Remember Zero Dark Thirty? Kathryn Bigelow’s follow-up to The Hurt Locker was nominated for a well five Oscars, including best picture, actress, and
Remember Zero Dark Thirty? Kathryn Bigelow’s follow-up to The Hurt Locker was nominated for a well five Oscars, including best picture, actress, and original screenplay. But Bigelow’s film walked away from the 2013 ceremony with just one win—for best sound editing, and even that was a infrequent tie.
Perhaps the movie was bested by Argo because voters simply preferred that film. It probably didn’t hurt, though, that even as it was drawing rave reviews and bushels of awards nominations, Zero Dark Thirty was also being bombarded with criticism about its veracity and execution—so much that the film’s Wikipedia page has a “Controversies” heading with four separate subsections.
As Gregg Kilday wrote in The Hollywood Reporter that year, “Welcome to the dark side of awards season. For weeks, filmmakers have been putting their best feet forward, mingling sociably at cocktail parties and patiently answering the same questions over and over again at Q&As. But at the same time, behind the scenes, there’s a different conversation taking place.”
Once upon a time, those whisper campaigns flew under the radar for anyone who wasn’t an awards insider. But thanks to social media, now anybody can launch an opposition campaign against an Oscar contender. Read on to see which lines of attack detractors are taking for all the movies up for best picture this year—some of which are decidedly more sedate than others.
Neon.
Anora
Though Sean Baker’s films have long been beloved by critics, he’s been overlooked by the Academy until now. This year, Anora scored six total nods, including four for Baker himself: best picture, director, original screenplay, and film editing. The film, about a sex worker (Mikey Madison) who marries the son of a Russian oligarch, is a raucous good time with a devastating final scene.
Some audiences, however, have taken issue with Baker’s filmography, which is stacked with movies about sex workers. As VF’s own Richard Lawson put it in a larger consideration of Baker’s work, “One also may question whether he—a cis, white, straight, prep-school-educated filmmaker—is the best steward of stories like Tangerine (2015), a dash through the night following two trans sex workers of color as they scramble to keep afloat in Los Angeles. And what of 2012’s Starlet, a mostly prickly-sweet story of a young woman befriending an elderly widow that takes a graphic detour into pornography? What is it that drives Baker toward this subject matter so far outside his own experience? Is it prurience, or altruistic fascination?”
Lawson, for the record, concludes in his piece that those “questions become pedantic and fussy in the light of the films themselves.” Baker, too, has addressed the concerns head-on, saying, “My films are often just reactions to what I’m not seeing enough of in film and TV or what I want to see more of. I’m not the first to have an empathetic approach to sex work—definitely, not the first—but I don’t see a lot of it, and it’s few and far between.”
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