Why The Post 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.
Even before The Post hit the theatres, it had seemingly secured a place the Best Picture field. Not only was there an expectation that this movie would be good, there was a prevailing belief that it would be a prime example ‘Oscar bait’; a movie so clearly made with all the trappings of typical Oscar winners that you could practically hear the statues being engraved already. Unfortunately for Post backers, in this day and age, and with these increasingly young and diverse voting members, being an Oscar Bait movie is more likely to be a liability for its chances than an advantage. That assumption doesn’t suddenly rid The Post of all those elements, though, and it’d be silly to count this one out. So what are the pieces that made this such a presumed awards-show slam dunk?
It starts at the top, with a legendary director. Steven Spielberg is easily the most famous name in film directing (perhaps 2nd only to Martin Scorcese, and even that’s a stretch), and is still churning out high-quality cinema at age 71. Spielberg hasn’t won Best Director since 1999, and hasn’t won Best Picture since 1994, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s been nominated for the former 7 times, and has directed Best Picture nominees 10 times. The man’s an Oscar regular, in other words, and you never know when the familiarity or legacy factor may kick in for voting members.
Speaking of familiarity and legacy: the actors! The Post really does have a spectacular cast, but it’s clearly driven by its leads. And those leads are none other than Meryl Streep, Oscar queen, and Tom Hanks, America’s president. Hanks was left out of the nominations, and Streep almost surely won’t win, but everyone knows their proficiency. The fact that the two acting icons had never appeared in a film together just lends to the campaign of sentimentality.
Yet, shockingly, neither director nor actors is The Post’s strongest bargaining chip. No, that would be the story itself. Cinema and investigative journalism have had a long, wonderful relationship. Even before Spotlight took top prize 2 years ago, All The President’s Men (1976), The Insider (1999), and Good Night And Good Luck (2005) were considered some of the finer movies of their respective decades— a critical consensus with which I’d concur. Yet, the story of the Washington Post’s grappling with the Nixon administration over whether they could publish the Pentagon Papers is more than just an investigative journalism tale. It’s a story of the fight for journalistic freedom, and freedom of speech, tenets of American democracy. In an era in which the American president (who is not overly popular in Hollywood) has made a pastime of taking aim at journalists, a victory for The Post could be a symbolic victory for Hollywood and the press alike.