"Green Book" won "Best" Picture?

The very idea of picking a Best Picture winner in any given year is frivolous, stupid, and plain old silly. Film is an inherently subjective medium, so there will never be a movie everyone agrees is the unequivocal “best”. Around 600 movies are produced each year in the U.S. alone, of so many different genres, budgets, and themes that no two can be compared by the same terms. The word “best” implies an objective choice when the winner will always be far from it.

Take this year’s Academy Awards, for instance. Of the eight Best Picture nominees, you might have opted for “Black Panther”, the most socially relevant movie of the bunch. Or “A Star Is Born”, the movie that made you cry the most. If you wanted technical excellence and personal filmmaking, you could’ve rooted for “Roma”. There are a lot of different criteria for judging a film, and this year’s actual Best Picture winner, “Green Book”, meets none of them.

“Green Book” was close to nobody’s absolute favorite movie of the year. The Academy picked the safest, blandest, most jaw-droppingly backwards film possible.

The movie is a true story about a gay Black man with multiple doctorates named Don Shirley, who is on a piano tour through the deep South in the 1960’s. Sounds pretty compelling, right? Except that the story is told from the perspective of his white driver.

There are two problems with this other than the driver’s story simply being less interesting. First, it perpetuates the “white savior” narrative that has plagued Hollywood for decades. This is a cinematic trope where a non-white character is helped by a white character to achieve their goals, and the white character is portrayed as heroic. It has cropped up in films like “Mississippi Burning”, “Glory”, “The Help”, and “Hidden Figures”. White savior films are obviously belittling towards non-whites and they make movies that are ostensibly about minorities in the lead roles really about the white characters.

“Green Book” is literally a white-savior movie because its lead character, the driver named Tony Vallelonga, is also Shirley’s bodyguard (and a racist). But this is a true story, so that’s not the problem. The problem is that Shirley is portrayed as disconnected from both Black and white communities, a loner who has never eaten fried chicken and apparently knows nothing about his own culture, as Vallelonga puts it. Shirley’s real-life family have said that this was not an accurate representation of Shirley, as he was not estranged from his family and he had eaten fried chicken before.

More troubling, though, is that Vallelonga appears to “save” Shirley, introducing him to Black culture and welcoming him into his own home when Shirley’s own community would not.

The second issue is the film’s message about racism in America. Race is at the heart of the film because it is about the unlikely friendship between a racist and a Black man. By the end of the movie (I guess this is the time for a spoiler alert, but this movie is honestly so predictable that watching paint dry would provide more twists and turns), Shirley and Vallelonga are essentially best buds. Vallelonga welcomes the downbeat Shirley into his home, and after literally 7 seconds (I counted), Vallelonga’s previously racist family wholeheartedly embraces the Black man who they have never met before.

The real-life Shirley family also claimed that these two were never really friends, so already, the film is a lie on the surface level. But the deeper message is that “it’s OK if you’re racist, because we can all still be friends.” The film doesn’t condone racism, it ignores it. This would never have happened in the 1960’s, and still won’t happen today. “Green Book” kind of says, “Hey, look at all this racism that used to happen. But don’t worry, we’re over it now, and we can all get along by just talking.”

All of that being said, “Green Book” is not a bad movie. Far from it. It’s well-paced, very enjoyable, and features superb acting by Mahershala Ali as Shirley and Viggo Mortensen as Vallelonga. Being an entertaining movie, however, doesn’t mean it’s the best movie of the year. It’s a crowd pleaser, but with a message so bland that it’s likely to be forgotten soon after seeing it. It’s not a remarkable, transcendent movie, like many of the other Best Picture nominees.

The movie is set in 1962, but unlike so many of our current period pieces that seem to be more timely than ever, “Green Book” is stuck in the past. In a year when “Black Panther”, “Sorry to Bother You”, and “If Beale Street Could Talk” were released, it feels like a movie that would have been made 30 years ago, when Hollywood was beginning to diversify, but only superficially, when they weren’t quite ready to really confront the deep-seated issue of racism.

Oh . . . wait a minute. Hollywood did make this movie 30 years ago. It’s called “Driving Miss Daisy”, released in 1989, about the unlikely friendship between a white woman and her Black driver. It, too, won Best Picture. And that was the year that Spike Lee’s seminal “Do the Right Thing” was released and wasn’t even nominated for the award.

Even if that blunder wasn’t exactly acceptable, at least it was understandable in an era when Oscar voters were mostly old, white men. Now it’s 2019, and the same thing just happened again. Lee’s latest masterwork, “BlacKkKlansman”, was also up for Best Picture, alongside “Green Book”. In a year when the Academy had been praised for adding thousands of new, non-white, non-male members and giving awards to Black women in technical categories for the first time, voters not only snubbed Lee, but added insult to injury by allowing the very antithesis of his socially-aware film to win the film industry’s top prize.

Ultimately, “Green Book” is a backwards-looking film, one that relishes in traditional values of right and wrong and is eager to please everyone, while ignoring the cultural zeitgeist. It is the opposite of a timeless movie: a movie stuck in its time. Thirty years from now, “Green Book” will be remembered not only for being the wrong pick, but a shameful one.