The Oscars 2021 Special: The Debatable, The Forgettable, And The Impeccable
The Academy Awards spurned another round of discussions, we pitch in our ideas to pick your brain
The 93rd edition of the Academy Awards, more popularly known as Oscars, was held on the 25th of April 2021. The night that was a celebration of films released in a year ruled by a virus was filled with stars, snubs, and abysmally low ratings.
We wanted to put our thoughts about it, and here you go!
What can you find inside?
- The debatable winners
- Why can a movie win the Award?
- The Big Winners
- Notable Contenders
The Debatable Winners
One such snub that has been debated ever since, and will continue to be debated, is Anthony Hopkins winning the golden statue over the late Chadwick Boseman. The Internet, as always, is divided into two factions. One is arguing that Anthony Hopkins’ performance deserved the Oscar, and the other is saying it didn’t.
However, what either of those factions fails to understand is that an Oscar by itself doesn’t necessarily serve as a benchmark of an actor’s prowess.
Al Pacino took twenty years since his first nomination in 1972 for The Godfather to win an Oscar. It would be plain stupid to say that Al Pacino was not an exceptional actor for twenty years until he won an Oscar. All the more, his performance in The Scent of a Woman, for which he won the award, would not even be mentioned in the actor’s top 5 performances.
Not just that, followers of Leonardo DiCaprio’s career would know how great his performance was in The Wolf of Wall Street. It didn’t garner him an academy award. Joaquin Phoenix, the actor who won an Oscar for Joker (2019), didn’t win an Oscar for his brilliant and inarguably better performance in The Master (2012). His performance in the Master lost to Daniel Day Lewis’s performance in Lincoln. Phoenix’s performance in Master would have won him the Academy had it released in any year in that decade except 2012. Speak of rotten luck!
Why can a movie win the Award?
And not just the year in which the movie is released, but also the promotion and the push the movie receives play an important role.
“Momentum” is a widely used term while describing the awards season. The awards season every year begins with the Golden Globes and ends with the Oscar. The more awards a movie gets, the more a jury member will hear about it. Consequently, the more the chances of watching it and the more the chances of them voting for it. The producers of the film play an important role in publicizing the movie to the jury, which again increases the chances of them watching it.
The Big Winners
The other highlight of the night was Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland winning the Best Picture, Best Actress, and Best Director. Chloe Zhao became only the second woman in more than nine decades of Oscars to have won the best director award. And Frances McDormand became just the second woman to have won three Best Actress Oscars. What a performance to get there! Her performance as Fern was brutal. Frances, along with Chloe, masterfully portrays the vulnerabilities of a woman who’s so used to being on the move all the time. When she is invited to her friend’s house, Chloe sets up the house like a prison. For the first time in the film, Fern is no longer a nomad. Not just that, for the first time in the film, the camera is stationary. The stagnant frame gives us a sense of unease, a deep dive into what Fern’s feeling when she’s unable to move around, a bird with its wings clipped.
The other big winner of the night was The Father, a film about an old man who has Alzheimer’s. Most films that deal with memory loss have the frame of reference as the real world or a real person who processes memory and time linearly. The Father flips this reference point, giving us the whole movie from the patient’s perspective. The result of this is an endearing emotional drama which talks about the potency of memory and the curse of time. And Anthony Hopkins hits it out of the park. It is heart-warming to see an actor with almost a fifty yearlong distinguished career give arguably his best performance at the age of 83.
Notable Contenders
There is Mank, one of the finest films of the year, about Hollywood in the 1930s and the unbreakable bond between cinema and politics. The film virtually stood no chance in the non-technical section of Oscars because of how vocally anti-Hollywood the film is. There is Minari, an endearing film about a Korean family trying to get accustomed to post-war America, trying to get a share of the Great Big American Dream. And then there is Promising Young Woman, a film with a brilliant screenplay and an equally brilliant Carey Mulligan. The Academy Award for Best Foreign Picture was awarded to Druk (Another Round), a story about four forty-something teachers who participate in a research study to see whether being mildly drunk help them perform better in their professional and personal lives.
What we have to say-
All in all, 2020 was a better year for cinema than it was for humanity. I don’t know if all the worthy ones were nominated or whether everyone who deserved to win won (by looking at the Internet, I guess the jury is still out).
All I can say is, most great actors win an Oscar, but most great performances don’t. Most great filmmakers win an Oscar, but most great films don’t.
About the Author: Adithya Seshadri is a management grad born in Chennai, currently living in an Wes Anderson movie. You can reach out to him here.
