Fun with numbers: Ranking the 2019 Best Picture Oscar nominees

So, the 2019 Oscar nominations are out and the fun begins. Variety releases its usual list of snubs and surprises. Websites/experts likewise express their opinions on the nominees. Various people get their 15 minutes of fame by expressing anger over inaccuracies or omissions in films which are based on real-life events or people they were related to.

As part of my own build-up of excitement leading up to awards night, I decided to have some fun by looking at each of the Best Picture nominees and applying a bit of superficial analysis to gauge their chances of winning the Oscar.

To begin with, I clustered the nominees into five groups:-

1. Political Intrigue – The Favourite, Vice
2. Music & musicians – Bohemian Rhapsody, A Star is Born
3. Race and inequality – BlacKkKlansman, Green Book
4. Superhero blockbuster – Black Panther
5. Family drama – Roma

Let’s get some context around each Oscar nominee; I have highlighted acting nominations as these indicate that the movie wasn’t just technically superior, but also delivered on emotional content. I have also highlighted cases where the movie’s director has not been nominated, which is unusual and usually is weakens its chances:-

• The Favourite, dir. by Yorgos Lanthimos, released by Fox Searchlight (10 nominations, including 3 for acting)
• Vice, dir. by Adam McKay, released by Annapurna (8 nominations, including 3 for acting)
• Bohemian Rhapsody, dir. by Bryan Singer (unofficially completed by Dexter Gordon), released by Fox (5 nominations, including 1 for acting, director not nominated)
• A Star is Born, dir. by Bradley Cooper, released by Warner Bros. (7 nominations, 3 for acting, director not nominated)
• BlacKkKlansman, dir. by Spike Lee, released by Focus Features/United International Pictures (6 nominations, including 1 for acting)
• Green Book, dir. by Peter Farrelly, released by Universal (5 nominations, including 2 for acting)
• Black Panther, dir. by Ryan Coogler, released by Buena Vista (7 nominations, none for acting)
• Roma, dir. by Alfonso Cuaron, released by Netflix (10 nominations, including 2 for acting)

Based on the above stats, one must assume the two movies which didn’t get Best Director nominations start at a disadvantage. Understandable that Bryan Singer hasn’t got a nomination for Bohemian Rhapsody, since he was sacked due to absenteeism weeks before completion of the movie. Bradley Cooper was nominated for his acting, but sadly not recognized for creating that intense, claustrophobic atmosphere in A Star is Born, that put the audience right in the middle of Ally and Jack’s lives.

With the Academy having a predominantly older white demographic, it’s unlikely that BlacKkKlansman will garner enough votes to get the top spot; we should just be grateful that Spike Lee has finally got a Best Director and Best Picture nomination after all these years.

Black Panther will likewise have to be grateful to be the first superhero pic nominated for Best Picture. It will probably pick up a bunch of technical awards, i.e. Costume Design, Product Design, Sound Mixing and Sound Editing, but the absence of any acting noms make it a difficult bet for Best Picture (the last movie to overcome this barrier was the closing chapter of The Lord of the Rings in 2003).

That leaves us with four real front-runners:-

• Green Book won ‘Best Picture – Musical or Comedy’ at the Golden Globes and won Best Picture at the Producers Guild awards, so that puts it in a strong position. It ticks pretty much all the boxes as you’ll see with my scorecard later on.

• Roma won Best Director at the Globes and also Best Foreign Film. It’s pretty much guaranteed that it will win Best Foreign Film at the Oscars as well. Will the Academy feel that is sufficient and deny it the big prize?

• The Favourite seems certain to pick up a win for one of its three actresses who are nominated, but it hasn’t won any other major awards for best picture and may be just a bit too quirky for the Academy. I admired the movie (there is no doubt that director Lanthimos has a singular and distinctive cinematic vision), but I didn’t love it in the way that I love Green Book or adore Roma. The fishbowl style cinematography and the discordant music together actually made me uncomfortable at times. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s probably a bit too edge for the Academy.

• Vice is a quintessentially American movie, a story of political intrigue and excess (not dissimilar to The Favourite) that is difficult to appreciate for those unfamiliar with the American political milieu. This comes from the same team behind The Big Short, which took on a similar irreverent tone to explain the Global Financial Crisis (which was of interest around the world). The best one can do is to marvel at Christian Bale’s transformation behind facial prosthetics into a spitting image of ex-Vice President Dick Chaney.

Next, I tried to put some science into this process and scored all eight films based on these criteria: feel-good quotient, emotional intensity, visual beauty, acting star power, social relevance, entertainment value. This is how they stacked up, the top four contenders listed first and the remaining four (some of which scored higher than the top four):-

Nominee	Feel-good	Emotional	Visual	Stars	Social	Entertaining	Total
Green Book	10	8	7	10	10	10	55
Roma	10	10	10	2	7	6	45
The Favourite	6	7	9	8	4	6	40
Vice	4	5	5	10	7	8	39
Black Panther	10	6	8	10	4	10	48
BlacKkKlansman	8	7	7	6	10	8	46
A Star is Born	4	10	8	10	6	8	46
Bohemian Rhapsody	9	6	8	7	6	10	46

So, the winner seems to be Green Book going by my pseudo-scientific, subjective calculations. If Roma can pick up Best Foreign Film and Best Director for Alfonso Cuaron, I will be very happy indeed!

