The Oscars are only a few years away from their 100th anniversary, having first been held in 1929. In that time, the pinnacle of awards season has cemented itself as Hollywood’s Biggest Night, seen as the crowning moment for the best in cinema in any given year, as judged by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. For every inspired decision and deserving winner, like One Battle After Another this year, however, the statuettes have, on plenty of occasions, gone to films or performances that have left observers scratching their heads when considering the other potential nominees around them. That’s been especially true of the Best Picture category, with one of the most controversial winners in the event’s history releasing in theaters just under eight years ago.
Directed by Peter Farrelly, the biographical dramedy Green Book wasn’t a terrible movie, earning a 77% from Critics on Rotten Tomatoes and featuring two stellar performances from Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen. However, its stiff competition featured one of Marvel’s most affecting movies to-date, Black Panther, which was hailed as a far more powerful and important representation of African-Americans and African culture and politics, as well as Spike Lee‘s BlacKkKlansman, Alfonso Cuarón‘s Roma, and Adam McKay‘s Vice, among others. Though the story of the blossoming friendship between a renowned African-American pianist and the Bronx bouncer he hired for his tour through the deep South made for a fine crowdpleaser, it was quickly viewed in retrospect as the wrong choice and a go-to answer for an example of the Academy’s failures. However, despite the poor reputation, audiences are continuing to revisit it years later.
Currently, Green Book is sitting in third place on Netflix’s U.S. film chart, sandwiched between Taron Egerton and CharlizeTheron‘s new survival thriller Apex and the Ryan Reynolds and Sandra Bullock rom-com, The Proposal. The film’s streaming resurrection isn’t entirely a surprise. It’s one of the highest-profile newcomers to the platform’s library for May, and general viewers have had a better impression of it overall. In addition to Ali as Don Shirley and Mortensen as Frank “Tony Lip” Vallelonga, the cast also boasts plenty of other stars, including Linda Cardellini, Sebastian Maniscalco, and Dimiter D. Marinov, among others. Farrelly co-wrote the script with Tony Lip’s son, Nick Vallelonga, and Brian Hayes Currie.
Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz Which Oscar Best Picture Is Your Perfect Movie? Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country
Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.
🪜Parasite
🌀Everything Everywhere
☢️Oppenheimer
🐦Birdman
🪙No Country for Old Men
01
What kind of film experience do you actually want? The best movies don’t just entertain — they leave something behind.
02
Which idea grabs you most in a film? Great films are driven by a central obsession. What’s yours?
03
How do you like your story told? Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.
04
What makes a truly great antagonist? The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?
05
What do you want from a film’s ending? The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?
06
Which setting pulls you in most? Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what’s even possible.
07
What cinematic craft impresses you most? Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable.
08
What kind of main character do you root for? The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you.
09
How do you feel about a film that takes its time? Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.
10
What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema? The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?
The Academy Has Decided Your Perfect Film Is…
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
Parasite
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
Oppenheimer
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
Birdman
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
No Country for Old Men
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
The Oscars Just Made Their Biggest Changes in Years
Although the overall voting process remains the same and the Academy is always going to be prone to making controversial decisions, the Oscars finally approved some meaningful, long-desired changes this year. Chief among them is the decision to allow actors to be nominated multiple times in the same category for different roles and the call to bar all A.I. generated performances and scripts from contention. Next year, it will also be easier for foreign movies to compete for Best International Film, now being able to contend either through their country’s selection or by winning a major award at an eligible film festival. They each mark some of the biggest changes in the Academy’s process since the awards show began.
Green Book is now available on Netflix. Stay tuned here at Collider for more on all the hottest shows and films on streaming throughout the year.
