It was not all that shocking that CODA had won the SAG Ensemble award. It was mildly shocking when it won the Adapted Screenplay award at the BAFTA. It was most definitely shocking when it won the Producers Guild and the Writers Guild over the weekend. CODA is showing the same kind of last minute momentum surge we’ve seen with movies like Spotlight, Moonlight, and Parasite.
There is just one difference between CODA and almost every other film nominated for Best Picture in the past 90 years: it has just three Oscar nominations with no directing and no editing. That CODA’s three nominations and lack of down ballot support doesn’t seem to be stopping it’s ascent to Best Picture can only mean one thing — an emotional consensus trumps all.
The only other comparison to be made about this year was the Driving Miss Daisy year. For whatever reason, Bruce Beresford was never nominated for Best Director. Not at the Globes, not at the DGA, not at Oscar. Yet Driving Miss Daisy still won the Globe and the Oscar. But even that film had eight nominations, including editing.
That might be because the movie was based on the play and it’s really just about Morgan Freeman and Jessica Tandy driving in a car. Ironically enough, Drive My Car, which is also about that, was nominated for Best Director this year. Another irony is that Kenneth Branagh was last nominated for Best Director in the Driving Miss Daisy year for Henry V.
The 1989 Best Picture nominees were:
Driving Miss Daisy
Field of Dreams
My Left Foot
Born on the 4th of July
Dead Poets Society
(notably absent: Do the Right Thing)
The Best Director nominees were:
My Left Foot
Born on the 4th of July
Dead Poets Society
Crimes and Misdemeanors
Henry V
This selection of films was kind of odd. There isn’t really a strong contender among them. Driving Miss Daisy’s success was built on the long odds it would be a hit and those odds paying off. In the book Inside Oscar, none other than Anne Thompson is quoted on the film’s Oscar chances, “Like last year’s frontrunner Rain Man, it’s an entertaining, unthreatening movie with just the right patina of seriousness to make people feel enabled after seeing it.” And Jessica Lange, presenting the clip for the film, said, “Isn’t it a wonderful surprise when, against all odds, a small, off-Broadway two-character play can not only get made in this town but become one of the most successful films of the year?”
Back then, the box office was one of the most important drivers in the Oscar race. This was 1989-1990, and things were about to shift away from big studios and big profits and towards smaller, independent films. A strong factor in Driving Miss Daisy’s win, it must also be said, was love for Jessica Tandy at 80 years old finally winning an Oscar.
Now, the streaming services are like the big studios once were, or at least they are trying to be. Winning an Oscar for them would be the same motivator for a big studio back when box office and clout mattered. It is that eternal male ego once represented by the soccer trophy on the shelf. Since there is no box office to be measured this year, we have only emotion, only what defines this industry right now in 2022.
They are an industry living through a climate of fear. It isn’t only their jobs on the line, it’s their relevance. It’s trying to somehow hold onto power and control when it is all slipping away. YouTubers and TikTok influencers are beginning to dominate. Hollywood studios are afraid of what is happening politically, globally, and in each of our own lives. It is a time of instability. That makes it less of a time to rally a consensus around something difficult or painful, and more of a time to rally around something calming and reassuring, something that makes the world feel like a better place full of good people doing good things.
There isn’t much negativity at all in CODA. There is a bar fight where the brother (Daniel Durant) brawls with a bully who calls him a freak. But overall, there is mostly love and support for the Rossi family. Of course they would come around to sending their daughter off to school and of course her audition would go well. This is not a world where bad things happen, this CODA world. This is a world very much insulated from the bad things.
When you look at it that way, it’s a little easier to understand why the consensus is going so hard for CODA even with just three Oscar nominations, with no Globe or DGA or Oscar nomination for directing, just like Driving Miss Daisy. Well, that and perhaps millions in advertising sales via the most powerful company in the world. That it’s directed and written by a woman is really enough to tip the balance. What if it had been directed by your standard white guy — would people love it and rally behind it as much? Probably not.
So, why should it even matter if CODA only got three Oscar nominations?
Because film awards are meant to be about rewarding high achievement in film, including its craft. The achievement of the Best Picture winner is meant to be recognized by every branch that celebrates all of the elements that went into making the movie. In general, Best Picture winners win because they are well directed and recognized as such.
It isn’t just that CODA has only three nominations. It’s that CODA has the least number of nominations of any Best Picture contender this year and has no Director or Editing nominations — something that no Best Picture winner has gone without ever since the creation of the Best Editing category at the Oscars in 1935. It doesn’t have a nomination for either Emilia Jones or Marlee Matlin.
Other than Driving Miss Daisy, surprise winners that captured the emotional consensus still obtained broad support with directing and editing, like Chariots of Fire, Crash, Shakespeare in Love, Spotlight, and Parasite.
I think this year tracked along like an ordinary year, but sentiments began to fracture all over the place. It was hard to get a large consensus to back any of the movies since there were so many driven by emotion, like Belfast, King Richard, and West Side Story. Had Belfast won the SAG, it’s possible it might have rallied the consensus the way CODA did. Perhaps not likely, but it was possible.
I think when CODA won the SAG Ensemble, it created a kind of halo effect and that suddenly made it appealing to get behind, so people could become part of the “CODA family.” I don’t buy it that people didn’t see the movie, which was screened at Sundance. Maybe some of them didn’t get around to watching it, but it made the BAFTA long list in Picture, Director, Actress, Screenplay, Supporting Actress, and only landed with three nominations there too, and didn’t make it into Best Picture.
It could not have placed at the Golden Globes, the WGA, the PGA, and the SAG without people having seen it.
Granted, it’s worth mentioning that one of the biggest changes this year was having so many nominations drop at once. The PGA, the DGA, and the WGA were all announced on the same day, the same day Oscar voting started. That made it harder for a movie like CODA to build momentum since it wasn’t in Telluride or Toronto and thus, it wasn’t on the radar of the pundits as much as the other films were.
Some years, the emotional consensus is put in place in the beginning and never deviates, like Slumdog Millionaire or The Artist. But other years it feels like it’s not so easy to take the most highly acclaimed film of the year, even the best film of the year, and rally an emotional consensus around it, especially if the film is dark or complex. In that case, there has to be another reason for people to want to rally around it, like finally giving Martin Scorsese or the Coen brothers an Oscar.
I started this website in 1999 to answer the question as to why How Green Was My Valley beat Citizen Kane in 1941. 22 years later I know why. That understanding has deepened significantly with the rise of CODA. An emotional consensus around a nominee matters more than anything else. Figuring out how to make that happen is the real challenge.
We don’t know whether CODA will actually make history on Sunday or not. It does seem more likely at this point, though, than it ever has. When voters love a movie, or when that movie feels safe, or when they have a chance to both make history and feel like heroes, nothing is going to stop them. Not stats, not history, not even the idea that people ten years from now might look back at 2022 and wonder how that movie, with three nominations, beat a movie that won the Golden Globe, the DGA, and the BAFTA.
To explain that, you will have to start with, “there used to be a thing called movie theaters…”
