How the Middling <em>Green Book</em> Became an Oscars Front-Runner

The Oscars have always been the guardians of mainstream film taste, for better and for worse. The definition of a “prestige movie,” a term often deployed with derision, is a film made to attract the votes of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) and that thus often tries to win the broadest consensus possible from a group that trends old, white, and male. This approach explains how Best Picture winners such as Driving Miss Daisy and Crash became eternal punch lines: They were two middlebrow films with myopic perspectives on race relations in America that were unfortunately enshrined in history thanks to both their Oscar wins and their respective defeats of better-remembered projects such as and