Who has brought up whether a film’s social significance has anything to do with how good a film it is?
If nominating Three Billboards didn't make me lose credibility in the Academy enough, nominating A Star Is Born definitely did.
I'll take 100 Star Is Borns over Three Billboards. Aggressively fine beats middling and insulting any day of the week.
Also I know this is probably going to get me @-ed a bunch of times but A Star Is Born was a really well-made movie. I wouldn't put it on my top ten favorite films of the year, and wouldn't have nominated it for Best Picture either, but I have to give it that.
I know everyone hates on The King’s Speech, but as a hardcore Colin Firth fan that movie will always hold a special place in my heart. That year was one of my favorite Oscar fields ever honestly. There were like four or five films at least that I was rooting for equally hard, and almost all of them took home major categories.
Black Panther stood out from the pack, specifically, because of how Coogler turned away from the "by the book-ness" of most MCU movies.
There’s way more going on in it than there needed to be to still have been a huge success. I love that you can watch it from the point of view of basically every main character and end up with a totally different story each time.
No one should be surprised at the black panther criticism. This happens everrrrryyyyyyyy year. When a movie gets lots of critical praise, there's going to be a good amount of backlash as well. It happened to Three Billboards last year. If that movie didn't get nominated for a ton of awards and got some decent critical reception, it would not be as talked about and as polarizing in this thread if it were just some other movie.
If Black Panther is "by-the-book" Marvel, I really wish they had made Iron Man 2, Thor, and Thor: The Dark World by that book as well.
did shape of water really win last year? i'll have to watch that one again because while it's not Kings speech level of "eh'ness", it certainly feels close to it.
Three Billboards is a bad example because that would have been problematic and crass and awful no matter what the reaction was. It wasn’t just, “It’s popular so I want to be contrarian,” backlash. That has definitely happened tons of other times though.
Both movies are of a type (superhero/horror) that are traditionally snubbed by the Very Serious Academy, but Get Out is an incredibly well made, unique movie within its own genre, so it makes sense to me that it they would carve out an exception for it like they did. It’s not like I dislike Black Panther or anything, but I can’t say the same thing about it. Obviously BP is a huge cultural phenomenon, but if mass popularity / cultural significance determined the Oscar noms then they would look entirely different and very likely *would* include those kinds of movies more often.
This would mean more if you actually discussed how it is good or unique rather than just repeatedly asserting that it is.
I loved it the first time. Not as much on repeated viewings. Pretty much the same way I felt about “Slumdog Millionaire.”