The 92nd Academy Awards: four victories and a lot of defeats

Foto: IMDb

As you may very well know by now, this year’s edition of the Academy Awards was a pleasant surprise. Or should we call it an unexpected demonstration of normality… ish? Bong Joon Ho’s masterpiece, Parasite, saw the recognition we all hoped it would get, and left the room with almost all the major awards. Four of them, to be precise. We might be thus tempted to reconsider the lack of love we’ve shown the Academy for repeatedly snubbing artists of color, women and all the other usual and unfortunate suspects. But let’s not be hasty.

One important thing to consider is that the success Parasite had this year doesn’t guarantee that the next brilliant piece of cinema will receive the same treatment next year. 

Let’s remember Berry Jenkins’ Moonlight getting three awards, including the one for Best Picture (not before we got a good scare with La La Land), back in 2017. But then the same award was offered to Peter Farrelly’s Green Book in 2019 over Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma or Spike Lee’s Blackkklansman, both of the latter being far superior to Green Book. And when it comes to the conversations about race and, more precisely, the struggle of African-Americans in America,  Green Book shouldn’t even have been in the same ballpark as Blackkklansmen. But then again, the esteemed members of the Academy do have a tradition of ignoring things such as nuance and relevancy. 

But let’s not linger on the past. Parasite’s success and recognition didn’t even guarantee a fair game for this year’s edition, with Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach not being nominated for Best Director,  even though their movies, Little Women and Marriage Story (for which Laura Dern got a well deserved Best Supporting Actress award) were on the Best Picture shortlist (I guess some movies just direct themselves). And at least these are the projects who did get selected. 

The Safdie brothers’ powerful and original movie, Uncut Gems, which tells the story of a New York jeweler who’s addicted to gambling and frankly high-risk stakes, didn’t even make it to the door. The same goes for the wonderful Hustlers, directed by Lorene Scafaria, which tells the story of a group of women, all former strip club employees who, in the midst of the 2009 Global Financial Crisis, have to quite literally come up with a racket in order to stay afloat. Lulu Wang’s The Farewell, which tells a wonderful non-western story of family and tradition is also something that we would have loved to see amongst the Oscar nominations. Then there is the sublime Midsommar, directed by Ari Aster, from which the most important lessons we can draw is that not everything that’s bonkers cool should be the subject of a PhD., and also that sheer horror can be found in sunshine, honest smiles, and fresh air as well as in dark and haunted houses, rotten teeth, and deathly gasps.

The list can go on and, of course, the empty slots for each section of the Oscars will never match the number of good or brilliant movies made in a year. But we would sure like to see more than one original story brought forth.