But the moment most emblematic of the Academy schism came during the back-to-back presentations of the two Screenplay awards, with Nick Vallelonga taking Best Original for “Green Book” (I mean, come on, “The Favourite” was right there), immediately followed by Spike Lee winning for “BlacKkKlansman.” It’s not often that we can say “at that moment, we were all Samuel L. Jackson,” but the way he stumbled over reading out Vallelonga’s name, like a horse refusing a particularly gnarly looking fence (and having to be led around it by Brie Larson) but then bellowed “Spike Leeeeeeeeeeeeee” for his buddy’s extremely welcome win was truly when he spoke for all of us. Vallelonga’s history of Islamophobic tweeting (particularly icky given Mahershala Ali is Muslim), his film’s blackballing by the family of the black man it purports to celebrate, and the widespread acknowledgment of “Green Book” as the worst type of cocktail-liberal pandering to the kind of white guilt that feels aggrieved at being made to feel guilty, should have kept him off the podium, especially when there were other strong contenders in that category. And frankly, it tarnished Spike Lee’s political, polemical and wildly overdue acceptance speech by association, making these two guys equivalent on the night when these. Two. Guys. Are. Not. Equivalent.
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We’ve been as guilty as anyone of touting the New Model Academy as a place where this kind of injustice and tone-deafness should be a thing of the past, where the main thing we’re going to fight about will be, you know, the actual quality of the work in each category. But last night showed us rudely just how far we are from that Utopian ideal, and depressingly suggests that even though the profile of the membership has changed drastically for the better and more diverse in recent years, as an institution, by and large, it can still suffer from the kind of failure of imagination that leads people to confuse what a film is about with what it is— which is the nicest way I can think of to account for the evening’s more egregiously terrible winners.
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And so, barring some sort of Thanos-snap event, it will take time, and natural wastage before the New wholly supplant the Old, by which time the new will be significantly older anyway. After the heady high of the “Moonlight” win just two years ago (and the pleasure of the weird, genre-inflected, female-led “Shape of Water” taking Best Picture last year) the only thing proven by last’s night grimly polite battleground is that the Academy ain’t “fixed” yet, and in fact, the injection of fresh blood may have just contributed to a weird partisan factionalism that will always see a few categories fall to the wrong winners out of what looks a lot like spite. With a hall-of-shame Best Picture winner, and the most awarded film of the night being a straightwashed jukebox musical directed by [screeching of macaques], the Academy’s soul, as an entity dedicated to recognizing and furthering actual artistic achievement in cinema, is clearly not something that got saved a couple of years back and now we can just look forward to the march of progress forever. It’s a soul that those who care about movies and think that the Academy has a role to play, however compromised, in promoting them, are going to have to fight for, again and again, category by category, every year, however exhausting that sounds, because the default position is not progress. It’s “Green Book.”
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