To be an Oscar frontrunner these days is to exist in two disparate worlds of opposing consensus: the nominally real one, where paying audiences and industry folk are united in their enthusiasm for a broadly acclaimed film, and the online one, where a large and previously quiet faction of critics, Twitterati and under-article commenters gather to tell us how lousy it really is.
Damien Chazelle’s La La Land is discovering that now. Even before its record-setting sweep of seven Golden Globes on Sunday night, about as unambiguous a declaration of devotion from one corner as you could ask for, you could hardly move for internet hot takes decrying everything that’s supposedly wrong with the Los Angeles-besotted musical, from thin female characterization to a white-saviour complex on jazz to an uneven sound mix. (Yes, no stone is left unturned in the argumentative heat of awards season.)
But in the immediate wake of that emphatic Globes triumph – the loudest bellwether to date of the film’s long-presumed Oscar dominance – another accusation came to the fore: that the film, or more specifically its popularity within the industry, is emblematic of a kind of Hollywood solipsism, one that sees artists rewarding reflections of their world, their work and their privileged problems over stories and crises that lie further from home.
“It was hard not to feel that Hollywood had fallen in love – and not just with a movie, but with yet another intoxicating vision of itself,” the Los Angeles Times critic Justin Chang wrote the next day. That “yet another” pointedly alludes to the number of industry-focused films that have come out on top in recent awards seasons. Two years ago, after critics voted overwhelmingly in favor of Boyhood, Richard Linklater’s lovely long-game paean to middle-American ordinariness, Oscar voters brushed it aside for Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, a flashy backstage comedy revolving around an ageing Hollywood leading man’s crisis of self-worth. Glibly clever and artfully constructed, it nonetheless spoke to no audience quite as directly as the one in a position to hand it awards, and duly reaped the benefits.
Two years before that, Ben Affleck took the top prize for Argo, a tense, roaringly entertaining fact-based thriller in which outer-world political drama – the Iran hostage crisis of 1979 to 1981 – was given a literal Hollywood rescue, as the film drolly mapped out the artificial American film production dreamed up by the CIA and studio insiders to bring the captives home. And that was only a year after Hollywood fell head over heels for the French film-maker Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist, a delightful homage to American silent cinema and old-school silver-screen glamour that pre-empted much of what Birdman had to say about the insecurities of male stardom, albeit in a more winsome way. Taking five Oscars that same year? Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, a family fantasy in which a young Parisian orphan is enraptured by the innovations of the silent-cinema pioneer Georges Méliès.
Citing all these examples the day after the Globes, the film writer Mark Harris caustically implored awards voters to “stop ratifying yourselves”. He continued: “The history of the Oscars is going to be, ‘For decades, the Academy gave Best Picture to all kinds of things. Then they stopped.’”
Harris’s comments may not be entirely fair: alongside the aforementioned films, the Academy has also recently given their top honor to such stern, serious-minded films about subjects far outside the Tinseltown bubble as Spotlight, 12 Years a Slave and The Hurt Locker. Meanwhile, it would be reductive to suggest that films about the entertainment industry are inherently trivial or irrelevant to those outside it. La La Land’s bittersweet romance between a struggling actor and a struggling musician aims for a more universally poignant reflection on the pursuit of dreams, and the frequent incompatibility between personal ambition and romantic stability. The narrative, one pushed even by many of its admirers, that it’s a sunny escape outlet for audiences and awards voters alike from the troubled political present doesn’t quite account for what a melancholy, intimate reverie Chazelle has made; it’s not exactly Chekhovian in its human insight, but neither is it an alien property to many people who have been either in love or in career stasis.
Admittedly, it’s also not Moonlight, a film being presented by many critics as a neat corrective to the Hollywood insularity that benefits La La Land. Widely seen as running second to Chazelle’s film in the Oscar race, despite a dominant run through the US critics’ awards, Barry Jenkins’s delicate work of lyrical realism, focused on identity conflict and burgeoning sexuality within Miami’s disenfranchised African American community, could hardly seem less familiar to most west coast voters. Jenkins and his team didn’t hide their surprise when the Hollywood Foreign Press Association handed the film its best drama film prize after denying it any other wins – a victory largely overshadowed by La La Land’s vast haul. Beneath producer Adele Romanski’s onstage admission that she “didn’t think this was going to happen” was a suggestion that Moonlight’s team isn’t expecting the Hollywood vote – that they have suspicions about the limits, or at least the preferential inclinations, of the in-crowd’s empathy.
No film with a worldview quite like Moonlight’s has ever won best picture. And while it’s easy to argue for the formal daring, tonal novelty and accomplished high-wire execution of La La Land in many respects – only in the endlessly sniping atmosphere of awards season would a fully original contemporary musical be dismissed by detractors as “safe” or “formulaic” in 2017 – it’s harder to claim that its perspective on the world is one Academy types haven’t seen and endorsed before.
Hollywood’s fascination with its own image isn’t necessarily an artistically limiting one. If there were any journalists complaining about Oscar voters’ self-interested nature in 1950, when the race was led by two now-immortal black comedies on thespian self-interest (All About Eve and Sunset Boulevard), it’s safe to say the voters were right not to listen. And while Bob Fosse’s egotism was the butt of numerous media jokes in 1979, when his thrilling autobiographical backstage biopsy All That Jazz was up for best picture (it lost to the more tasteful and broadly relatable domestic drama of Kramer vs. Kramer), the film has outlasted them.
Meanwhile, it’s a misconception that Hollywood has always voted with one eye in the looking-glass; there have been eras of drably earnest Oscar voting when showbiz storytelling could hardly compete with more capital-I Important fare. Perhaps the Academy of today might have voted for Sydney Pollack’s wise, riotous TV-industry satire Tootsie over the laboriously noble Gandhi – a case of voters scrupulously attempting to recognize a world beyond their own, and getting it snoozily wrong in the process – and Hollywood history would be better for it. The mirror, quoth Barbra Streisand, has two faces, and sometimes seeing yourself isn’t quite the same as admiring the view. Which side of itself Los Angeles is collectively seeing in La La Land – a film that, in a single envelope, sends the City of Angels both a vibrantly painted valentine and a Dear John letter listing its crueler failings – is still open to question.
