Alfonso Cuaron has won Best Director for his labor of love set in 1970s Mexico City, Roma. Roma already won Best Foreign Language film and Best Cinematography. Many people love how immersive, quietly compelling and beautiful it was, and it was the favorite to win Best Picture, which went to Green Book (more on that in a moment). It is an important film historically and in this moment in history. Roma was also praised for its portrayal of domestic workers and for helping raise awareness of their work and roles. Yalitza Aparicio gave an excellent lead performance as Marina, a character based on the woman who raised Cuaron.

I believe Cuaron has been nominated for ten Academy Awards (that’s based on this list at IMDB, although his films have been nominated in so many categories) and he’s won twice before, for Best Picture and Best Director for Gravity in 2014.

In his acceptance speech for Best Director, Cuaron thanked so many people including his actors, Netflix, and his coworkers. He said “I want to thank the academy for recognizing a film centered around an indigenous woman, one of 70 million domestic workers, a character that historically has been relegated to the background in cinema. As artists our job is to look where others don’t, this becomes much more important in times when we are being encouraged to look away.” He also thanked everyone and Mexico in Spanish.

Now I wrote all that before I knew that f’ing Green Book, the white savior movie, won Best Picture. WTF. I hope this is the tail end of peak 2018. This film was controversial for its portrayal of a black man’s story from the perspective of a while savior character. The surviving family members of the man portrayed in the movie, Dr. Don Shirley (played by Mahershala Ali), have criticized the inaccuracies of the film and called it “the depiction of a white man’s version of a Black man’s life.” Lead Viggo Mortensen has also said some really terrible things in his press for the film, but still it got rewarded because people must like this kind of tripe. (Kaiser saw it, I did not and I trust her opinion.)

Director Peter Farrelly wasn’t even nominated in that category. In his acceptance speech for Best Picture he said that Green Book is about “loving each other no matter what our differences.” He then praised Viggo and the other actors as an aside.

This was a weird f’ing night and Julia Roberts sent it off. At least it didn’t run too late?

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photos via Netflix and credit WENN