Have the 2019 Oscars Drifted Away From "American Values"?

The Oscars have never billed themselves as art, and they keep their distance from commercial films. What they try to do is define American values and vouch for them — and that core is now fading.

Whether 2019 turns out to be a strong year or a weak one for the Oscars, one thing is obvious: this year's Oscars don't look much like the Oscars.

The film critic magasa once proposed the idea of an "Oscar look" in a column for QDaily. What the Oscars reward, he argued, is a distinctly American kind of art film. Its methods are more accessible than those of European art cinema; it favors biopics, historical dramas and adaptations of serious literature; and it concentrates on historical events, glimpses of great men, characters with extraordinary lives, and re-creations of socially progressive moments — all of it in the service of American universal values.

Most Best Picture winners of recent years sit inside that range. The Hurt Locker, which won in 2010, carried an American view of global justice, and so did Argo in 2013 and American Sniper, nominated in 2015. The Shape of Water and Moonlight answer a more recent domestic question — how America's different ethnic groups should live together — a trend that has grown clearer since 12 Years a Slave won in 2014. A Beautiful Mind, The King's Speech and The Artist are all biopics of the sort the Oscars love.

The value of the Oscars may not lie in art itself. As magasa put it, "it represents a model of cinematic taste exported by the world's most powerful film-producing nation — an invisible hand that shapes, without anyone quite noticing, what people make and what they watch." Film is one of America's most potent exports, and it can export values; the Oscars' choices show that better than anything.

This year's Best Picture list, though, has no clear face. It looks like something assembled out of several conflicting standards.

More of this year's nominees than usual sit close to the aesthetics of European art cinema. The two films with the most nominations, ten apiece — Roma and The Favourite — are standard selections from Europe's three major festivals. BlacKkKlansman is an American film, but director Spike Lee's earlier work won more recognition in Berlin and Cannes than at the Oscars. And Paweł Pawlikowski's Best Director nomination for Cold War, which premiered at Cannes, is widely seen as a major upset.

From the other side, an Academy that has long looked down on commercial films, superhero movies above all, also dropped its guard this year and put Black Panther, the second-highest-grossing film in the world in 2018, on the Best Picture list. Barely a month earlier, The New York Times had asked exactly this question: "Since 2016, Oscar voters have gone to great pains to diversify their membership, but would they embrace Coogler (director of Black Panther)?"

Flanked on one side by the more artistic films and on the other by the more commercial ones, the films that had been the 2019 season's favorites precisely because they had the Oscar look were shut out one after another.

First Man, the new film from Damien Chazelle, the youngest Best Director winner in Oscar history, tells the story of the astronaut Neil Armstrong; it was ignored all season. Barry Jenkins, whose Moonlight beat Chazelle's film to Best Picture that year, saw his new film If Beale Street Could Talk pick up only one major nomination this time, for Best Supporting Actress. The Coen brothers, who took both Best Picture and Best Director in 2007, saw their new film The Ballad of Buster Scruggs nominated only for Best Adapted Screenplay, plus costume design and original score.

Similar films met the same fate: Boy Erased, about a gay teenager forced into a conversion program; First Reformed, about a pastor wrestling with his own faith; and Welcome to Marwen, the new film from Forrest Gump director Robert Zemeckis.

The eight films nominated for Best Picture at the 2019 Oscars make a strange picture. There is the heavily artistic end — Roma, The Favourite, BlacKkKlansman — and the commercial triumph of Black Panther, and then A Star Is Born and Bohemian Rhapsody, where the music and the stars count for far more than the films. Calling the list inclusive is generous. It looks confused and lost.

Only the remaining two, Green Book and Vice, are typical Oscar films. The first tells the story of a white bodyguard protecting a Black pianist on a tour deep into the American South. The second attacks Dick Cheney, vice president under the Bush administration, head-on, casting him as the man chiefly responsible for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Oscars have become less like the Oscars. One explanation for the surprise is that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which runs the awards, and the Hollywood it stands for, are going through another round of rebuilding. The upheaval alone is enough to leave the Oscars' road ahead unclear.

For a long time Hollywood was taken to be Jewish turf. Mel Gibson, director of Braveheart, was blacklisted there for ten years over antisemitic remarks. Oscar voters were likewise white and male: a 2012 Los Angeles Times investigation found that of more than 5,100 members, 77% were men, only 2% were Black, and Latinos were fewer still.

