Decoding the 2015 Oscars: The ‘Birdman’ Win and What It Tells Us About Hollywood
Last night’s Academy Awards was touted as one of the closest races in years. The Best Picture preferential ballot was going to make things impossible to predict! Bradley Cooper was coming on strong! American Sniper’s booming performance at the box office was a narrative changer! Academy voters really, really like [fill in the movie title], so don’t be surprised if it pulls off an upset!![]() |
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) director Alejandro González Iñárritu is the big winner |
Also not surprising: As seems to happen every year, approximately 80 percent of the nominees lost. This can lead to bad feelings and gripes about what “the Academy” does and does not get and does and does not like, as if the Academy is a monolith. It is not; if anything, it is a house divided against itself, though one that manages to remain standing. In fact, sometimes it’s the very act of standing that exposes the deepest divisions. As the in-house thunderous ovation for the Oscar-winning song “Glory” from Selma attested, there is a large Academy contingent (the “still healthy enough to attend the show” demographic) that pretty clearly feels Ava DuVernay’s film got screwed. I’m with them.
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Michael Keaton as Birdman |
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Director Alejandro González Iñárritu during his acceptance speech |
Back then, the Academy coped with that anxiety — the threat of a scary and bewildering future — by looking backward. Thirty years later, it is coping with it by looking inward with The Artist, Argo, and Birdman. Stow these movies in a time capsule and 50 years hence, our descendants won’t learn much about what Oscar voters thought of the world, but they’ll learn a great deal about what Oscar voters thought of themselves.
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Or don’t do that, because the truth is, the time-capsule approach to Oscar voting is overrated. The Oscars aren’t really about posterity (they’ve never enhanced the long-term reputation of a winner or damaged a loser); they’re about transience, a selfie snapped at the end of a long campaign. And what this selfie said was “Come on, we’re trying.” The sing-off between Neil Patrick Harris and Anna Kendrick and Jack Black was, even by the standards of a fairly self-conscious ceremony, very meta. Those two strains of argument — “Let’s celebrate our effort!” and “This business is going to hell!” — sat side by side in the house last night, and, of course, the winning movie was the one that cannily embraced both of those views.
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The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) & Birman (2014) took home the most Academy Awards in 2015 |
Where do we go from here? Far away from the surliness that has come to define too much of the season, I hope. A year in which Selma and Boyhood and Birdman and Whiplash and Nightcrawler and Foxcatcher and The Grand Budapest Hotel were all nominees is not a year in which one should be particularly dour about the state of ambitious American movies or the ability of the Academy to spot them. A year in which an 84-year-old man directs a blockbuster that dwarfs the rest of the competition at the box office and in which 1965 can be commemorated with equal fervency because of both the march in Selma and the release of The Sound of Music is a reminder that careers are gratifyingly long and the Academy’s sense of history is surpassingly weird. A year in which Birdman wins Best Picture is a year in which the industry’s top prize goes to a good movie rather than a bad one, for which let us give thanks. And a year, or 12 of them, in which Richard Linklater makes Boyhood brings us back to what we’ve known all along, which is that there are some achievements that do not need the validation of a statuette.
I have no idea what next year’s Oscar race will be like, but I’ve looked over the release calendar and I don’t see a single movie about movies. I couldn’t be happier — and if I’m missing one, I’m OK with that too; it’s been a long season, and for now, I’m more than willing to give in to the unexpected virtue of ignorance.
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