How Much Has Really Changed In The 30 Years Since ‘Driving Miss Daisy’ Won The Best Picture Oscar?

During the 1990 Oscars broadcast, while presenting the clip for Best Picture nominee Dead Poets Society, a clearly terrified Kim Basinger took a moment to chastise the Academy for snubbing Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing because, as she explained, it “ironically told the biggest truth of all.” She wasn’t specific, but that truth she referred to probably had something to do with the intractability of race relations in the United States. What was nominated ostensibly in its stead was another film that dealt with those same racial tensions, but in a way palatable to an almost exclusively white voting body: Bruce Beresford’s Driving Miss Daisy. The ripple of that decision carried over into the Oscar ceremony last year when the somehow more-odious version of Driving Miss Daisy, Green Book, took home the statue over another Spike Lee Joint, BlackKklansman. Some would call it progress that Lee’s film was nominated at all, his first nomination for Best Picture over the course of thirty features. Others might say calling something like that “progress” is patronizing tokenism of the worst, most patronizing kind.

As Driving Miss Daisy, the 1990 Academy Award winner for Best Picture, is a recent addition to Netflix’s ever-dwindling library of films, it’s a good time to examine what it is about that film that was so attractive to a voting body that’s still predominantly white, elderly, and affluent. In truth, if we frame the Oscars as an incestuous industry prize created by the industry to gratify and enrich itself, then it’s fair to not expect it to ever consistently reflect anything other than entrenched tastes. In an October 2019 interview with Vulture, Bong Joon-Ho, nominated this year for a Best Director award, said “The Oscars are not an international film festival. They’re very local.” What he means is the Oscars are provincial and solipsistic, and history has shown it’s interested mainly in things that won’t upset the applecart. When it seems to tap into the new, as it did mostly recently with the surprise win of Moonlight, history has shown it to be more anomaly than trend. More, it’s an anomaly that reset itself with an overreaction a scant two years later with the embarrassingly regressive Green Book.

Driving Miss Daisy is based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning Alfred Uhry drama inspired by the experiences of his grandmother and her driver of twenty-five years. In the film, Miss Daisy (Jessica Tandy), aged out of driving herself after a whimsical car accident, is given Hoke (Morgan Freeman), an affable African-American man hired by her son Boolie (Dan Aykroyd) to drive the adorably prickly old lady around. Beloved at the time by powerful tastemakers Siskel & Ebert who lavished praise on its “subtlety” and “warmth”, the film almost immediately gathered strong reconsiderations. In an article titled “White Wash,” David Denby of New York Magazine called the film a “public fantasy that everything is just swell in this country, when in fact we have catastrophic problems.” Spike Lee himself, in Jet Magazine from April of 1990, said that though Morgan Freeman is one of our great actors, in the film he “still plays a subservient role.” Freeman lost the Oscar, as it happens, to Daniel Day Lewis’ portrayal of the profoundly disabled artist Christy Brown in My Left Foot. The issue of able-bodied actors portraying disabled characters, of course, is just further evidence of systemic bias.

What is it about Driving Miss Daisy that so appealed to the voting block represented by the Academy at large? It’s easy to point to the handsome trappings: the impeccable costumes, period sets, and automobiles, the great performances from two great actors (Tandy won the Oscar for Best Actress). But the real reason may be films like this don’t challenge the status quo. Driving Miss Daisy suggests racism is a regrettable thing of the past, and also that the past is over. Voting for Driving Miss Daisy, for some, must have felt like charity, done as a misguided act of contrition for vaguely understood long-dead transgressions. When it triumphs, it’s reassurance that there’s not a problem and explanation in part for why films about slavery, and actors playing slaves, seem to have a better chance of Oscar recognition. Denzel Washington performed a kind of coup in 2001 when he won Best Actor for playing a crooked cop in Training Day (after winning Supporting Actor for playing a slave in Glory in Driving Miss Daisy‘s year), though I would argue that African-American men are also rewarded for playing athletes, musicians, and criminals. There are prizes available for African-Americans, it seems, who occupy the “right” role.

The case of Driving Miss Daisy is interesting because it also indicts the publishing and theater communities. Its success calls the entire American media environment to answer for being beset by a very particular and easily-identifiable problem. Change in the Academy can’t come from a token infusion of minorities into its body, but rather only through the destabilization of the most powerful men who make most of the decisions. Until the unlikely day there’s a real and meaningful revolution at the top of the pyramid, there will only be another three decades of dusty old corpses like Driving Miss Daisy anointed in an earnest, confused, and dangerous way as irrefutable evidence of some sort of forward-thinking progressivism. All this time down the road, Driving Miss Daisy and Do The Right Thing are both available for another look. Only one of them, though, has anything to say about a path forward.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is due in 2020. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.

Where to stream Driving Miss Daisy

Where to stream Do The Right Thing