That male grip changed sharply over the past year. The trigger was the accusation, in the second half of 2017, that Harvey Weinstein had sexually assaulted women for years, which set off the #MeToo movement that swept the world. In that movement many white men who controlled large resources in Hollywood lost their standing: Amazon Studios head Roy Price, Disney and Pixar chief creative officer John Lasseter, directors Woody Allen, Bryan Singer and Roman Polanski, actors James Franco, Casey Affleck and Kevin Spacey.

The consequences differed. Weinstein may never return to the film industry. Lasseter found a new job but faced a boycott. Polanski went to France to shoot his new film and may be quietly frozen out of Hollywood. For Hollywood, their departure left a vacuum of power, and that vacuum would set off a chain of further changes.

In June 2018, the Academy published the list of people it was inviting to join: 49% were women and 38% belonged to ethnic minorities, and the list even included Takeshi Kaneshiro, Sylvia Chang, Lou Ye, Huayi Brothers founders Wang Zhongjun and Wang Zhonglei, and Bona Film Group founder Yu Dong.

This is not the first time a social movement has shifted the Oscars' aesthetic leanings. In 2014, a few months after 12 Years a Slave, in which he appeared, won Best Picture, the British actor Gary Oldman said: "If you didn't vote for 12 Years a Slave at the Oscars, you're a racist."

In 2016 the #OscarSoWhite movement was formally launched. Idris Elba, of Beasts of No Nation, and Michael B. Jordan, of Creed, had both been widely seen as favorites for the acting awards, yet neither got so much as a nomination. People aimed their anger at the Academy, accused it of racial discrimination, and filled Twitter with the #OscarSoWhite tag.

"We [Black people] might pick up an Oscar here and there, but the Oscars don't fundamentally change how Hollywood does business. I'm not talking about the stars of Hollywood. I'm talking about the people with decision-making power. We're not in that room where decisions get made," director Spike Lee said after the 2016 Oscar nominations were announced.

The #OscarSoWhite movement finally quieted down when the Academy pledged to double the number of women and people of color among its voting members by 2020. The latest figures show that if everyone on the Academy's 2018 invitation list accepts, women will make up 31% of the membership.

From #OscarSoWhite to #MeToo, the Oscars have faced steadily heavier pressure from society at large. The other half of the rebuilding comes from ordinary viewers.

At the start, the Oscars were no more than an industry prize. A 15-minute ceremony announced Best Picture, Best Director and the two acting awards, plus a handful of others, and it was over. Later the Oscars grew into an industry-wide honors gala, taking in technical categories such as sound mixing, art direction, editing, score, visual effects and costume design.

But the Academy is a nonprofit, and a large share of its money comes from television rights, which means it must weigh public opinion at every turn. There are more ways to be entertained now, big franchises like Star Wars and The Avengers sweep the market, and the box-office share of American art films keeps shrinking. Ratings for the ceremony have fallen year after year, and the Academy has been pushed into one compromise after another.

In August 2018, Academy president John Bailey announced that, to keep viewers from abandoning the Oscars and to solve a potential funding problem, the Academy was proposing a new award for Best Popular Film. In internal discussions, one idea was to let audiences decide it: at screenings with at least 2,000 viewers, they would vote with their ticket stubs to pick the winner.

The mockery from filmmakers came fast and from every direction. Director Rob Lowe tweeted that with the Oscars introducing a popular-film award, "the film industry has today parted ways with it." Los Angeles Times film critic Justin Chang called it extreme wishful thinking and pandering.

Most recently, the Oscars angered the industry again by pandering to viewers. The plan was to hand out four awards — cinematography, editing, makeup and hairstyling, and live action short — during commercial breaks, shortening the ceremony to pull in more viewers and please the network.

The reply from Roma director Alfonso Cuarón spoke for the whole industry: "In the history of cinema, there have been masterpieces without sound, without color, without a story, without actors, without music. But no film has ever existed apart from cinematography and editing."

All of this shows the Oscars' awkward position. They have to answer to viewers and to the industry. They carry people's demands for social justice and people's idea of what cinema should be. The white men who once controlled Hollywood may not have cared about any of that outside noise, but as one social movement after another has cleared them out, the Oscars' split identity has finally cost them any grip on their own fate, and they now drift among goals that are divided and sometimes at war with one another.

The stylistically chaotic Best Picture list is that condition in miniature. Judging by the public reaction to the nominations, at least, it manages to please nearly everyone.

Critics are delighted that Roma and BlacKkKlansman made it in; the two really were the strongest films of 2018 as art. Ordinary viewers may feel, thanks to Black Panther, that the Oscars have finally set their prejudices aside.

