We’re less than a week out. By Monday, the Oscars will be over, and the next Oscar season will have begun. Despite my protestations, it’s a year-round Oscars season now, and try as you might, you won’t be able to resist clicking on those “Predicting the 2024 Oscars” pieces that will go up on Monday or Tuesday morning. Actually, some are already up. Click if you must. You’re only human.
Personally, I find it hard to love the Oscars unequivocally when all the coverage is on the horse race. Predicting the winners is a guilty pleasure. I’m happy to do it (in fact, I did it here), but I don’t want to make my entire life about it. And yet I still want to care about the Oscars. My strategy is to focus on my energy on the non-prediction elements of the Oscars. The other storylines. So here are a couple things I’ve been thinking about.
(Before I do, I’d be remiss to not direct you to the two Oscar-related pieces I published elsewhere in the last couple weeks. Over at Decider, I explained why Top Gun: Maverick is worthy of its Best Picture nomination, and at The Ringer, I went deep on the incredible directing achievement that is The Fabelmans. I’m proud of both these pieces and would be happy if you read them.)
(Finally, did I mention I’m giving a virtual lecture tonight on the Oscars for Smithsonian Associates? Well, I am, and you should absolutely join. It’s always a blast, with a spirited Q&A at the end).
Okay, now here’s what I’ve been thinking about:
Why Tom Cruise is Back at the Oscars
For starters, he’s an Oscar-nominated producer. Although he wasn’t nominated for Best Actor, Cruise will be invited to the Oscars as a producer of Top Gun: Maverick. Earlier this awards season, some (me, for starters) questioned whether Cruise, who has shunned the ceremony since 2012, would attend. Cruise was once a semi-regular at the ceremony, in addition to being a four-time nominee), but in recent years it has started to feel like he and the Oscars were simply on parallel tracks. Cruise spent half his career angling for an Oscar, but his interests seemed to have shifted. Now he wants to die on a movie set.
Top Gun: Maverick is different, though. It is, according to many, the movie that saved theatrical distribution. Even Steven Spielberg thinks so. So maybe this awards season is one big victory lap for Cruise, who is getting feted wherever he goes, whether it’s at the Oscars lunch or at the Producers Guild Awards, where he was honored with a lifetime achievement award. Being credited for saving movies could certainly make a person feel more connected to the Hollywood community.
Or maybe he is just really proud of Top Gun and wants to represent the movie well. As I wrote for Decider, the film was an incredible accomplishment of craft. A true team effort. Planes were invented for it. The actors went through a three-month training program (designed by Cruise himself) before shooting. The director spent two years convincing the Navy to let him use a particular plane. Cruise might feel he is simply using his celebrity to honor the below-the-line artists.
Or maybe…just maybe…this is the beginning of something else. As much as we joke about Cruise making Mission: Impossible movies until he dies, there are signs he’s wrapping things up there. He just shot two of these movies back-to-back. He’s 60 years old. I’m sorry, folks, he can’t do this forever. He’s not a superhero, despite what some idiots have argued. Which means that at some point he’ll have to pivot to a new phase of his career, and it’s incredibly likely this new phase will involve more Oscar-friendly fare. To be honest, that’s all an actor in his ‘60s and ‘70s can really do, unless they want to do cameos in Marvel movies. I don’t see Cruise making one of those old-folks-gone-wild comedies (at least not yet). Instead, he’s going to start working with serious directors again and play some fucked-up dudes. He just has to.
And when he does, he’s going to need the Academy. Oscar voters will be major players in that next phase of his career. And I wonder if part of what’s motivating Cruise right now is that he needs to make nice with them. He needs to become part of their community again, as opposed to part of the Thetan community. In other words, this is not a one-off. Tom Cruise might be back at the Oscars in years to come, sitting in the front row, just where he belongs. It starts this year.
In Which I Try to Talk About Race
If Everything Everywhere All at Once wins Best Picture as predicted on Sunday, it will be the second film about Asian or Asian-American characters to win Best Picture in four years. In between, another such film, Minari, was nominated for Best Picture and won a major acting award. To be clear, I’m aware these movies are not all the same. Parasite is a Korean film set in Korea. EEAAO is an American film co-directed by an Asian-American about a Chinese immigrant family. Minari is about a Korean immigrant family.
