« Green Book » would have been a good best picture winner in 1990, when « Driving Miss Daisy » took the top Oscar. Or in 2006, so…
« Green Book » would have been a good best picture winner in 1990, when « Driving Miss Daisy » took the top Oscar. Or in 2006, so we wouldn’t have had to hear about « Crash » for the next decade.
But in 2019? Not so much. « Green Book » winning Sunday at the 91st Academy Awards just felt really wrong, especially during an awards season where the story of a black classical musician and his white driver in the 1960s Jim Crow South has never quite been all right.
The movie navigated filmmaker controversies – director Peter Farrelly exposing himself, now-Oscar-winning screenwriter Nick Vallelonga’s controversial 9/11 tweets – as well as the family of one of its subjects, Dr. Don Shirley, calling it « a symphony of lies » and the story coming under fire for portraying race from a white point of view.
And somehow « Green Book » still won best picture. It’s a head-scratcher of a choice when sitting right there in the category were « Black Panther, » the blockbuster Marvel superhero movie that was a humongous, game-changing win for black representation, and Spike Lee’s « BlacKkKlansman, » which depicted a racist past that mirrors our current tumultuous times.
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It’s also the wrong choice on a night where Lee stood exultant with the first non-honorary Oscar of his long career and Hannah Beachler of « Black Panther » became the first African-American woman to win for production design.
