Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri could win Best Picture. Why? It’s complicated.

Each year, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences nominates between five and 10 movies to compete for the Oscars’ Best Picture trophy — its most prestigious award, and the one given out at the very end of the night. What “best picture” really means is a little fuzzy, but the most accurate way of characterizing it might be that it indicates how Hollywood wants to remember the past year in film.

The Best Picture winner, in other words, is the movie that represents the film industry in America, what it’s capable of, and how it sees itself at a specific point in time.

So when we look at the nominee slate for any given year, we’re essentially looking at a list of possibilities for the way Hollywood will ultimately characterize the previous 12 months in film. And one thing that’s definitely true about the nine Best Picture nominees from 2017 is that they exhibit a lot of variety.

There are genre films and art films, horror films and history films, romances and tragicomedies. And thinking about what the Academy voters — as well as audiences and critics — found enticing about them helps us better understand both Hollywood and what we were looking for at the movies more broadly this year.

In the runup to the Oscars, Vox’s culture staff decided to take a look at each of the nine Best Picture nominees in turn. What made this film appealing to Academy voters? What makes it emblematic of the year? And should it win?

In this installment, we talk about Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, a tragicomedy that has garnered both acclaim and plenty of controversy. It’s one of the most likely winners — but we have complicated feelings about it.

Alissa Wilkinson: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is the most controversial of the Best Picture nominees, and it’s also one of the favorites to win.

I saw it in September during its hotly anticipated North American debut at the Toronto International Film Festival, where many people were praising it. It won the People’s Choice Award there, which often signals that a movie will be a major contender for Best Picture, and which means non-critic audiences (Toronto opens its festival screenings to the public) really liked it too.

At the time, I was kind of amazed that it won that award. It’s often a very funny movie, with undeniably great performances, but I didn’t think it was as good as McDonagh’s earlier films (In Bruges, Seven Psychopaths), and it didn’t strike me as a “crowd pleaser” at the time.

Then it started picking up awards from critics groups and guilds. And at the same time, it came in for heavy criticism of its sloppy racial politics and what some people saw as a “redemptive” arc for a racist cop. I found myself talking and writing about Three Billboards a lot more than I had anticipated when I first saw it in Toronto.

The question I kept asking myself was why audiences and critics at its initial screenings had responded to it so strongly, and why they continued to respond to it all fall. So by your estimation, why has Three Billboards managed to be both popular and a lightning rod for controversy? Why have people (critics and audiences alike) responded so strongly to the film? What makes it a potential “best film” of 2017?

Constance Grady: Three Billboards strikes me as a film that’s both benefited enormously from its timing and been hurt by it. It went into wide release on November 10, just over a month after the first Harvey Weinstein story broke, as it was becoming clear that the flood of stories about powerful men who preyed on women with impunity was not going to slow down anytime soon. In that context, a movie in which a woman’s rage is portrayed as operatic, in which Frances McDormand’s speeches are less like rants than like arias, is immensely cathartic.

I think it’s for that reason that Three Billboards has begun to work as a protest symbol in the same way that the red robes from The Handmaid’s Tale have. In the wake of the Parkland, Florida, shooting, for instance, gun control activists sent three trucks with billboard-style signs to drive through Miami, blaring out, “SLAUGHTERED IN SCHOOL / AND STILL NO GUN CONTROL? / HOW COME, MARCO RUBIO?”

Rose McGowan, who’s been active in speaking out against Harvey Weinstein, has said that after he allegedly assaulted her in 1997, she tried to rent out a billboard on Sunset Boulevard that said, “Harvey Weinstein is a rapist.” (I don’t know whether McGowan actually did try to rent out a billboard in 1997, but the way she tells the story seems strikingly influenced by Three Billboards.) It’s become an enormously meaningful signifier of righteous, unmitigated rage in a time when our culture is finally beginning to let people — especially women — be angry.

That said, as great as Three Billboards is at legitimizing and celebrating women’s rage, it’s remarkably clumsy at dealing with race. (Why would you invoke the horrific systemic racism of America’s police if all of your main characters are going to be white?) And its momentum going into awards season means that it’s become a useful symbol of how bad Hollywood is at focusing at more than one social issue at a time, and how it seems to believe that this year is the “gender year” and that means no one will care about #OscarsSoWhite anymore.

