Why Roma Won’t Win Best Picture

The Best Picture race has never been less certain. I said that in 2018 and 2016 too. In 2017, I felt pretty confident then picked the wrong winner with absolute conviction. There hasn't been a certain winner going into the ceremony since The Artist won for 2011. This year, literally all 8 nominees feel like they have a chance to win, so I'm going to do a series on why they won't (and how they could). These will drop as each nominee runs out of precursor awards to learn anything from.

Finally, Netflix’s big move.

Most Similar Best Picture Winner: The Shape of Water

I thought Roma would be the easier film to find a similar Best Picture winner for, since it has the profile of a typical Oscar winner. It ended up being pretty difficult. Frankly, it looks the most like Alfonso Cuarón’s last film, Gravity, or his friend Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s The Revenant. Those both lost Best Picture though to films that weren’t as “technically impressive” as them, which Roma is in danger of as well. The Shape of Water works as a comp though, because the film won on the back of the director Guillermo Del Toro (also a friend of Cuarón’s). The Shape of Water did have a PGA Award win though which Roma failed to get.

Path to Victory:

Roma is the best made film of the nominees. I didn’t even care much for the movie, and I think that. Cuarón has made a beautiful film that is both small and intimate and big and overpowering at different points. I didn’t see a more exact movie in 2018, but it still manages to be a warm movie. I’m pretty sure the cold precision is what hurt Gravity’s Best Picture run five years ago. Not a concern this time. The only “Big 8”* precursor nomination Roma is missing is the SAG Ensemble award. I’m less worried about that, because the actors branch of the Academy specifically nominated Yalitza Aparicio and Marina de Tavira for acting Oscars, suggesting there’s more love in the Academy membership than in SAG membership. Cuarón won the DGA Award, which is the best indicator of which way the Best Picture Oscar will go. It also won the BAFTA Award for Best Film despite going up against the more British The Favourite. It’s really the mix of craft and heart that makes it easy to see why Roma is the most likely to win Best Picture. It’s Roma’s to lose.

Why That Won’t Work:

Roma is a foreign-language black-and-white movie, with mostly untrained and unknown actors, that most people had to see on Netflix rather than in a theater. That sentence contains most of the reasons why it might not win Best Picture. A foreign-language film hasn’t won Best Picure in modern times (1930’s All Quiet on the Western Front is the last one, I believe). I would like to deflate that a bit though. The Academy membership is significantly more international than it was a few years ago. It’s no coincidence that Roma, Cold War, Border, and Never Look Away were all foreign films that received nominations outside the Foreign Film award this year. The black-and-white element didn’t get in the way of The Artist winning less than a decade ago, and is a silent film any more of a turn off than a subtitled film?

I don’t know how to factor in the Netflix protest vote. I can’t remember a case where a frontrunner’s studio was protested but not the film. People don’t like how Netflix has tried to buy a win and bypass the standard release model. The lack of theater availability isn’t that significant though. So much of the Academy membership watches screener DVDs or through streaming services anyway.

Losing the WGA screenplay award isn’t great. It lost to Eighth Grade, which wasn’t even nominated for an Oscar, so that stings a little less. Losing the PGA award is more of a missed opportunity than a death blow. Roma won the only precursor award it HAD to: the DGA award. I could also quibble with the lack of a Film Editing Oscar nomination. Past Best Picture winners have survived worse though.