By Jake Coyle / The Associated Press
LOS ANGELES—The segregation-era road-trip drama Green Book was crowned best picture at the 91st Academy Awards on Sunday, handing Hollywood’s top award to a film seen as a feel-good throwback by some and ridiculed as an outdated inversion of Driving Miss Daisy by others.
In a year where Hollywood could have made history by bestowing best-picture on Netflix (Roma) or Marvel (Black Panther) for the first time, the motion picture academy instead threw its fullest support behind a traditional interracial buddy tale that proved as popular as it was divisive. But Peter Farrelly’s Green Book weathered criticism that it was retrograde and inauthentic to triumph over more acclaimed films and bigger box-office successes.
It was an unexpected finale to a brisk, hostless ceremony awash in historic wins for diversity, including Spike Lee’s first competitive Oscar. Lee, whose Do the Right Thing came out the same year that Driving Miss Daisy won best picture, was among those most visibly upset by the award handed to Green Book. After presenter Julia Roberts announced it, Lee stood up, waved his hands in disgust and started pacing up and down the aisles.
Green Book also won best supporting actor for Mahershala Ali and best original screenplay.
“The whole story is about love,” said Farrelly, a comedy veteran of broad comedies like Dumb and Dumber and There’s Something About Mary. ‘’It’s about loving each other despite the differences and find out the truth about who we are. We’re the same people.”
The Oscars at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles otherwise spread awards around for Ryan Coogler’s superhero sensation Black Panther, Alfonso Cuaron’s black-and-white personal epic Roma, and the Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody.
Lee’s win for best adapted screenplay for his white supremacist drama BlacKkKlansman, an award he shared with three cowriters, gave the Dolby Theatre ceremony on Sunday its signature moment. The crowd rose in a standing ovation, Lee leapt into the arms of presenter Samuel L. Jackson and even the backstage press room burst into applause.
Lee, whose film including footage of President Donald J. Trump following the violent white supremacist protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, urged mobilization for the upcoming election.
“Let’s be on the right side of history. Make the moral choice between love and hate,” said Lee, who was given an honorary Oscar in 2015. “Let’s do the right thing! You knew I had to get that in there.”
One of the biggest surprises of the night was in the best actress category. Olivia Colman won for her Queen Anne in the royal romp The Favourite, denying Glenn Close her first Oscar. Close remains the most-nominated living actor never to win, with seven nominations.
“Ooo. It’s genuinely quite stressful,” said a staggered Colman, who later turned to Close to say she was her idol, “And this is not how I wanted it to be.”
Bohemian Rhapsody, which kicked off the ABC telecast with a performance by Queen, won four awards despite pans from many critics and sexual assault allegations against its director, Bryan Singer, who was fired in mid-production. Its star, Rami Malek, won best actor for his full-bodied and prosthetic teeth-aided performance, and the film was honored for editing, sound mixing and sound editing.
“We made a film about a gay man, an immigrant who lived his life unapologetically himself,” said Malek. “We’re longing for stories like this. I am the son of immigrants from Egypt. I’m a first-generation American, and part of my story is being written right now.”
The lush, big-budget craft of Black Panther won for Ruth Carter’s costume design, Hannah Beachler and Jay Hart’s production design, and Ludwig Göransson’s score. Beachler had been the first African-American to ever be nominated in the category. Beachler and Carter became just the second and third black women to win nonacting Oscars.
“It just means that we’ve opened the door,” Carter, a veteran costume designer, said backstage. “Finally, the door is wide open.”
Two years after winning for his role in Moonlight, Mahershala Ali won again for his supporting performance in Green Book—a role many said was really a lead. Ali is the second black actor to win two Oscars following Denzel Washington, who won for Glory and Training Day. Ali dedicated the award to his grandmother.
The night’s colead nominee Roma won best director and best cinematography for Cuaron, whose film also notched Mexico’s first foreign language film Oscar. Cuaron and his “Three Amigos” countrymen—Alejandro Inarritu and Guillermo del Toro, who presented Cuaron with best picture—will have had a stranglehold on category, winning five of the last six years.
Cuaron, who becoming the first director to ever win for serving as his own director of photography, referenced an especially international crop of nominees in one of his three acceptance speeches.
“When asked about the New Wave, Claude Chabrol said there are no waves, there is only the ocean,” said Cuaron, referring to the French filmmaker. “The nominees tonight have proven that we are a part of the same ocean.”
The wins for Roma gave Netflix its most significant awards yet, but Green Book denied the streaming giant the best picture win it dearly sought. Netflix remains to some a contentious force in Hollywood, since it largely bypasses theaters.
Queen launched on Sunday’s ceremony with a medley of hits that gave the awards a distinctly Grammy-like flavor, as Hollywood’s most prestigious ceremony sought to prove that it’s still “champion of the world” after last year’s record-low ratings.
To compensate for a lack of host, the motion picture academy leaned on its presenters, including an ornately outfitted Melissa McCarthy and David Tyree Henry and a Keegan-Michael Key who floated down like Mary Poppins. Following Queen, Tina Fey—alongside Amy Poehler and Maya Rudolph—welcomed the Dolby Theatre audience to “the one-millionth Academy Awards.”
Rudolph summarized a rocky Oscar preamble that featured numerous missteps and backtracks by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: “There is no host, there won’t be a popular movie category and Mexico is not paying for the wall.”
The trio then presented best supporting actress to Regina King for her pained matriarch in Barry Jenkins’s James Baldwin adaptation If Beale Street Could Talk. The crowd gave King a standing ovation for her first Oscar.
“To be standing here representing one of the greatest artist of our time, James Baldwin, is a little surreal,” said King. “James Baldwin birthed this baby.”
The inclusivity of the winners on Sunday stood in stark contrast to the #OscarsSoWhite backlash that marked the 2016 and 2015 Oscars. Since then, the academy has worked to diversify its largely white and male membership, adding several thousand new members and opening the academy up internationally.
• Associated Press writers Kristin M. Hall, Andrew Dalton and Lindsey Bahr contributed to this report.