People who care about race will be satisfied too. Even those who fault Green Book for a "we're all one big family, whatever our color" theme that is still behind the times may approve of Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman, because Lee's views on race are more radical. What makes this worth chewing over is that the Oscars have spent years ignoring this long-established Black director. He has been selected for the Berlin festival four times and Cannes twice, yet this is his first Oscar nomination for Best Picture or Best Director. There are also rumors that Lee himself has refused to become an Academy member.

As art, BlacKkKlansman deserves its Oscar nomination a hundred percent. On the other hand, it is also a correct and safe choice. So is Green Book, about a white man and a Black man learning to get along. So is Roma, a Mexican story. So are Vice, which attacks the former Republican vice president Dick Cheney; A Star Is Born, with a woman at its center; The Favourite, with its lesbian relationships; and Black Panther, with its Black superhero.

People often question the fact that most Oscar voters are actors — most of whom have not necessarily seen every film, most of whom lack a deep feel for art itself, most of whom have their choices swayed by publicity campaigns. So why should anyone believe this year's list stands for any particular aesthetic? Especially a list holding both a Cannes art film and a Marvel blockbuster.

In that sense, safety looks like the defining trait of this shortlist. What's a pity about it is that the Oscars have given up their own say in the film industry.

The Oscars have never claimed to pursue art, and they don't speak for commercial cinema, yet they remain the most important award in the world, because they stand for the world's most powerful country and its filmmaking, and set the rules for it. At bottom, the Oscars embody American values and do the work of cultural export.

"As in the political realm, a recurring theme in Hollywood is people's ambivalence toward powerful social institutions, and how those institutions shape everyday life. Those institutions may be religious, economic, military, or political." The historian Jim Cullen wrote in The Washington Post, "Movies can tell us as much about this country as the ballot box."

The 2008 Oscars have been called the finest of the new millennium. Its two frontrunners, No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, were the work of the Coen brothers and Paul Thomas Anderson. The first belongs to the Hollywood western and paints Texas as cold and absurd. There Will Be Blood is about the discovery of oil in 19th-century America, and about the role and meaning of religion in that era. Both are rooted in American history and culture, and that is what carries them past the limits of the traditional western and the traditional biopic.

In the same way, when Argo and The Hurt Locker won, America was in the middle of reckoning with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Their wins matched the mood in the country at the time. And in recent years The Shape of Water and Moonlight have reflected on how America should handle relations among its different ethnic groups, and how a melting pot can preserve each group's identity and culture.

Among the 2019 frontrunners, Roma is a Spanish-language film about Mexico and The Favourite is a story of the 18th-century English court. Neither is cut off from current affairs, but neither is an American story. With the aesthetic standards of Europe's three major festivals now in the mix, American culture looks, for the first time, like a minority voice in the Best Picture category.

Behind this lies the broader decline of American values. As America is less and less seen as a just keeper of global order, films like The Hurt Locker and Argo have lost the legitimacy they once had. When America is no longer the world's beacon, films bound up with American history, like No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, lose their pull as well.

After the Oscars gave Best Picture to Moonlight and The Shape of Water in consecutive years, Hollywood's tilt toward political correctness became obvious. Over the past year, though, that creed has run into a crisis without precedent. Political correctness has failed to reconcile America's ethnic groups, to hold them together while keeping each one's diversity intact. Worse, the conservative backlash has put the very idea in doubt.

Among the public it showed up as a plain refusal to buy the two films, and a belief that their rivals in the same years — La La Land, Manchester by the Sea, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri — all deserved the award more.

Political correctness has also tied up Hollywood's ability to create. The Shape of Water is a flawlessly correct film, but in the eyes of critics it is also one of the duller films of Guillermo del Toro's career. Political correctness comes with too many rules and boxes to tick — people of every race, orientation and gender must be treated the same way — and it hardens easily into creative dogma. That is exactly why films like Boy Erased and If Beale Street Could Talk got a cold reception this awards season.

Film is a cultural and artistic product, and its strength has always rested on a powerful core to express. China's Fifth Generation directors made their names reckoning with the Cultural Revolution; the Sixth Generation turned to the people caught inside enormous social change. The Taiwan New Wave was born as society slowly thawed, and the French New Wave was inseparable from the restless society of the 1960s. When the core disappears, the film movement built on it dissolves with it.

That is why the Oscars have increasingly been seen as having a weak year. Traditional American values have gradually proved unworkable, and the new core of political correctness turns out to be a hollow slogan that cannot settle conflicts between ethnic groups. Having lost the core, Hollywood and the Oscars have lost their power to define what cinema is.

For the film world, that is simply a loss. It already has Europe's three major festivals chasing a pure artistic standard, and box-office numbers to show what audiences like and dislike. But there is only one Oscars, the award tied tightly to American values.