Oscar Best Picture Pick Causes Controversy
by EG
The Academy Awards could have made a lot of people happy by choosing either Black Panther or BlacKkKlansman as this year's Best Picture. Instead, the Academy chose the one nominee in the category that was guaranteed to cause an uproar. Read on for details.
A thoroughly unpredictable, sometimes mud-slinging, always suspense-filled awards season ended with Green Book, the tale of an interracial friendship, being crowned best picture at the 91st Academy Awards on Sunday night. While the evening saw The Favourite's Olivia Colman and Bohemian Rhapsody's Rami Malek claim the top acting prizes and witnessed a number of firsts — black craftsmen won Oscars for the first time in the costume and production design categories for their work on Black Panther — Green Book’s victory became the story of the night.
Peter Farrelly’s film — a true-life tale starring Viggo Mortensen as Tony Lip, an Italian-American who was hired to drive pianist Dr. Don Shirley, played by Mahershala Ali, through the Jim Crow South on a concert tour — had picked up precursor awards like a Golden Globe for best comedy/musical and the Producers Guild Award, but an Oscar triumph was by no means guaranteed.
In fact, heading into the final moments of Sunday night’s ceremony, which was broadcast from Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre by ABC, it looked like the winning momentum was with Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma. Universal’s Green Book had racked up two awards by then — one for its original screenplay and the other for Ali as supporting actor. But Netflix’s Roma had claimed three — with Cuaron personally collecting Oscars for best director, best cinematographer and for best foreign-language film.
So when Julia Roberts announced Green Book as the best picture winner, it marked something of a come-from-behind victory for the film. Green Book did establish itself as a crowd-pleaser early on when it debuted in September at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it was the surprise winner of that fest’s audience award, beating out films like A Star Is Born. And its theme of racial reconciliation looked as if it would appeal to the Motion Picture Academy’s long-standing liberal sensibilities, which, in the past, resulted in best picture wins for films like 1967’s In the Heat of the Night and 1989’s Driving Miss Daisy.
But Green Book has also hit some potholes along the way: Some of Shirley’s family members criticized the pic for not accurately reflecting the man they knew. Nick Vallelonga, Lip’s son and one of the film’s screenwriters, had to apologize for an old tweet in which he endorsed Donald Trump’s unfounded 2015 claim that Muslims in New Jersey cheered the destruction of the Twin Towers on 9/11. And Farrelly himself was shut out of the best director category, never a good sign for an aspiring best picture winner.
Get the rest of the story at The Hollywood Reporter.
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