the entire previous Rocky series (it's main plotline was even kicked into motion by events of the silly, montage-heavy none-more-80s Rocky IV). It was a tremendous success, delighting long term Rocky fans, bringing in a whole new young audience while offering Sylvester Stallone his best role since 1997's Cop Land (and scoring the ageing actor a surprising, but well deserved, Oscar nomination.) This ability to serve two masters, pleasing the art house crowd by packing his films with provocative themes and honest character work while playing to the masses with bold, brash entertainment, would serve him well on Black Panther which maintains this balance on an even more extreme level. Much like with Michael B Jordan's title character in Creed, both the protagonist and lead villain of Black Panther are driven by a deep sense of grief and a desire to live up to their father's memory which they bury within themselves behind a facade of grandstanding machismo. The action scenes in the film feature some of the most interesting and dynamic in the whole Marvel film series (especially an early casino based set piece featuring long tracking shots of mayhem over two floors that would put most Bond movies to shame) but it's when the film slows down to give the character's time to open up that it really shines, pushing the film's thematic heft and stacked cast to the forefront.
That cast is a who's who of some of the greatest black actors working in Hollywood right now. This includes the aforementioned Michael B Jordan, Oscar winners Lupita Nyong'o and Forrest Whittaker, Oscar nominees Daniel Kaluuya and Angela Bassett, the much celebrated Chadwick Boseman, Danai Gurira and Sterling K Brown and it also features a breakthrough role for Letitia Wright who went on to win this years Rising Star BAFTA award for her work. (The cast also featured the beloved Hobbit stars Martin Freeman and Andy Serkis, often jokingly referred to as the film's "Tolkien white guys.") The cast went on to win the Best Motion Picture cast at the Screen Actors Guild of America awards, their highest honour.
It shouldn't be a surprise though. The cast are given plenty to work with. Portraying a fictional, uncolonised and technologically advanced African country opens up various possible political and philosophical questions to explore and Black Panther touches on more of them than should ever be possible in this kind of over the top action movie. When buying tickets to a Marvel superhero film you do not expect to see a serious discussion on the responsibilities that successful countries have to use their wealth to support their vulnerable neighbours, the reparations due to the developing world from their former colonisers, questions of whether revolutionary violence is an acceptable reaction to state oppression and the acceptance (or lack of) felt by African Americans in both their place of birth and their ancestral homeland. You certainly do not expect to see such complex and compelling themes tackled in the kind of film which also features invisible forcefields and rhinoceroses being used as weapons! Somehow, none of this feels out of place and everything organically clicks together in a way that seems almost effortless. There are more complex discussions of racism, nationalism and personal and political responsibility in this daft adventure movie than most overlong prestige dramas manage in their whole runtimes.
The symbol of Wakanda has extended even beyond the movie though. This power fantasy of afrofuturism offers to many oppressed groups the world over an alternative world free from the grip of regressive white supremacy (an attractive prospect in the troubled era of Trump and Brexit.) The cultural impact this film has had only months after its release cannot be overstated. African American activists have already used screenings of the film as the centre point of voter registration drives, signing up whole cinema screens at a time to get more engaged with their political landscape. Schools in America have already begun adding viewings of the film to their curriculum as a way of sparking deeper conversations about African culture and history and black identity in the western world. Charity campaigns have appeared online to take kids from low income inner city schools to free screenings of the film as a way to inspire them and, mirroring a plot point from the movie's finale, Disney have pledged $1million of the films profits to an outreach program promoting STEM eduction for underprivileged youths. It's almost impossible to quantify the feelings that this film has inspired in black audiences but even a cursory glance at the responses to the twitter hashtag #WhatBlackPantherMeansToMe is a startling reminder of the sheer power that cinema has to open our minds and our hearts to viewpoints which have been mostly silenced in the past. (Celebrated film critic Roger Ebert knew what he was talking about when he described film as "a machine that generates empathy.")
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| Chadwick Boseman and Lupita Nyong'o in Black Panther |
However, it's not just black audiences who have found the world of Wakanda inspiring. Across the 17 previous films which make up the Marvel Cinematic Universe, very few of them feature complex female characters and rarely have major female protagonists outside of the male title character's love interest. While Lupita Nyong'o's Nakia fulfils the expected romantic spark with Chadwick Boseman's T'Challa, she is also a capable fighter with her own separate goals and ambitions and she is a strongly opinionated political figure who often challenges T'Challa's (and the audience's) viewpoints. Beyond her we have Danai Gurira's Okoye, a fiercely loyal and patriotic bodyguard, Angela Bassett as Queen Ramonda, a walking symbol of the royal lineage that T'Challa must live up to, and Letitia Wright as Shuri, T'Challa's sarcastic, tech-savvy sister. Each of these women is shown as having power and agency in both the utopia of Wakanda and in the script itself to a degree that is sadly uncommon in mainstream action cinema.
