Why Vice Will Win Best Picture
'Tis the week before the Oscars, and 8 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 a few films have won any of the top prizes on the awards circuit, and one of those [Alfonso Cuarón's Roma] is a notable step ahead in the sweepstakes. However, many have called this one of the most wide-open Best Picture races in recent memory. Not only is no contender is a traditional winner, none 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 2016, and Moonlight's stunner in 2017 dared us to expect the unexpected, so we're here to give fans of all 8 nominated films reason to believe they might win the top honors on Sunday night.
How did Vice go from being one of the most divisive movies of the year to Oscar giant? It’s the question on everyone’s mind. The sweeping Dick Cheney biopic was labelled both 2018’s best film and worst film by different respected media outlets. On the whole, then, perhaps it’s no surprise that its reviews average out to a 61 on Metacritic, or roughly a C grade. Yet no movie from the year has as many Academy Award nominations as Vice does, with the Annapurna Pictures release garnering six on the night, including for Best Picture.
That last fact in itself is one reason why you would be silly to sleep on Vice as a legitimate contender. Sure, there are the odd instances of True Grit in 2010, where the most-nominated feature of the night can go home empty-handed, but typically a film that has secured more nominations than any other can be counted as a serious candidate for Best Picture.
Both the number of the movie’s nominations and its appeal as a Best Picture nominee might add to the unique style of the film itself. Love it or hate it, Vice is one of the more creative cinematic experiences of the year. It’s comedy, drama, documentary and surrealist satire, seemingly in equal doses. It’s not dissimilar at all from the style of director Adam McKay’s previous work, The Big Short, which was nominated for the award in 2016. Big Short received much more consistent positive reviews, and when it eventually lost out to Spotlight, there was a decent sect of film nuts that thought the deserving winner. So perhaps there is a sense of delayed gratification here: McKay and co. win the award they ‘deserved’ 3 years ago. It may seem far-fetched, but in several instances where less critically-acclaimed films won Best Picture, the driving force was a respected director who had never won the award, although in those cases it was an older veteran of the industry.
If we’re being honest, the biggest driver of this movie’s momentum is its subject matter. It posits itself as mostly a true story, but the lens through which it views Dick Cheney, as well as most everyone associated with the Bush administration, is certainly cynical. Knowing the well-documented political leanings of most in Hollywood, it’s not hard to imagine this being a crowd favorite among many voters. Although the administration in the film’s crosshairs is the one of yesterdecade, with Americans just a year away from the primaries for the 2020 Election, a vote for Vice from the Academy might just scratch the vengeful political itch Hollywood likely feels.