By Jared Free

The 2019 Oscars will go down in history as not just one of the few ceremonies to honor a film that is actually good with Best Picture, but this is the first year where the top prize went to a foreign film. After 92 years of great foreign film, what made this year different?

After four years of being blasted by Trump again and again, I think Hollywood was ready to be on the right side of history. By now the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences is used to being lambasted by critics on both sides of the political spectrum, but after the inexplicable win of Green Book and amid more and more protestations of #OscarsSoWhite, it would seem that enough members of the Academy were ready for some digital praise.

Of course, it didn’t help that the so-called Oscar movies produced by Hollywood have been on a pretty noticeable decline. Once the Weinstein brothers changed the way studios and stars campaign for their Oscars, it became evident that the Academy doesn’t vote for the movie they think is the best. Facetime with celebrities and filmmakers is more important than ever, so even a movie as critically acclaimed and popular with the masses as Parasite must launch a massive campaign to snatch a nomination, let alone a win. Director Bong Joon-Ho has said that he’s so exhausted from the campaign his distributor Neon put on that he can’t even think about making more films — despite the fact that a mini-series adaption of Parasite is already in development at HBO.

But it seems like a truth universally acknowledged that American prestige filmmaking is churning out more of the same. Even the new offerings from popular directors that hit last year feel familiar at best, and repetitive at worst. Scorsese’s the Irishman gives Goodfellas (or wait, was it Casino? No, it must have been Mean Streets. Or maybe it was…) the three-hour treatment we were all clamoring for — and with all the same actors! Marvel’s best attempts to make a movie with some kind of emotional depth failed (for about the 20th time), and even the supposedly subversive and controversial JoJo Rabbit and Joker ended up being more smoke than fire.

What does all this mean for the future of the Oscars? Film? The world? Probably nothing. If this era of woke, callout, and cancel culture has shown us anything, it’s that huge corporations will make surface level adjustments to their messaging while continuing down the same path they always have. But it could mean more opportunities for filmmakers to tell personal stories that might not have even gotten off of the ground just a few years ago.

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Lucretia Free