Then, of course, we have to consider the financial success of the movie. Black Panther is now the highest grossing movie solo superhero movie ever released (the only films in the genre to make more are the previous two Avengers movies which crossover multiple already successful characters and it even outsold both of them in the American market). Even discounting genre considerations, the film is now the ninth biggest selling movie of all time, outselling every Harry Potter movie, every Steven Spielberg blockbuster, every Disney animation (yes, even Frozen!) and every single Star Wars movie barring 2015's Star Wars: The Force Awakens. It remained in the top ten in the USA for a staggering 13 weeks after its release. It even made over $100m dollars in its opening weeks in China, a market notoriously ambivalent to films featuring black protagonists. The critical acclaim was just as impressive, scoring a 97% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes (the highest score ever achieved by a superhero movie) and an average A+ grade from CinemaScore.
However, even if we can call out the merits of Black Panther as a movie, it's worthiness for a Best Picture nomination can only be quantified by comparison to its competition. Even if Black Panther is generally seen as a great film, it may still not be worth consideration if the rival movies are of an exceptional standard. Therefore, let's have a look at another nominee for comparison. What better film to consider than Green Book, another film which tackles racial politics and which has become favourite to lift the little golden man on Sunday evening after winning the top prize at the Producer's Guild of America awards (in the last 29 years, the PGA winner has gone on to take the Best Picture Oscar no less than 20 times.)
First, some background.
The Negro Motorist's Green Book was first published in 1936 by New York City mailman Victor Hugo Green. The book acted as a guide for African American drivers trying to travel during the Jim Crow era. It offered readers tips on where to find lodging, restaurants, gas stations and other services where black customers could safely travel to without facing the discrimination that was rife at the time of publication. It has become a major piece of African American history and culture.
'Doctor' Don Shirley was a groundbreaking classical and jazz pianist. He began playing at the age of two and was already performing concertos with the Boston Pops and the London Philharmonic Orchestra by the time he was a teenager. During the 1960's Shirley specifically chose to put himself at risk by performing tour dates in the American deep south in order to try to open minds and oppose prejudice, having to use Green's guide to protect himself during this difficult but noble mission.
The movie Green Book isn't about Victor Hugo Green and his guide. It isn't really even about Doctor Shirley. It's about Tony Vallelonga.
Tony 'Lip' Vallelonga was an Italian American nightclub bouncer and occasional driver who once acted as Don Shirley's chauffeur during one of his tours. He later became an actor making many friends within Hollywood circles. He was grotesquely racist as a young man (even in the movie Green Book, which treats him reverently, he is seem binning his own glasses which he sees as being 'contaminated' after being drunk from by black workmen) even if his views softened after working for Dr Shirley. The movie Green Book was a passion project for its co-writer, Nick Vallelonga, the real-life son of Tony Lip. It's hard not to see the film as the younger Vallelonga's attempt to portray his own father in a better light, if only by arguing that he had a black friend once. However if Nick Vallelonga genuinely wanted to make a bold statement about the evils of racism, his intent is somewhat muddied by recent revelations that he supports Donald Trump and even shared Islamophobic conspiracy theories online. (He has since deleted his entire Twitter account since this came to light.)
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| Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen in Green Book |
Green Book stumbles into one of the most patronisingly but extremely common tropes, one that's found especially in Oscar bait movies: that of the White Saviour. In these films, the theme of racism is tackled but in a way that is less interested in challenging the views and preconceptions of the audience than it is in assuaging any guilty feeling they may feel for the injustices of the past. In a typical 'White saviour' narrative, black characters are stripped of their own agency and given roles as nothing more than powerless victims waiting for a strong white man to come along and rescue them from the cruelty of others. These films allow white audiences to acknowledge horrors, which are often represented via the most cartoonishly villainous of racists, but also separate themselves from them as the characters they most relate to are always the 'good white people' who were always there to lend a hand when required. Racism is always displayed as single acts of open, often violent, hatred which are seen as representative of a certain time or place separate from the here and now and ongoing issues of institutional racism are rarely acknowledged. This trope has become so widespread that it is now inspiring parody (such as in this brilliant sketch from Late Night with Seth Myers.) In Green Book, the brilliance and bravery of Don Shirley is only seen in passing; he is a supporting role in his own story. In contrast, the main thrust of the plot and most examined character arc is that of Tony Lip's journey from being an openly hateful racist to a man who once managed to invite a black acquaintance to his house for dinner without humiliating him. (For comparison, some critics joked that if Black Panther wanted to be taken seriously as an Oscar contender they should've made the complex, superpowered King of Wakanda a side role and given the lead instead to Martin Freeman's constantly befuddled CIA operative.)
This type of simplistic story may still be well meaning but it's not really adding anything at all to our current cultural conversation. There is very little here which wasn't already touched on by films like Driving Miss Daisy, 30 years ago (and even then film critics found it cowardly that that film won Best Picture in a year when Spike Lee's incendiary Do The Right Thing failed to even garner a nomination.) Generally the phrase "virtue signalling" is almost always nothing more than a red flag that the person using the term is the type of misanthrope who cannot grasp the idea of human decency without imagining that there must be some sort of ulterior motive, but it is actually relevant when describing typical Oscar movies. Academy voters seem to love draping themselves in the symbols of progressiveness and open mindedness by always considering films which touch upon potentially controversial themes. However they rarely like to actually be challenged in their viewpoints and prefer movies which allow them to feel that they are involved in discussing 'big important subjects' while also soothing them with the confirmation that all the evils of the world are being committed (or supported) by other people in different places and times and that they never have to consider changing their own behaviour to help. (Consider, for example, how often they nominate films about people 'overcoming' their disabilities while doing very little to actually make the film industry a more accessible employer to disabled talents.)
