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Old 02-17-2020, 05:46 AM   #1
Doppleganger
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Black Panther

Can someone please, concisely, explain to me why Black Panther won Best Picture? I have no bias or intention to denigrade the accomplishment, I'm merely curious and I cannot for the life of me find a simple by-the-numbers explanation that isn't buried beneath furious masturbation.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Los Angeles Times
In 1958, Alfred Hitchcock did something audacious.

Working in the heart of the Hollywood studio system, he made a film as intensely personal as anything contemporary audiences would expect from the Sundance Film Festival. He used two of the biggest stars of the day and put them into a story where what mattered to him was front and center.

The film was “Vertigo,” starring James Stewart and Kim Novak. It was not well-received, and a long time passed before it was taken seriously.

But in 2012, when the respected British film journal Sight & Sound released its once-a-decade poll of critics worldwide selecting the best films ever made, “Vertigo” was picked as No. 1. You can look it up.

I thought of “Vertigo” when I started thinking about “Black Panther” — about what the superhero blockbuster accomplished, why it has been under-appreciated, and why it would be my choice for the best picture Oscar this year.

Of course, parallels between “Black Panther” and “Vertigo” are far from exact. For one, “under-appreciated” is not a term most people would choose for a film that has accumulated a worldwide gross of $1.346 billion, six Oscar nominations and the coveted SAG ensemble cast award, all while spending an almost unheard-of six months in theaters.

But despite its undeniable success, there is no shortage of those who devalue the accomplishments of “Black Panther,” who either dismiss it as just another superhero movie or refuse to watch it at all for the same reason. The motion picture academy, which denied the film writing, directing and acting nominations, likely has voters who fit that description.

Those doubters may not grasp the extent of what director-cowriter Ryan Coogler and his team have accomplished. Very much like Hitchcock, they’ve gone into the belly of the beast, expropriated the deep-pockets resources of the Marvel/Disney juggernaut and used them for their own purposes.

This is not easy to do. Those big clanking Hollywood machines exist not to serve individuals but to bend them to their will. Indie and foreign language directors without number have been lured to studios by the promise of being able to make films their own way, only to find the reality very different.

And yet here is “Black Panther,” a film so intensely personal that when the classic Marvel elements appear — like a cameo by the late Stan Lee — they almost feel out of place.

“Black Panther,” however, deserves a best picture Oscar not because it managed to go its own way but because of what going its own way meant.

Before examining that, it’s important to underline that “Black Panther” fulfilled its part of the bargain with Marvel by delivering a superhero saga that pleased the entertainment behemoth’s massive core audience.

This is by no means a given, and although it’s not a reason to give a film an Oscar, neither should it be — as has often been the case — a reason for disqualification.

Nowhere is it written, though voters sometimes act as if it is, that the Oscars are an elitist award for which mass-appeal movies need not apply. In a sane world, intelligently satisfying an enormous audience should be one of the things the Oscars are all about.

The key word there is “intelligently,” and if you’ve watched more than your share of superhero movies, you know that quality is often in short supply in a genre dominated by business-as-usual boilerplate.

Coogler (who cowrote with Joe Robert Cole) ensured that “Black Panther” would be an exception, in part by retaining his core creative team of collaborators, including composer Ludwig Goransson and production designer Hannah Beachler (both Oscar-nominated) as well as editor Michael P. Shawver and cinematographer Rachel Morrison.

Adding costume designer Ruth E. Carter (also nominated, for the third time in a distinguished career) was icing on the cake.
...

Quote:
Originally Posted by Fastcompany
The rule in Wakanda is that, on Challenge Day, any warrior from one of the nation’s five tribes may battle the newly anointed king for the throne. Although Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma is the odds-on favorite to win Hollywood’s own personal Challenge Day, the Academy Awards, only one challenger is mighty enough to pull off an upset on coronation day. And don’t you dare say it’s Green Book.

Black Panther is not only the best superhero film of 2018, it’s also just an excellent film, period–artful, beloved, ridiculously profitable, and culturally significant to the point where we’ll be talking about it for years. Thanks to the byzantine preferential voting system that the Academy uses to determine Best Picture–voters rank nominees 1 through 8, and the winner is the movie with the broadest overall support, even if it comes from voters’ second- and third-place choices–there is a plausible (if remote) scenario that a film as beloved as Black Panther could actually win. The very thing that most prognosticators say takes it out of the running–the fact that it is, you know, a superhero movie–is what would make its achievement even greater: that this is what a superhero movie can be. Suddenly, the prospect of getting saddled with six of these things a year for the rest of eternity seems less bleak than it did before.

Much internet ink has been spilled describing how important Black Panther is, in terms of representation both in front of and behind the camera. There’s no reason at this late date for me to explain what it means for a film to so thoroughly trounce the myth that international audiences won’t show up for a majority-black cast. I probably don’t have to mention either what a paradigm-shift it is for young kids to see a movie where all the women are formidable warriors (Danai Gurira’s Okoye), genius scientists (Letitia Wright’s Shuri), or love interests who never need to be rescued because they’re actually spies (Lupita Nyong’o’s Nakia.)

In all the conversation about Black Panther’s importance, though, we may have lost sight of how amazing it is that a movie this important is also a riveting, rip-roaring crowd-pleaser. And while superhero movies are indeed traditionally designed to please four-quadrant crowds, with the notable exception of Ang Lee’s brazenly esoteric Hulk, if director Ryan Coogler removed a few elements from Black Panther, it could stand on its own without even being a superhero movie.
These white dudes love the smell of their own farts. Heaping praise on the movie is one thing, but there's very little information in these obtuse passages, just over indulgence in the writer's own prose.

And this is everywhere.

Please tl;dr this for me, I have a small brain.
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Old 02-17-2020, 12:40 PM   #2
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Black Panther & The Oscars: The Death of Objective Film Criticism

I'll just leave this here.
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Old 02-17-2020, 12:52 PM   #3
Emi
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Green Book won Best Picture, not Black Panther. Black Panther only got the nomination.
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Old 02-17-2020, 02:09 PM   #4
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Emi View Post
Green Book won Best Picture, not Black Panther. Black Panther only got the nomination.
See, in the the two paragraphs I quoted, you wouldn't know either way, because there's words but no information. I search "Black Panther best picture" and those were the top two hits. I learned nothing and so was thoroughly confused.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Loki View Post
Excellent, I appreciate this much.

It's very sad though. I had anticipated it would be a Zootopia 2.0 situation, so it's disappointing to hear it is actually worse, where Black Panther doesn't actually tell its ideas well in the vein of...oh, Guardians Vol 2.

THAT SAID, a nomination is a Gulf of Mexico sized difference from actually winning, so I think it's much ado about nothing, really.
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Old 03-05-2020, 04:17 AM   #5
DavidCorbeta
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I didn't like black panther
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Old 08-16-2020, 03:50 PM   #6
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was good movie
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Old 09-07-2020, 07:39 AM   #7
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This is politics but you can't talk about it out loud))
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