The Night Roma Lost Best Picture
No host this year—the Kevin Hart situation had collapsed in the weeks before, and the Academy ran out of runway to find someone else, so they just didn’t. The ceremony worked fine without one. Better, most people agreed. There’s something clarifying about stripping out the unifying personality and letting the films and the politics stand there without mediation. Or in this case, letting the argument happen directly.
Green Book won Best Picture. Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma—formally precise, shot in black and white on 65mm, deeply personal, the kind of film that arrives once a decade—won Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best International Film, and then did not win the category that gets the headline. I’m not sure the Academy was wrong in a purely procedural sense. I’m sure they were wrong in every other sense. Green Book is a competent, warmly lit film about race in America told from the perspective of the white man in the story. Giving it Best Picture in 2019 is a choice that says something about the Academy, and the Academy didn’t seem to notice it was saying it.
Rami Malek won Best Actor for Bohemian Rhapsody—a strange, sanitized biopic of a genuinely strange man, straightened and simplified in ways that would have baffled Freddie Mercury. Malek is committed in ways the film doesn’t deserve, and the Academy rewards commitment. Olivia Colman winning Best Actress for The Favourite is correct in every sense; her Queen Anne is one of the decade’s great comic performances, tragic underneath all the comedy, wearing its grief so lightly you almost miss it. Regina King for If Beale Street Could Talk, also right. Mahershala Ali for Green Book is that film’s one genuinely earned prize—he does more with restraint than most actors do with a monologue.
Black Panther took three: Production Design, Costume Design, and Score. Ludwig Göransson’s score deserved it—he found a way to wed West African rhythm and instrumentation with orchestral blockbuster music without making either feel compromised, and that is harder than it looks. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse won Best Animated Feature, which was the right call made obvious. That film does things with frame rate and visual language that animation hadn’t done before; comparing it to anything else in the category felt almost unfair. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s German entry Never Look Away—his first film since The Lives of Others—lost International Film to Roma, which is the correct result. Mamoru Hosoda’s Mirai lost Animated Feature to Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, also correct.
Lady Gaga won Best Original Song for Shallow from A Star Is Born. It’s a good song. The performance at the ceremony with Bradley Cooper—all that charged proximity and held silence—was the most discussed two minutes of the evening, and probably the most honest. You know it’s constructed. You watch it anyway. That’s a reasonable summary of the whole enterprise: a constructed spectacle that you watch anyway, and then spend a week arguing about whether it got things right. This year, mostly in the categories that don’t generate the headline, it did. In the one that does, it gave the award to Green Book, and everyone agreed to move on.