How a technical innovator became the boring establishment pick

If you had told me that a movie that seems to take place all in one shot and is set in World War I was going to be the frontrunner for best picture, I'd say "Wow, what an outside-the-box choice!"

But if you told me 1917 was going to be the frontrunner for best picture, I'd say "Boring, typical Hollywood."

How on the earth did the former become the latter? And how on earth did I become convinced of that along with everyone else?

I should start by saying I know a number of people who think 1917 is the best movie of the year, including my esteemed ReelGood colleague John Roebuck. (Until he saw The Lighthouse and amended his choice, that is.) It's not some Green Book, which a decent number of people thought was reasonably good, enough to vault it above the other favorites that burned brightly and passionately for a more select few. No one thought Green Book was the best movie of 2018, but there are some who think that way about 1917 in 2019.

But the right people, the people who dominate the cultural conversation about the Oscars, seem to think it's just the latest example of Hollywood's well-documented myopia.

Who are the "right" people? I'll engage in some argument shorthand by referring to them only as "snooty critics." I'm not always a man of the people, but I do embrace my low culture, and when I want to see "snooty critics" as them, it's easy enough for me to do so.

"Snooty critics" have a number of problems with 1917, though I haven't heard them explained all that convincingly. The phrase "video game" gets thrown around, as in, it is one. But I'm not all that sold on that take. Yes, it's a series of obstacles to overcome that have a first person quality to them by the very nature of the single-take aesthetic. But how else are you meant to make a movie like this and not have a number of challenging set pieces break up the story at approximately eight-minute intervals? If you're attacking 1917 as a video game then you are also attacking the core conventions of screenwriting.

Then there are those who say it glamorizes war, but Francois Truffaut said that he's never seen an anti-war movie, as every war movie, by the very dramatization of what it depicts, glamorizes war to some degree. You can't make a movie with trenches and mortars and people being shot through the helmet without making a movie that "glamorizes" war in somebody's opinion. It would be fair to say that on the spectrum of glamorizing war that goes from "not very much" to "Michael Bay," 1917 is much closer to the "not very much" side.

An argument that would probably convince me a bit is that it's a very male movie, as the only female character -- at all? -- is a woman hiding in the shadows, nursing a baby. But I haven't even heard this argument much. While true, I gotta say, that's World War I for you. Maybe in this day and age, that movie shouldn't win best picture, but Sam Mendes probably couldn't have made it all that differently.

I can poke holes in both the good and bad arguments against 1917, so why is it that these criticisms have gotten under my skin and made me a convert? Why are there at least three other movies I'd rather see take home the trophy?

That last question is easy -- there were three or four, actually exactly three, best picture nominees ahead of it on my year-end list. So yeah, it's not my first choice. But it's also not my last choice, the choice I dread. It's not Joker, for Christ's sake, and its frontrunner status will help deny Joker any shred of a possibility it has of winning.

I did turn on 1917 somewhat quickly, though, from ranking it #15 for the year with a near-perfect 4.5 star rating, to only a few days later, openly contrasting it with a movie I ranked #24 for the year (The Last Black Man in San Francisco) in a conversation with a friend, and saying the latter was the better film. Its status as the second-to-last film I saw before closing my list meant that I didn't really have the time to chew it over before I was sure it belonged as high as I placed it.

But I think there's another recent best picture winner, which I adored, that played as much of a role in my souring on it ever so slightly.

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) did two things that sort of do this film a disservice, and make it seem more conventional and "establishment-like" than it might initially seem. Not only did Birdman do the one-shot concept already, five years ago, in ways that may have been more technically challenging than 1917 in certain ways, but it also broke the glass ceiling for high-concept films such as itself. When I saw Birdman and immediately boosted it into my top spot for the year, a spot it never relinquished, I didn't for a minute think of it as an Oscar film. When it became not only a nominee but a frontrunner, the same eye-rolling by "snooty critics" that is now attending 1917 made it seem significantly less ground-breaking than I had every reason to think it was. Because of Birdman, Mendes' film can't say the same thing about breaking ground, even as technically accomplished as it is.

And yet it is accomplished enough that one might rightly call it a wonder. Can you figure out where those edits are? I sure can't. CGI is getting pretty damn amazing, but even within that, Mendes and company are using it virtuosically. They're doing Birdman without some of the crutches, daring you to point out the cracks that you could probably point out fairly easily in Birdman -- though I don't think Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu would care because he's not pretending it's one two-hour block of time like Mendes is (sort of).

But maybe this is the thing that makes it the most establishment. There's nothing Hollywood loves more than celebrating itself, and in a way, 1917 represents the "magic of the movies" more than any other nominee. Parasite and Little Women may be better, but neither is literally tricking your eyes the way 1917 is.

I think the most establishment thing about 1917, actually, is that we've seen it before. We've seen war movies before. We've seen World War I movies before. We've seen World War I movies win best picture before. We've seen movies that pretend to be one continuous take win best picture before. We've seen movies directed by Sam Mendes win best picture before. We may not have seen this exact movie before, but a lot of its ingredients are familiar, and there are a lot of best picture nominees with far more unfamiliar ingredients.

And maybe one of those will win. I've got my fingers crossed for Parasite, the one movie I think is capable of pulling off a shock upset, which would be even more shocking because a movie that's entirely in a foreign language has never won best picture.

But the Oscars really only shock you rarely, like when Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty had the wrong envelope, or, in the same moment, when Moonlight beat presumed favorite La La Land.

I hope Parasite is this year's Moonlight, because 1917 is definitely this year's La La Land.