Last week, Green book took home the Academy Award for Best Picture of 2018. Achieving that title used to mark the biggest and most significant accomplishment for any single film and everyone associated with it. Nowadays the significance lies mostly with the nomination and not the actual award.
The reason the award itself has lost much of its weight could be rooted in the Academy’s reluctance to adapting to the flux of ideologies and themes that have found their way into popular culture. This is mostly due to the industry and in general, society, becoming more tolerant of women, people of color, the LGBTQ community and stories and art centered around them and created by them.
The Academy picks in the past few years have been at best politically or socially charged and at worst solely based on the popular opinion or the least controversial. This year we saw an obvious example of the academy going with the most comfortable option. Truth is, Roma being a foreign language film or Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse being an animation never really had a chance against a heartwarming story about racism that only warms the hearts of the privileged and people who don’t have any tangible experience with discrimination.
Green Book is advertised as a remarkable black musician’s story but it’s really the story of a racist driver from the Bronx. Tony Vallelonga is the main character of Green Book. We spend the first 20 minutes of the film with him and get to meet his family, friends and get a hint of his racism. In later scenes, we are faced with instances of physical racism and are led to feel that Tony’s racism wasn’t that bad and he’s actually a “good guy”.
Furthermore, a family as intolerant and ignorant as Vallelonga’s family is portrayed to be in the earlier scenes, could not possibly have changed enough to embrace Dr. Shirley at the end of the movie with such warmth in the short span of Tony’s absence, not to mention they didn’t even go through the “life-changing experience” that Tony did.
Green Book is a textbook successful movie, it’s beautifully shot and the dialogue is captivating but the story arc and the concept its built upon just feels unbelievable and forced, similar to someone mentioning they have a diverse friend group as a response to being called racist. Being friends with people of color doesn’t automatically exempt anyone from being racist. On the contrary, the claim exhibits a lack of understanding of such a delicate subject.
In short, Green Book is a mediocre movie that’s been engineered to entertain everyone and it does, but a deeper look into the story reveals the shallow nature of it.
If you want to watch some of this year’s Oscar-nominated movies but don’t know where to start, check out how I’ve rated them in this IMDb list:
https://www.imdb.com/list/ls046304537/
