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| Alfonso Cuarón, Nancy Garcia Garcia, Yalitza Aparicio, Marina de Tavira y Gabriela Rodríguez |
Oscars 2019 verdict: lovely surprises can't compensate for shock horrors
The Academy voters got it right with gongs for Olivia Colman and Alfonso Cuarón, but Bohemian Rhapsody and Green Book have been sorely overrated
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n the end, there was enough good news – or news that made a certain sort of sense – for this not to be simply another exasperating Academy Awards pageant of mysteriously over-promoted nonsense. Olivia Colman already had the title of queen of all our hearts, and, just when it looked as if Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite was going to go home with nothing at all, Colman added the Academy Award to her bulging silverware cabinet – and of course gave a speech of great charm and grace.
Her prize acceptance game this year has been off the chart: stylish, polished and with just enough pinch-me-I’m-dreaming astonishment to rival Helen Mirren’s triumphal awards season tour of 2007, when she was winning everything for her own queenly performance. Colman (Anne), Mirren (Elizabeth II), Dench (Elizabeth I) … Brits in crowns generally do it for the Academy.And there was justice in seeing Alfonso Cuarón picking up the best director, best cinematography and best foreign language Oscars for his magnificent artwork Roma. I have no problem with Spike Lee and his co-writers David Rabinowitz, Charlie Wachtel and Kevin Willmott picking up the award for best adapted screenplay for their fierce satire BlacKkKlansman. (Although I think I might have preferred to see Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty get it for Can You Ever Forgive Me?) The 2019 Oscar prize list was speckled with honourable wins.
But best picture for Green Book? (Best original screenplay, too, over The Favourite and Paul Schrader’s First Reformed.) The news of that win lands like a dead weight on Oscar night, increasing the inevitable disappointment and tristesse that always settles on any awards ceremony in its closing minutes, as the unacknowledged frustration of the losers’ 80% silent majority seeps into the atmosphere. A friend of mine said that by the time this awards season was over, this film should have the word “REALLY?” added to its title. Green Book REALLY? becomes this year’s technical winner of the “best picture” accolade and surely now is added to the list that includes Crash, Chicago and Argo in the What Were They Thinking? categories.
Green Book isn’t a bad film, and it is possible to overindulge one’s high cinephile disdain. Mahershala Ali (winner for best supporting actor) and Viggo Mortensen give very slick and technically accomplished performances as the African-American jazz musician and composer Don Shirley and Tony Vallelonga, the Italian-American nightclub bouncer who finds himself driving Shirley through a tricky tour of the 1960s deep south. Ali’s performance is extremely elegant: he has the command and address of a classical actor in a classical role. But – to quote another of the night’s winners – this really is shallow stuff, which in another, sterner universe would be straight-to-video. Its well-intentioned white/black balance is glib.
The other truly mystifying triumph this year is Bohemian Rhapsody, the story of Freddie Mercury and Queen, a project clouded by its association with its disgraced director Bryan Singer. Now, whatever else might be wrong with this film, it isn’t Rami Malek’s likable, spirited and now Oscar-winning performance: the impersonation of Mercury that he carried off with great elan. However, it has to be said that he wasn’t as good as the other four nominees: Christian Bale for Vice, Bradley Cooper for A Star Is Born, Willem Dafoe for At Eternity’s Gate and indeed Viggo Mortensen for Green Book.
Green Book isn’t a bad film, and it is possible to overindulge one’s high cinephile disdain. Mahershala Ali (winner for best supporting actor) and Viggo Mortensen give very slick and technically accomplished performances as the African-American jazz musician and composer Don Shirley and Tony Vallelonga, the Italian-American nightclub bouncer who finds himself driving Shirley through a tricky tour of the 1960s deep south. Ali’s performance is extremely elegant: he has the command and address of a classical actor in a classical role. But – to quote another of the night’s winners – this really is shallow stuff, which in another, sterner universe would be straight-to-video. Its well-intentioned white/black balance is glib.
The other truly mystifying triumph this year is Bohemian Rhapsody, the story of Freddie Mercury and Queen, a project clouded by its association with its disgraced director Bryan Singer. Now, whatever else might be wrong with this film, it isn’t Rami Malek’s likable, spirited and now Oscar-winning performance: the impersonation of Mercury that he carried off with great elan. However, it has to be said that he wasn’t as good as the other four nominees: Christian Bale for Vice, Bradley Cooper for A Star Is Born, Willem Dafoe for At Eternity’s Gate and indeed Viggo Mortensen for Green Book.
But for this moderate film to have been such a big winner, even picking up the Oscar for editing (as well as sound editing and sound mixing), really seems very silly. As with Green Book, it feels as if the Academy has reached into the bargain bin of those video stores that no longer exist, the bin just by the till, and capriciously plucked out a couple of also-rans for glory.
It was, however, great to see Regina King win best supporting actress for her delicate, luminously intelligent performance in Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk. Here is where the awards’ hive-mind consensus has got it right, and her success makes up a little for the way that this excellent film was overlooked this year.
There was a time when we thought that Bradley Cooper’s version of A Star Is Born might win big this year. It is an excellent movie, which deserved an awful lot more than just best song – although the steamily passionate live performance that Lady Gaga and Cooper gave of Shallow tonight earned them the scene-stealer award and created a Twitter gagstorm about how their respective partners must be feeling.
Elsewhere, it is difficult to question the resounding best animation win for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, a brilliant film that future generations of cinephiles will be treasuring long after BoRhap has been forgotten. And there was a best documentary Oscar for the truly gasp-inducing Free Solo. It was good to see Hannah Beachler and Jay Hart win best production design for their amazing work on Black Panther.
As ever, we have to hope that great movies such as, say, Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace, Lucrecia Martel’s Zama, and Lee Chang-dong’s Burning will survive their hurtful snubs, and concentrate on the success of Roma – although even here I have a twinge that Cold War, directed by Paweł Pawlikowski and produced by Tanya Seghatchian, did not get the moment of glory that it deserved.
Yet Roma is a wonderful film, a thrilling journey into the past, all but defying gravity in its staggering set pieces and crowd-scene choreography with profoundly mysterious and moving moments. It is superbly acted, unbearably moving and visually electrifying. It is the evening’s real winner.
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