‘Get Out’ Will Compete As A Comedy At The Golden Globes and Twitter Managed To Be Mad About It On Both Sides

If there is one unequivocal good omen for Jordan Peele’s Get Out this week, it’s that every piece of news about awards season so far seems to revolve around it.  It led the Gotham Awards nominations a few weeks ago, and now it’s the talk of the Golden Globes even before the Hollywood Foreign Press Association has announced their nominations.

News trickled out this week that the HFPA would be considering Get Out as a comedy, placing it in the mix for Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Actress  in the musical/categories. This fairly standard bit of Golden Globes gamesmanship was met with a lot more uproar and controversy from the Twittersphere than usual.

 

On one level … what else is new? Twitter’s been on edge ever since Trump won the election, and even before that. Everything turns into battle stations and wars of words. Every slight is a slam, and every difference of opinion is a feud. That both sides of the Get Out comedy “debate” have managed to stake out some kind of moral high ground is, while impressively swift and decisive, not necessarily noteworthy. More noteworthy is that the people who made Get Out seem to be delving into the debate:

Peele spoke at a PR lunch for Get Out in New York today (one stop out of many on the Oscar campaign road), where he spoke at more length about the categorization. “What the movie is about is not funny,” he said. “I’ve had many black people come up to me and say, ‘man, this is the movie we’ve been talking about for a while and you did it.’ That’s a very powerful thing. For that to be put in a smaller box than it deserves is where the controversy comes from.”

 

The argument against Get Out as a comedy seems to boil down to a couple points:

#1: Categorization as a comedy trivializes the subject matter by painting a complex movie that blends horror, drama, and, yes, comedic relief as purely comedic. This argument says, essentially, that laughing it off robs the film of its more serious messages about racism and the violence inherent in American culture’s treatment of black people.

#2: Categorization as a comedy will hurt the film’s chances to win Best Picture at the Oscars. That by changing the branding of the film from “smart social critique in the guise of contemporary horror” to “horror comedy,” it robs the Get Out Oscar campaign of being able to sell the movie as an Important Film.

The rebuttals from the other side of the coin go something like this:

#1: Comedy should not be seen as an inherently frivolous medium. Good comedy can be smart; good comedy can have a message; good comedy should be respected.

#2: Comedy can win at the Oscars if it is packaged as smart social satire, which Get Out almost certainly would be. In truth, it’s the horror genre aspects that make Get Out more of an Oscar long-shot than the comedic stuff.

Both sides of this argument appear to have Get Out‘s best interests at heart. Everybody wants to see this movie celebrated in as many venues as possible. This HFPA categorization is a story of campaign tactics, and campaign tactics fly in the face of Get Out‘s appeal, which has been earnestly, stridently activist. Get Out was such a huge success because it is a crackerjack thriller with the underpinnings of a smart, razor-sharp critique about race. Trying to to bottle all that righteousness in a bottle labeled “comedy” is a bit of a tall order.

A few things to know about the Golden Globes:

Universal Pictures submitted Get Out as a comedy; all the Hollywood Foreign Press Association did was approve that categorization. Universal is in the position of having a wildly popular and accomplished movie that nevertheless doesn’t tick the usual awards-movie boxes, genre-wise. Since the Golden Globes are one of the earliest indicators of future Oscar success, you want to show up as strong there as possible.

The Musical/Comedy category at the Globes is an easier “get” for a prestige movie. There are a billion reasons for this, having to do with genre bias (broad comedies are seen as inferior and unserious) and also the fact that studios don’t campaign heavily for comedies.

As a result, films have historically played genre games in order to qualify as a musical/comedy. In 2004 and 2005, biopics Ray and Walk the Line qualified as musicals due to their music-heavy subject matter, despite not being what anyone would describe as true musicals. As a result, Jamie Foxx, Reese Witherspoon, and Joaquin Phoenix all won Globes in their respective acting categories (Foxx and Witherspoon went on to win Oscars). In 2013, the Best Picture Musical/Comedy field went 5/5 in nominating prestige awards fare that was more melancholy (Her; Nebraska; Inside Llewyn Davis) or loudly aggro (American Hustle; The Wolf of Wall Street) than comedic or musical. The recent example that gets the most crap is The Martian getting nominated as a comedy in 2015, though that movie pretty much has as many comedic beats as Get Out does.

Get Out WILL benefit from this move to the comedy categories. It’s now pretty much guaranteed a Best Picture nomination, and it puts it into the driver’s seat for a win. Additionally, lead actors Daniel Kaluuya and even maybe Allison Williams stand a decent shot at nominations themselves, when they wouldn’t even be in the conversation among the dramatic actors.

The truth of the matter is that many of the best films are the best films because they’re able to blend genres so expertly. Rigorous genre distinctions seem less and less applicable in this era of genre blending. Is Get Out a pure comedy? No. Nor is it a pure horror film or a pure drama. It hit audiences like a ton of bricks because it was able to use horror and satire and even some pure, basic comic relief in order to get to a gut-punch of truth about race in America. It was never going to fit cleanly into either of the Golden Globes category silos. Better, then that it fits into the category that gives it the best chance to win.

 

Where to stream Get Out