Timing feels like the biggest and most important factor for me here. In a year in which we weren’t grappling quite so visibly with Hollywood’s systemic misogyny, I’m not sure Three Billboards would have been quite such a big story.

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Caroline Framke: I agree. When I left my theater — about a week before the backlash started picking up major steam — I was buzzing with a kind of vicarious rage that felt, like Constance said, incredibly cathartic. After steeping myself in the Weinstein story and its ripple effects for a solid month, it did feel awesome to watch Mildred raise holy hell in the name of avenging a wronged woman, in all her deadpan, vicious glory. In McDormand’s incomparable ability to portray a woman who doesn’t give a single fuck, I can’t lie: I found a bit of relief.

But the longer I sat with Three Billboards, the less I felt able to grasp on to whatever it was trying to say — probably because, in the end, I’m not convinced the movie itself even knows.

Mildred’s pain is so sharp, and there are so many lines that make for the kind of endlessly quotable nuggets McDonagh excels at. (He’s a playwright, and it shows.) But everything else collapses the second you give it a second thought. Sam Rockwell is incredibly good as the belligerent cop Dixon, but that character is such an ungodly mess, not least because of how many characters — especially Woody Harrelson’s kindly Chief Willoughby — tend to just chuckle and shake their heads when he abuses his power just because he can.

As many have pointed out, McDonagh wrote this movie eight years ago, about a very specific kind of Southern dynamics that he himself has never experienced — especially not the racial dynamics, which he just about completely bungles with this movie’s glancing blows.

What’s more, not even the “woman raging for justice” angle quite stands up to scrutiny, because Mildred is literally the only woman that this movie bothers fleshing out. Even the daughter she’s mourning — the woman the billboards are for — only gets a single flashback in the way of development, and that scene includes her ending her final fight with Mildred with the furious sarcastic aside that she hopes she gets raped. Even in that first viewing, I flinched. It’s a remarkably bad scene, blunt in all the wrong ways, that really makes me question if McDonagh understood the women he was writing about at all.

So if anything, the thing that’s surprised me with Three Billboards is its awards season longevity, given how little it can hold up to even a second glance. Why do you think it’s been able to stick around so much, Alissa? Is it as simple an answer as “most awards show voting was underway before the backlash really picked up,” or is there something else going on here?

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Alissa: Strangely, the backlash had pretty much hit before most awards voting started, just after Thanksgiving. So the praise and the backlash has been going on simultaneously. And that’s not uncommon. The same thing was happening with La La Land last year, for instance. But the criticism of Three Billboards feels much more urgent than La La Land, being so tied to big, timely issues in the country more broadly.

I think what’s happening is pretty simple: This movie works on some levels and doesn’t on others, and the level on which it works — Mildred’s anger and action — is so memorable and larger than life that it drowns out the matter of race, which, as you said, Caroline, can take a while for some viewers to register as not just a movie failing to confront an issue it promises to confront, but a larger failure of writing. (It took me a while.)

And I think there’s another factor too: As some of our colleagues wrote in January, America is yet to have its #MeToo reckoning with race. We’re hyper-aware now in many ways of the gender dynamics in our culture, but for many people — especially the kind of white, generally progressive-leaning people who make up critics groups and industry voting bodies — race is still a blind spot, in ways that fellow Best Picture nominee Get Out expertly (and uncomfortably) skewers.

I think that’s what accounts for Three Billboards’ success with voters and with audiences. And it is a memorable film with great performances. If it wins Best Picture, I’ll be disappointed (even racial politics aside, there’s no way it’s the best picture of the year), but I won’t be surprised.

I do wonder if there’s another factor motivating its success too. Three Billboards is, as we’ve noted, a depiction (though not a realistic one) of a particular place: Missouri. It wasn’t shot there, which is pretty obvious if you’ve spent any time in Missouri, and it’s highly stylized — Missouri is more Midwestern than Southern, but McDonagh seems to think it’s all Southern — but that’s at least the notion.

I don’t really buy the “Hollywood coastal elites” stereotype, if only because everyone in Hollywood is from everywhere else, but I do wonder how many of these voting groups are thinking about it as a depiction of a place that’s fraught with controversy, both with police violence in Ferguson and controversies about tearing down Confederate statues. Could voters be responding to its “place-iness,” trying to honor a film that portrays a place that only exists for many people in the news?

