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#Three billboards outside ebbing missouri synopsis movie#
I’ll let my colleague Angelica Jade Bastién go into it further later this week, but briefly: The second half of the movie largely belongs to Sam Rockwell’s Dixon, a ne’er-do-well cop with a history of racist violence who gets some measure of redemption by the end of the film. The film came out to generally positive reviews in November, when audiences began noticing something that the Toronto reviews had barely touched on - the film’s odd blind spot on race. (As Owen Gleiberman wrote in Variety, “She’s woke, she’s fierce, she’s beyond shame or scruples, she’s screaming truth to power, she’s charged up with the wrath of an avenger.”) Though the film won the festival’s top prize and McDormand was widely assumed to be a strong contender for Best Actress, Three Billboards was marketed as something different from the usual toothless Oscar bait: pricklier, more raw, less interested in making you love it. Back then, the movie was widely pitched as standing on the right side of the current political divide, with early critics seeing Frances McDormand’s Mildred Hayes as a standard-bearer for #nastywomen everywhere. But it’s also because, for those of us prone to treating awards ceremonies as referendums on the state of social progress, this year has an embarrassment of worthy winners: Get Out, a horror film with a clearer view of American racism than a million liberal-humanist dramas Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig’s sensitive portrait of mother-daughter tension and Call Me by Your Name, a love story so beautiful that, as one E! red-carpet host revealed at the Golden Globes, it made his straight friends finally realize gay relationships were as real as their own.Īmid the hubbub over #TimesUp, Oprah’s speech, and James Franco elbowing Tommy Wiseau, you may not have noticed something else that happened at the Globes: With its four wins Sunday night, Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri not only became the Oscar front-runner, it was also officially inaugurated as this year’s La La Land, the movie whose awards success is seen as emblematic of America’s various ills.įew people would have anticipated either of these things happening from reading coverage of Three Billboards after its premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in September. In part, this was because the industry gave us enough offscreen monsters that we didn’t need to turn a movie into one. Unlike last year, when the battle between Moonlight and La La Land became for many viewers a proxy war for the struggle against the incoming administration, the first few months of this year’s Oscars race denied us the pleasures of another stark contest.
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Photo: Merrick Morton/Fox Searchlight Pictures