No movie has won Best Picture with a Best Actress nominee in it, let alone a Best Actress winner, since 2004’s Million Dollar Baby. The factors that contributed to this unprecedented dry spell are probably many. Some can be due to the makeup of the Academy, though that doesn’t explain it since the Academy has always been dominated by white males. But sure, especially in the era of the preferential ballot, that might be true: we vote for what we identify with. Part of it could be due to the lack of great roles for women as film culture slid into franchises and fanboy mentality where women were sidelined to pieces of ass or high kicking tough babes but whose internal world was non-existent. The great roles for women then tended to come from independent projects that would never get near Best Picture, like Still Alice.
Some of it could be down to an increasing awareness of how women are portrayed and those requirements becoming so strident that women, or people of color for that matter, can’t really take any role in any film without someone starting a shitstorm over it. Shitstorms where women directors are concerned are many (Selma, Zero Dark Thirty, Suffragette, Detroit) and shitstorms for movies with all white males in them not so much. Thus, it’s a safe bet to make a movie like Argo. Who is going to start a shitstorm over that? The more shitstorms, the less chance a movie has to get nominated or to win Best Picture. Shitstorm = controversy.
No one can say for sure the reason for the dry spell. If any year seemed poised to disrupt it either, last year would have or this year still might. Already we have four Best Actress contenders in four Best Picture contenders, with three of those having a chance to win: The Shape of Water, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and Lady Bird. Last year’s La La Land seemed like it could at last break the spell but it didn’t. One of the reasons for that, I figured out, was that men, for the most part, tended to rank Moonlight higher than La La Land. Women tended to rank La La Land higher than Moonlight. Less women, less votes. When you look at last year you have to consider whose favorites the lineup represented, and what films would benefit when their favorites dropped off.
When I did my series of polling on Facebook, I learned a bit about how people were ranking their films and here is a messy generalization of those findings, keeping in mind that La La Land won the majority vote at the PGA and the DGA and in many categories at the Oscars themselves where ranking didn’t matter:
Arrival — liked mostly by women. La La Land could be their number 2 choice. So could Moonlight.
Hell or High Water — liked mostly by men, Moonlight would rank higher.
Manchester by the Sea — liked by both, more by men and Moonlight would rank higher.
Fences — liked by both, mostly men, Moonlight would rank higher.
Hidden Figures — liked mostly by women but Moonlight would rank higher on these ballots for socially conscious voters.
Lion — liked by both, but La La Land would usually benefit from these ballots.
Hacksaw Ridge — liked mostly by men and Moonlight would rank higher.
Try to picture the voter who picked Hacksaw Ridge as their number one or Hell or High Water, then picking La La Land as their number two. Ain’t gonna happen, people.
For whatever reason, male-oriented stories are thought of as more universal. When they’ve done studies of box office, for instance, women were interested in and would pay for stories about men where the opposite wasn’t true. Men, for the most part, would not buy tickets for movies that were “women” stories. Films where women are put in traditionally male roles would of course be liked equally, like Zero Dark Thirty, for instance, or Three Billboards from this year.
I’ve always believed women directors could better in Hollywood if they told more universal stories, but they get pressured to always represent women and thus they aren’t really given the freedom to tell those stories. The same goes for black directors or any directors of color. They have a responsibility to right the wrongs done to an entire population.
The films that have won Best Picture that had lead actresses in them were films that were mostly male stories anyway, like Million Dollar Baby was really Clint Eastwood’s character’s story. Shakespeare in Love was about William Shakespeare. The only film I can think of would be Chicago, which won in 2002 and starred two women who were really the stars and focal points of the film.
That was a long-ass time ago, my friends. And not all that much has changed. To predict what will win Best Picture, you have to ask yourself — what will the dudes like? Men tend to like movies with women in them who are fuckable in real life or in the film. They can roll with movies directed by women who are fuckable as long as the women in them aren’t threatening or alienating to men. So in The Shape of Water men are replaced by a creature that can fuck like a champion. They probably don’t like that too much. No one wants to be replaced by a more desirable appendage. But once you figure out what the movie is about you understand that she isn’t necessarily opting out of human dick — it’s more like water seeking its own level. Also Sally Hawkins, by design, isn’t meant to BE fuckable to human men. Had Guillermo Del Toro not been such a brilliant uncompromising artist he would have cast her with a much younger, hotter babe. But he didn’t. He cast her with an actress who can actually appear to be the kind of woman no one would notice.
I thought men liked The Shape of Water until I started actually listening to what they were saying. Scroll the comments over at Hollywood-Elsewhere and you’ll see they aren’t too keen on it — only half-way on Lady Bird. Women I’ve heard talk about it seem weirded out by the sex part, even though it’s clear Sally Hawkins’ isn’t altogether human either. If women are slightly weirded out by it, men say things like “it was stupid.” I’ve heard this on more than one occasion from them about this movie, which I find so odd. There are many things you can call stupid in this world, lots of movies you can call stupid. The Shape of Water isn’t one of them. But you can’t really “explain” movies to people who vote on them. They vote on what their minds allow them to “get.” And if they don’t get a movie, they aren’t going to vote for it. Remember that essential rule of Oscarwatching: a Best Picture winner is that movie you can sit down in front of anyone and they’ll get it if not love it. If anyone comes out of a movie saying “I don’t get it” or “I didn’t get it” or “that was stupid” — that doesn’t define your typical generic Oscar winner. No one is going to walk out of Argo saying “I didn’t get it.” Or even Moonlight, for that matter.
Of course, I try hard not to be insulting when it comes to this kind of thing: everyone has their own idea of “good” and “bad.” What we’re doing here, though, is not deciding that at all. We’re deciding what a consensus of thousands of people are going to agree on is best. Or at least tolerable. The movies that reach for high artistic achievement are the ones that last. They just aren’t the ones that win.
Those movies this year in Best Picture almost anyone can get include: Lady Bird, Get Out, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. The rest of them require reaching in, leaning in, expanding your mind somewhat to get what the whole point is. Phantom Thread, Darkest Hour, Dunkirk, Call Me By Your Name and The Post are all movies that do require some kind of thinking to figure out why they matter.
The Shape of Water hovers somewhere in between that. It’s not an “everyone loves it” movie. It’s a “those who love it, REALLY love it” movie and there have been, as we can see, many of those. It had no trouble winning the preferential ballot at the PGA, neither did La La Land, come to that. Hell, even The Big Short won there. But the Academy isn’t made up of just producers. There are actors and costumers, composers, documentarians, makeup artists, animators, and sound technicians. Lots of different strokes going on with all those different folks.
That’s why this year is so confounding. But you could do worse than figuring it out by asking the question, which movie did the dudes like best? I have my own ideas about that but I’ll need more intel before I figure out the answer. The WGA might help clear that one up.