Sometimes, I really do love being wrong. I’ve talked in the past about coming around on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre on second viewing. I went into Villeneuve’s Dune having totally convinced myself I would hate it and walked out ready to watch the next two and a half hours on the spot. And this morning, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences thoroughly trashed my prediction that Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car, though a critical darling, stood no chance at a best picture nomination.
The Oscars, it bears repeating, don’t mean anything. The lack of validation for many of the year’s great films — Wes Anderson’s wonderful The French Dispatch, Hamaguchi’s other masterpiece Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, Julia Ducornau’s Titane, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria (which never did stand must of a chance), to name just a few with zero nominations — doesn’t change the fact that they’re great. Sometimes people will use Oscar martyrdom as a measure of greatness: can you believe that Goodfellas and Citizen Kane didn’t win Best Picture? This is an exercise in subjectivity forced on an unassuming popular consciousness as objective, and as such is completely farcical to begin with. Even when they acknowledge something like Parasite or Drive My Car, it sort of feels like they’ve chosen one representative foreign film and have done their duties as connoisseurs for the year. It’s inherently frustrating and designed to compel indifference, sparking rage for its total inability to shed its popularity.
And yet, watching Drive My Car, not only one of the best films in some time but one of the more slippery and difficult ones to grab public attention, storm its way into the Best Picture slate is a tremendous feeling. Academy voters, as many have pointed out, sit in an intangible purgatory that’s too mainstream for hardcore film buffs and too snobby for general audiences. But they’re still not a group that owes anything to a three-hour Hamaguchi effort, and they’re still a group that, for better or worse, makes public taste. To watch them champion Drive My Car provides some hope for mass moviegoing continuing to accept challenging art. To consider the implications of their choice sparks genuine optimism: undeniably, more eyeballs will now find their way to a Ryusuke Hamaguchi film than ever before. It will play in more theaters (and for longer) than anyone could have anticipated. One of our most exciting emerging filmmakers is going to have unimaginable free reign on his next project, which will in turn itself become more accessible than it would have been otherwise. The much-theorized-about popular Korean cinema boom post-Parasite didn’t exactly take off, but I guarantee more people watched Okja than had ever previously considered it, and we sure as hell had some people check out The Host and Memories of Murder off of it. Parasite itself exploded, becoming a pop culture touchstone that seemingly everyone has seen, or at least knows. And sure, part of this is due to the film’s nature as entertaining and crowd-pleasing, but it never happens if it doesn’t get the extra elevation the Academy provided it. I really do doubt that Drive My Car can run all the way to a victory in the category. And I really don’t think it’s as primed for popular acceptance as Parasite. But regardless of whether the boom will be as big, it’d be pretty much impossible not to see some spike in viewership. The film deserves it, as does its masterful architect, especially considering how brazenly it isn’t designed for it. In an age dominated by franchise films and IP-driven fare, to live in a world where an honest-to-God Hamaguchi masterclass can find stateside name recognition is a downright miracle. Say what you will about the Oscars and the state of this year’s nominees, you know that I’m going to over the coming weeks. But at the very least, I’ll be taking a moment to appreciate the sheer coolness of Drive My Car’s success.
I’ll say it again: beep beep, beep beep yeah.
The Movie Files 