And yet let’s do a stupid thing and lump them together if only for a moment so we can examine why the Academy is suddenly so open to Asian and Asian-American filmmaking and still so resistant to filmmaking from other marginalized ethnicities and races. Mostly, I’m talking about Black filmmakers. There were two Black actors nominated this year, and one of them—Angela Bassett—has a strong chance to win. No small thing. But The Woman King was shut out completely, failing to even get a nomination for its incredible costume design. Danielle Deadwyler from Till failed to get a nomination for Best Actress, and I defy you to find five better lead performances (of either gender) from last year. There were also zero nominations for Jordan Peele’s Nope, a film I admired more than I loved but, as a high-grossing movie about moviemaking, would seem to fall right in the Academy’s sweet spot.
So what’s the deal here? There are a few ways to think about this, but I think it’s fair to wonder if the make-up of the Academy, despite being far more inclusive than it once was, is just far more friendly to Asian filmmakers than to Black filmmakers. Starting in 2016, AMPAS made a multi-year effort to invite more women, artists of color, and international artists. We don’t have the exact numbers for any of this, but it’s certainly possible that any gains that were made for Black films by inviting more Black artists were negated by all the international invitees. Would Academy members from China, Brazil, India, or Poland be more likely to connect with Black filmmaking than a generic white filmmaker from Los Angeles? I couldn’t say for sure, but I suspect not. Not that they’re opposed to supporting Black artists, but those artists unfortunately don’t have the same international standing. It’s truly a vicious cycle.
Meanwhile, a film like Everything Everywhere All at Once is perfect for the new Academy. It’s an American movie influenced by Chinese cinema starring Michelle Yeoh, who was an action star in China before coming to Hollywood in the ‘90s. Since then, she has maintained star status in both hemispheres. Same with Triangle of Sadness, whose director Ruben Östlund is an awards darling in Europe; he’s a two-time winner of the Palme D’or, the highest honor at the Cannes Film Festival.
I think there’s also another element at play. It’s hard to talk about. But again, I’m going to try. These films by Asian directors are not about racism, or at least not nearly as much as recent serious films by Black directors. They don’t implicate white audiences. In fact, they embrace them. Bong Joon-ho, the director of Parasite, is hugely influenced by American blockbuster filmmaking. In Minari, the main white character (played by Will Patton) is a weirdo, but he’s a nice man who poses no threat. Everything Everywhere All at Once has some white characters who are perceived as threats by its hero—the daughter’s girlfriend, the Jewish stereotype, Jamie Lee Curtis—but the film opens its arms to them by the end. It’s a love fest, and they’re all invited.
On the other hand, Till is a punishing story revolving around the murder of an innocent young Black man by white racists. Deadwyler’s performance is riveting, but it’s rippling with intense emotional pain. It would be too easy for white Academy members to put off watching it until it was too late (despite the fact that it’s their responsibility to do so). Nope isn’t about pain, but it still bites the Hollywood hand that feeds. Its central metaphor implicitly criticizes Hollywood for profiting off of the suffering of marginalized actors. It’s not shocking that the greater Hollywood community would be less interested in honoring a film like that.
It all adds up to a somewhat impossible situation for Black filmmakers. If they make an honest film about racism, the Academy gets turned off (unless they give it a happy ending, like 12 Years a Slave or Hidden Figures). If they ignore racism for the sake of winning over the Academy, well, what’s the point of that? It has been 6 years since Moonlight won Best Picture—a film, by the way, that is partially about race but is in no way about racism—and that’s far too long to go without another Black film being a serious contender for Best Picture. Having said that, there are no easy answers here. The more they try to create access for Black filmmakers in Hollywood, the clearer it is that some paths are still blocked.
None of this should take away from the excitement of Everything Everywhere All at Once, a film I really didn’t love but nonetheless represents an exciting development for the Academy. If a non-studio, multiverse kung fu movie about an Asian family can win Best Picture, anything is possible. But I don’t blame Black filmmakers who feel it’s still not as possible for them.