This approach would maybe be forgivable, if this was an accurate representation of events or was the way that Don Shirley wanted to be represented on film. Unfortunately, according to his surviving family members (in statements taking from this interview with Shadow and Act), it is not. Don's youngest brother, Dr Maurice Shirley, now 82, and his nephew Edwin Shirley III were both greatly offended by his representation. Maurice went as far as to describe the film as "a symphony of lies." Most upsetting for them was the way that Don was shown as being estranged from his family and the black community in general. In Green Book, Shirley claims to have not spoken to his family in years or know their current whereabouts and he then has to be introduced to Blues and Soul music, the workings of African American society and, most uncomfortably, even fried chicken by his helpful white driver. “At that point he had three living brothers with whom he was always in contact,” said Maurice "One of the things Donald used to remind me in his later years was he literally raised me...there wasn’t a month where I didn’t have a phone call conversation with Donald.” Edwin too remembered his uncle stopping in the middle of a tour and dropping everything to be there for his family after the tragic death of his brother. Later he remembers being so excited when 'Uncle Donald' invited him on the road for a 9 stop tour across America with him.
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| The real Dr Donald Shirley at his piano |
Far from being divorced from his culture, Donald was described by Edwin as "totally devoted to the uplifting of African American people." He had even befriended Martin Luther King Jr and was present at the march on Selma where he performed for the protesters. The idea that Dr Shirley was ignorant of more stereotypically 'black' forms of music is even more laughable considering how active he was as a touring musician, even without considering his close friendships with various other musicians including Nina Simone and Duke Ellington. Also far from needing to be rescued by Tony, Edwin remembered having to break up a fight between his uncle and a hotel clerk who had refused him a room before the terrified clerk could call the police on him.
What did the Shirley family think of the supposed close friendship Don had with Tony Lip? "He fired Tony!" laughed Maurice when asked of his brother's relationship with the driver. "It was an employer-employee relationship," he confirmed, stating that he had never once heard his brother refer to the man as a friend and that he finally had to let him go in anger at his constant disrespect. According to Maurice, Tony would refuse to open the door, carry bags and would constantly remove his chauffeur's cap despite this all being part of his contract as a driver.
So if Green Book is a totally fictional reworking of a life created for dubious moral reasons then how has it managed to get itself taken seriously as a Best Picture contender. Well we have to look back at our definitions of Oscar bait. Does it set itself in a time of horrific oppression? Check. Does it feature a character struggling against racial stereotypes? Check. Does it choose to focus the narrative on a "white saviour" character on the edges of the actual story? Check. Does it feature a character having issues with their sexuality or having problems with alcohol or substance abuse? Check. (Even if both of those plot elements feel tacked on entirely to tick another box and are never explored again) Does it feature a musician and/or a (future) actor in its lead roles? Check. Does it all build to a happy, feel good ending that leaves the audience with the feeling that all is right in the world again and they need not worry about racism ever again. Check and mate. If the film had somehow subtly implied that Tony's antisocial attitude was caused by some sort of learning disability and had one of Don Shirley's bandmates reflect wistfully about the Holocaust then we may have had a full house on Oscar Bait Bingo.
Ultimately as the Academy sit down to vote on Best Picture we have to ask ourselves which of these films really deserves to be rewarded for it's efforts? Which film will we look back on as one of the most vital cinematic achievements of 2018? Should it be a film that focuses its entire runtime on discussing racism but offers nothing but a whitewashed version of a terrible past in order to make white audiences feel comfortable in their own apathy about the problems facing us today. Or instead, should we honour a startlingly bold, exciting and fun action adventure which also dares to show black audiences a fantasy of a better world in order to inspire them to stand up and fight for what they are owed.
Is Black Panther the best film of the year? That's a purely subjective question and we will each have our own favourites. (This author, personally, is shocked by the lack of attention being given to Damien Chazelle's thrilling First Man; Barry Jenkins lyrical If Beale Street Could Talk and Lynne Ramsey's stunningly visceral You Were Never Really Here.) However it has clearly earned its place to be considered and should definitely be taken seriously as part of the conversation. The fact that it looks out of place amongst films like Green Book is less a comment on the film itself than on the narrow vision we have of what constitutes an Oscar movie. When future generations look to our Academy Award winners to try to get an understanding of our time, I would much rather they be drawn towards films like Black Panther than to yet another film like Green Book. We have to ask ourselves a question that was sadly never asked to the brilliant Dr Shirley: how would you like to be remembered?
This essay was written by The Mogul in preparation for the 2019 Academy Awards
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