The Director of ‘Dumb & Dumber’ Is This Year’s Oscar Frontrunner (Really)

As we settle into the year-end mindset, it’s time to start rounding up the major Oscar contenders. There’s Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma, which is seeking to be Netflix’s first Best Picture nominee; there are the dazzling production elements of Damian Chazelle’s First Man, the kinetic storytelling of Steve McQueen’s Widows, and the gorgeous/devastating If Beale Street Could Talk from Moonlight director Barry Jenkins. If these films all have one thing in common, it’s elite and award-worthy filmmakers, all of whom have seen Oscar success for their films before. And yet, if the Academy is feeling sentimental this year, the one filmmaker that could beat them all is the filmmaker who wrote and directed this scene:

Peter Farrelly has had a long a wildly successful career making movies that most critics would call “dumb,” even complimentarily. Together with his brother Bobby, they made a giant splash (no pun intended re: the above clip) with the 1994 Jim Carrey/Jeff Daniels comedy Dumb & Dumber. And while the success of that film was pretty much entirely credited to Carrey, who was emerging as the biggest comedy star in the world that year, the Farrellys followed up with Kingpin in 1996 and There’s Something About Mary in 1998, the latter of which definitively cemented the brothers as comedy cinema’s great vulgar idiot-geniuses.

Still, there’s a huge gulf between the kind of respect you get for slicking Cameron Diaz’s hair back with something other than hair gel and the kind of respect that gets you into the Best Picture and Best Director conversation. The Farrellys just never seemed to aspire to that. Their most mainstream efforts were still modest rom-coms like Fever Pitch and the remake of The Heartbreak Kid. Mostly they seemed content to play in their own sandbox and rest on their perfect ’90s run.

Cut to 2018 and the Toronto International Film Festival, where this under-the-radar movie Green Book wins the coveted People’s Choice Award, voted on by audience members. It’s a prize that’s become widely coveted by the Oscar contenders at TIFF because the winner has gone on to a Best Picture nomination in nine of the last ten years, with three films (Slumdog Millionaire, The King’s Speech, and 12 Years a Slave) going on to win the top Oscar prize. And who directed Green Book but none other than vulgar auteur Peter Farrelly.

Green Book tells the true life story of famed black concert pianist Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali), whose tour through the deep South in the thick of the Jim Crow erais fraught with discrimination and danger. Shirley’s professional relationship and eventual friendship with his driver, a rough-cut New York bouncer-turned-driver (Viggo Mortensen) becomes a meeting of black and white and a triumph of love and connection over hate and segregation. Or so the trailers tell is.  And suddenly, now that Green Book is hitting theaters with its 83% fresh Rotten Tomatoes rating and its trailers promising a feel-good story about black and white people finding common ground in the Jim Crow South and you suddenly realize … this film might actually be our Best Picture frontrunner.

Look at the competition: A Star Is Born is a huge crowd-pleaser but has the feel of an early front-runner that gets overtaken. Roma will be a huge critical fave but has the whole Netflix banner hanging over their heads, which could still be a problem with Hollywood insiders in the Academy. First Man is getting crazy low box office. They probably won’t go for another quietly devastating Barry Jenkins movie so soon after Moonlight. One particularly interesting face-off would be if Farrelly’s film went head-to-head with Vice, the Dick Cheney bio-pic directed by fellow dumb-comedy-to-Oscar-glory filmmaker Adam McKay. Regardless, Green Book seems to have the uplift that Hidden Figures benefitted from only two years ago, and that film nearly made a run at winning Best Picture itself.

Peter Farrelly graduating from literal toilet humor to the pinnacle of establishment Hollywood success feels improbable, but it’s that very improbability that gives his story the narrative hook that could be irresistible to Oscar viewers. He’s the curveball nobody saw coming.

Where to stream Dumb & Dumber