The big sensation is in the air
Emilia Jones in “Coda”
Those: Apple TV +
The Oscars have changed fundamentally. Half of the voters were not members of the academy five years ago, making predictions extremely difficult. “The Power of the Dog” is a big favorite – but an outsider has caught up.
Ahen the #OscarsSoWhite storm broke out seven years ago – once again only whites had been nominated in the acting categories – the Oscars academy responded by announcing that it would significantly expand its membership base, with a particular focus on minority invitations.
Until then, it had accepted around 300 new members each year, and in the following years it was between 700 and 900. Today the Academy has 9,400 members, almost half of whom have been new members since 2015. But does that also show in the films that are successful at the Oscars?
Oscar favorite: “The Power of the Dog” with Benedict Cumberbatch, who is also nominated for best actor
Quelle: KIRSTY GRIFFIN/NETFLIX
First, it wasn’t African Americans who were the biggest underrepresented minority at the Oscars, nor were Latinos. The largest minority was the non-English speaking rest of the world. Just twelve percent of Academy members had a home address outside the USA in 2015.
Now the Oscars are an event of american Film Academy and have always been a marketing tool american film industry. But over the decades they have developed into a kind of universal seal of approval, with the unspoken – but often thought of – assumption that the world’s best film of the year is chosen here. Of course, that was often not true – it was never a world championship, but an American national championship – because the US film community, in its insularity and arrogance, rarely saw anything from the rest of the world. This could only be changed if the Academy were internationalized.
That has now happened. The proportion of non-American members has doubled to 25 percent. We saw the first spectacular effect two years ago when Korea’s “Parasite” won Best Film of the Year (finally, it really was the worldwide best film of the year). Last year, Korean Youn Yuh-jung won Best Supporting Actress in Minari, despite the fact that notoriously subtitle-hostile Americans didn’t understand a word she spoke.
This year, the equally incomprehensible “Drive My Car” from Japan is not only nominated for Best International Film (the alibi category where the Academy has been dumping foreign language films for decades), but also for Best Picture and for Director and Screenplay. For the first time, an actor couple is nominated, but not an American golden couplebut the Spaniards Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem, she for Pedro Almodóvar’s “Parallel Mothers” and he for Aaron Sorkin’s “Being the Ricardos”.
The new situation has made it very difficult to predict the Oscars. The “many nominations = many awards” equation no longer applies, at least since the shock of 2017 when “Moonlight” nipped the 14-nominated film “La La Land” at the last minute.
Now this year we have a 12-nominated favorite, The Power of the Dog, a late western drama starring Benedict Cumberbatch that takes the deconstruction of the cowboy man to unprecedented extremes. Jane Campion might win the director’s Oscar for it, but best picture?
Favorite among the main actors: Will Smith in “King Richard”
What: © Telepool
By early March, “Dog” appeared to be asserting its perceived lead. The strongest competitors – Kenneth Branagh’s Northern Ireland drama “Belfast”, Paul Thomas Anderson’s California anthem “Licorice Pizza”, Adam McKay’s doomsday satire “Don’t Look Up” – took little momentum from the preceding award ceremonies.
But then an outsider suddenly pushed his way forward: “Coda”, a drama about a girl who is the only hearing member of her deaf family. “Coda,” the French-produced remake of a French film, won the Producers’ and Writers’ Guilds and is now level with “Dog” in betting. It will be exciting on Monday night.