Why Get Out Will Win Best Picture
'Tis the week before the Oscars, and 9 films are ramping up their campaigns in a last-minute push for the top prize of them all, Best Picture. The biggest award has the potential to be either one of the most anticlimactic or most surprising result in recent years. The former is true, because really only two films have won any of the prizes on the awards circuit, and one of those [Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water] is a notable step ahead in the sweepstakes. However, neither frontrunner is a traditional winner, nor is without controversy; those facts, as well as the Oscars' less predictable preferential voting system means that no nominee can be counted out of the race. Birdman's and Spotlight's upsets in 2015 and 16, and Moonlight's stunner last year taught us to expect the unexpected, so we're here to give fans of all 9 nominees reason to believe on Sunday.
To kick off this series, I'm starting with the Best Picture nominee that I saw the earliest. When I first saw Jordan Peele's Get Out back in April of 2017, I didn't truly know what to expect. The trippy, unsettling trailer certainly didn't give me any sort of bearing as to what the viewing experience would be like. And in fact, when I left the theatre that Spring night, I certainly didn't think I had just watched a possible Best Picture winner.
So why, 10 months later, am I starting to convince myself that Get Out is the nominee most likely to crash the party and score an upset victory? Multiple reasons. For starters, Universal Pictures is going all in on its campaign. Money is being poured into advertising across Los Angeles, and the fact that a release from the first quarter of the year is suddenly omnipresent in Hollywood-- and, perhaps more telling, that said promotion has apparently been universally well-received --can only indicate a case of gaining momentum at the absolute right time.
The foremost reason, though, pertains to the film's quality: it appears that, just as it did with me, the movie's reputation is aging extremely well with critics and voters, with more and more voices calling for it to take the prize. It's not a film that one necessarily falls in love with upon first viewing; but for anyone to use that to count points against it would be betraying Peele's motive.
The motive here was to enthrall, to engage, and in fact, to enrage. And that ploy is executed with such panache from the director, such marvelous acting from relative youngsters Daniel Kaluuya and Alison Williams, and a perfect amount of comedy from Lil Rel Howery, that Get Out has become a cultural phenomenon. References to the Sunken Place, memes of the famous running scene, and fan theories were abound on social media this past year. Its central focus, on how white Americans from the Left to the Right are all complicit in creating the horror that is being black in America, is an example of exactly the sort of uncomfortable truths that are coming to the forefront presently. It may not be enough to say that the highest amount of people want Get Out to win. Rather, many people need Get Out to win. And maybe, just maybe, the Academy will take note.