'Green Book' and 'Bohemian Rhapsody' show strength of popular films - The Australian Financial Review

Smooth sailing, of course, had not been predicted for Roma. It had a lot of barriers to overcome to win best picture, including being a Spanish-language drama shot in black and white and distributed by Netflix, an entity that a portion of the film community views as an existential threat.

But, put in the context of the entire evening, Roma's loss to Green Book looks like something else. It looks like a change of course for the academy, away from the small artistic films that have dominated the best picture ranks in recent years.

Admire them or not, there is no denying that the best picture winners of the past five years - Shape of Water, Moonlight, Spotlight, Birdman and 12 Years A Slave - have not had a box-office titan among them.

You have to go back to 2012 and Argo, or perhaps even further, to get a winner with the look and feel of a commercial picture.

Rami Malek accepts the award for best performance by an actor in a leading role for Bohemian Rhapsody CHRIS PIZZELLO

The membership this year would have none of it. Voters went for Green Book a film whose box-office grosses continued to climb and climb even as it weathered a series of pubic relations disasters.

But those blunders by the filmmakers turned out not to matter because, as I noted when it came out, Green Book is a practiced crowd-pleaser, and "it is deeply embedded in the film's DNA to make us feel good."

The academy, as much as it wants the public to think differently, is made up of movie goers who are as susceptible as non-professionals to these kinds of blandishments. The members vote for what they like and rationalise it to themselves later on.

If there was a precursor to Green Book's best picture win, it was not only that screenplay victory but the way the academy couldn't get enough of voting for the weak and cliched Bohemian Rhapsody.

Though Rami Malek's victory as lead actor was forecast, no pundit I read expected the movie to walk off with four Oscars, the others for editing, sound mixing and sound editing.

For a film this feeble to have led all comers with four Oscar victories - more than the original Godfather - is something that will do the academy's reputation as an arbiter of taste no favours.

If there was a positive side to the return of Oscar populism, it was in the three key awards won by Black Panther, including costume design, production design and score.

This is prestigious territory for what too many voters likely denigrated as a comic-book movie, and the moving speeches by winners including Ruth E. Carter for costume design and the emotional Hannah Beachler for production design underlined how meaningful those victories were.

If voters had followed that populist instinct but instead channelled it toward the best popular film in the race, Ryan Coogler's Black Panther, it would have turned a dissonant night into a beautiful and triumphant one. It was not to be.

MCT

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