Golden Globes hits the spot with awards to Roma and Green Book

I watched Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma and Peter Farrelly’s Green Book over the weekend as part of my usual Dec-Jan run through of award contenders. I enjoyed both tremendously and was so thrilled when they scored big wins at the Golden Globes a few hours later!

Roma’s win for Best Motion Picture – Foreign Language was the closest thing to a sure bet in this category, although Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters was an early favourite. But the win for Best Director to Alfonso Cuaron was unexpected, as many people expected that go to Bradley Cooper for A Star is Born.

Green Book on the other hand was a bigger surprise with three wins. The least surprising one was for Mahershala Ali as Best Supporting Actor and indeed, I think he’ll be the favourite to pick up his second Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in a few weeks’ time. The win for Best Screenplay against the likes of Roma, Vice, The Favourite and If Beale Street Could Talk was probably a close-run result, as it could just as easily have been any of the other four films. But I think it’s the win for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy that no one saw coming, as Adam McKay’s Vice was considered the front-runner. In retrospect, this win is a testament to how Green Book struck the perfect balance between being an accessible, entertaining movie, but also shone a light on the significant historical issue of race that continues to be unresolved even today.

Let’s look at each of the films in a bit more detail.

(L to R) Marco Graf as Pepe, Daniela Demesa as Sofi, Yalitza Aparicio as Cleo, Marina De Tavira as Sofia, Diego Cortina Autrey as Toño, Carlos Peralta Jacobson as Paco in Roma, written and directed by Alfonso Cuarón. Photo by Carlos Somonte

Roma is the story of one year in the life of an upper middle class Mexican family living in the suburb of Colonia Roma in Mexico City in 1970/71, told from the perspective of their live-in housekeeper Cleo. Roma has the look of a Kurosawa film – it’s shot in B&W in deep focus, which creates a flattened look with foreground and background elements in focus all the time; as a result, even extras in the background have to be ‘in character’, because the viewer can see everything on the screen clearly (think about all those village scenes in Seven Samurai). This movie is filled with memorable shots and sequences which I am sure I will re-watch again and again. Some are quietly humorous (the ongoing challenge of parking the Ford Galaxy in the driveway, the ridiculous martial arts antics of Cleo’s boyfriend Fermin), some are unbearably intense (the Corpus Christi riots and the subsequent hospital scene) and some are incredibly heartwarming (Sofia’s unconditional acceptance of Cleo’s ‘situation’, grandma Teresa’s distress on the way to the hospital, the beach scene at the end). All of this is set up in the first half hour with mundane family scenes that any of us can relate to, which then makes the subsequent events even more impactful. There are wonderful cinematic touches throughout the film that are rewarding for the observant viewer – the airplanes that bookend the movie (and particularly in the opening scene), the human cannonball, the clip from Marooned as an signpost to Cuaron’s previous movie Gravity, Cleo being able to do what none of the other martial arts students can, the fire on New Year’s eve, etc. The power of these images is so compelling that one almost doesn’t realize that the film has no musical score. It’s a real pity that Roma is not available in cinemas because that’s where one could really appreciate the visual beauty of the movie. I am not sure how many people so far bothered to watch this low-key B&W Spanish language film on Netflix, but I do hope audiences will discover and enjoy this gem for years to come.

Viggo Mortensen (left) as Frank “Tony Lip” Vallelonga and Mahershala Ali as Dr. Don Shirley in Green Book, directed by Peter Farrelly

Green Book tells the real-life story of a 1960’s musical tour of the Deep South by classical and jazz pianist Dr. Don Shirley, accompanied by an Italian-American named Frank Vallelonga, who served as Dr. Shirley’s driver and bodyguard. Green Book is a crowd-pleasing film, which upon premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival got a lot of positive buzz (and inevitable, though superficial comparisons to Driving Miss Daisy). It then quickly spiraled into unnecessary controversy over a well-meaning but racially inappropriate comment made by co-star Viggo Mortensen (for which he immediately apologized) and also criticism that the film wasn’t “woke” enough to be a truly meaningful exploration of race issues in the 1960s. This is something I just don’t understand or agree with; I feel that in recent years, American critics and social commentators have a bias against ‘feel-good’ movies and take a position that meaningful messages can only be delivered via edgy or angsty movies. As I mentioned earlier, I felt that Green Book has done a great job of being a crowd-pleaser as well as a ‘movie with a message’. It draws its energy almost entirely from the chemistry between co-stars Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen, both of whose works I’ve really enjoyed watching in the past few years. Mortensen is surely among the most under-rated and versatile leading men in Hollywood, having played King Aragorn in Lord of the Rings, a Spanish musketeer in Captain Alatriste, Austrian psycho-analyst Sigmund Freud in A Dangerous Method, a Danish adventurer in Jauja, a Russian mobster in Easter Promises and now an Italian-American night club bouncer in Green Book. How amazing also that Peter Farrelly, one half of the duo that brought us low brow comedies like Dumb and Dumber, There’s Something About Mary and The Three Stooges should direct such a genuinely heartwarming and thoughtful film!

In the ultimate analysis, Green Book is a film with a message, but told with a light touch. Roma on the other hand, is about everyday life in an upper middle class family, but tells a universal story about the human condition – particularly how love can help overcome loneliness and pain. Both were deserving winners at the Golden Globes and I hope their run continues through the awards season into Oscars night on 25th February.