Constance: It certainly feels plausible that members of the Academy might be drawn to a movie that allows them to demonstrate that they care about the middle of the country, especially after so much of last year’s narrative was about how La La Land was bound to win because it’s such an LA movie and Hollywood wouldn’t be able to resist. (It didn’t win, but that was the narrative.)

But if that’s the case, surely there are movies out there that would better allow the Academy to do just that? Three Billboards is a bizarre amalgam of Irish class struggles and broad stereotypes about red-state America, all overlaid onto an imaginary small town without any particular attempt at verisimilitude. It’s a movie that insists on its “place-iness,” as you say, Alissa, but it’s also weirdly unconcerned with how far away it feels from actual Missouri — see, for instance, the sheriff’s wife, who is inexplicably Australian. (Abbie Cornish does a nice job with that pretty thankless role, but for real: How did an Australian woman end up in Ebbing, Missouri, married to a man 20 years older than her?)

Does Three Billboards feel like a movie that is interested in what it’s actually like to live in Missouri? Or is it using Missouri as a fancifully gritty backdrop to a morality play? And would that distinction matter to the Academy?

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Caroline: In order: no, yes, and no.

Also, was Cornish’s character Australian?! I’m genuinely asking, because I swear to God, that accent changed in every single scene she was in.

Anyway. If Three Billboards wins, it will signal to me an Academy that largely wants to appear progressive and risk-taking by rewarding a movie that appears to be progressive and risk-taking. It attempts broad-sweep critiques of misogyny and racism without wanting to actually examine either too closely. What’s more, it tries to rebrand that lack of follow-through as a willingness to live in gray areas rather than condemn any one character as irredeemable (see: the entirety of Rockwell’s character).

Basically: I wouldn’t be surprised if it wins, but I wouldn’t be particularly impressed either.

Alissa Wilkinson: Well, then. We all have mixed feelings about this movie. But in five or 10 years, what idea, image, or scene from the movie will stick with you? Besides the controversy, what will you think of when someone mentions Three Billboards?

Constance: I’m going to think of Frances McDormand as Mildred, sitting up in bed and doing a puppet show with her bunny slippers, her voice going high-pitched and cutesy as she speaks for the bunnies: “What are you gonna do, Mildred? You’re gonna crucify ‘em?” “Yeah, I’m gonna crucify the motherfuckers.” “Whoa, I guess those motherfuckers better watch out, all right? Fucking A.”

Three Billboards is a horrifically flawed movie, but McDormand’s performance is so vitriolic and intense that most of the movie’s issues didn’t quite dawn on me until I’d walked out of the theater — I was carried away by just watching her crucify the motherfuckers. (I won’t be mad if McDormand wins Best Actress, but I will be a little mad if Three Billboards wins Best Picture.) Watching her matter-of-factly plot her revenge with her slippers was the best part of the movie, for me, and the only part worth remembering.

Caroline: I agree that the most lasting impression from this movie is McDormand by a mile. Rockwell and Harrelson are really very good, but it just isn’t even close, and I wager everyone involved knows it.

So I want my answer to be Mildred throwing Molotov cocktails at the police station or kneeing a teenage girl in the crotch. But there’s honestly no beating the stark, terrible image of those three billboards rising into the sky, red as sirens and radiating rage even before they’re literally set ablaze. They’re so striking that I wouldn’t be surprised if the basic idea of them is entirely what inspired this movie, for better and for worse.

Alissa: I agree with all of this, but for the sake of the film, l do want to say that the sequence following Woody Harrelson’s character through his last day, before he writes a letter to his wife and shoots himself in the head to avoid his slow, cancerous decline, makes my insides twist a little every time I think about it.

As a plot point, it’s very contrived, and I’m not even sure I buy it, but his sadness and desperate desire to do something right even though he knows it will also hurt his loved ones terribly is, to me, what this film is trying to do at its very best: to get at how incomplete our efforts to do good will always be. The world is broken beyond repair, and there’s no perfect solution. And the film is imperfect too. So I guess, maybe, that’s sort of the point.

Check out what our critics roundtable had to say about all nine Best Picture nominees:

Call Me By Your Name | Darkest Hour | Dunkirk | Get Out | Lady Bird | Phantom Thread | The Post | The Shape of Water | Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

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