Oscars so divisive

It’s only befitting that the run-up to this year’s Oscars ceremony is a grim reminder of where America stands in the Trump era: Utterly polarised. It’s boggling everyone’s mind on Twitter, the pre-eminent platform to vent one’s rage these days, that two astonishingly bad movies are up for the most popular awards. Green Book, a movie about a black piano virtuoso (Mahershala Ali) who was able to traverse the Deep South in the 1960s due to his Italian-American chauffeur-slash-bodyguard (Viggo Mortensen) is a schmaltz-fest. Despite it being a true story, director Peter Farrelly took extreme liberties to buttress the movie's dramatic quotient. The two men apparently were never close friends and the cultured Black man never helped the brutish Caucasian write letters to his wife. Historical inaccuracies apart, the movie is just a giant slab of cliches piled together. That’s why nominating Ali for Best Supporting Actor and Mortensen for Best Actor almost feels like the Academy is rewarding one-dimensional acting. That said, Ali is almost a dead certainty for winning his second Oscar because the Academy is prone to loving such saccharine pap. 

Bohemian Rhapsody is another movie that left me cold despite it being the biopic of Freddie Mercury, the vastly charismatic frontman of Queen, one of the greatest rock bands in the history of music. Rami Malek is a misfit in the role of Mercury and he hams his way through but somehow he got a Best Actor nomination and he’ll need to either murder or rob a bank to avoid winning the award. However, the Academy is being accused of setting a bad precedent by lauding a movie whose director (Bryan Singer) is accused of preying on teen boys. 

The Academy also dodged a bullet by reversing its decision to award Cinematography, Editing, Live Action Short, and Makeup and Hairstyling winners during commercial breaks. In its quest to shorten the ceremony’s duration to under three hours, the Academy almost did away with crucial awards such as Cinematography and Editing, which are the flesh and blood of any movie worth its salt. 

For anyone in India who’s looking forward to waking up early Monday morning to catch the show, not all is gloom and doom though. The Favourite, a true story set in the 18th century about two cousins vying for the undivided attention of Queen Anne, is the dark comedy that will leave you simultaneously appalled and chuckling hard and, rightfully so, thus snaffled ten nominations. Director Yorgos Lanthimos’ ravishing tapestry earned Robbie Ryan, right now the best cinematographer in the indie cinema world, his first ever nomination. The punters are not betting big on the movie though. Olivia Colman’s Queen Anne might lose out on the Best Actress award to Glenn Close’s touching portrait of a woman disregarded by her pompous Nobel-winning husband in The Wife. Same might just be the case with Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz in the Best Supporting Actress category where Regina King is supposedly destined to get the shiny gong for her role in Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk. If there’s any justice left in the world, Lanthimos has to win the Best Director award. 

But, he’s up against Alfonso Cuarón for Roma, a semi-autobiographical movie about a nanny taking care of three American kids in the 1970s’ Mexico, which is the toast of the Tinseltown. Cuarón’s movie is a minor masterwork in mise en scène and the incandescent acting by Yalitza Aparicio, nominated for Best Actress, is to be seen to be believed. The movie earned ten nominations because Cuarón ensured it looked blazingly plain, sternly unsentimental and oozed with subtle detailing. A win for Roma will be a terrific acknowledgement for Netflix’s stature as a peer of the traditional movie studios of Hollywood. Roma’s victory would also be a rap on the knuckles of Donald Trump for his needless urge to build a wall along the southern border to thwart illegal immigrants from Mexico. 

Among other heartening aspects of the nominations is that it took 31 years for Spike Lee, American cinema’s Malcolm X, to get a Best Director nomination for BlacKkKlansman, a scabrous take on the far-right groups mushrooming in America in the 1970s. All in all, it's going to be a cracking show. 

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