Basically, the Academy awarded Green Book Best Picture despite being basically Driving Miss Daisy in Reverse (this time, the white guy drives the black person!); critics pointed out that's it's another movie about racism written, directed and produced by white men that ends with an individual overcoming his racism, while ignoring the more systemic aspects of American racism, which would allow the older, whiter audience it was aimed at (and which still constitutes a large portion of the Academy) to pat themselves on the back that they were one of the good ones without actually confronting any biases or privileges that they might have just by virtue of being born white in America.
Sure, it was a movie about "racism is bad"; but that isn't the problem anymore. Everybody knows racism is bad, now. Especially the racists. (I mean, just for an example, Donald Trump's main takeaway from Oscar night was that Spike Lee didn't like him, so Lee must be racist against white people.) When just about every critic pointed out that, despite it's basically true theme, it's still basically a "conservative" movie that does a poorer job actually addressing systemic racism than, well, your average recent Disney cartoon at this point, the audience it was designed to comfort (i.e. old white dudes who consider themselves liberal even if their politics were set in stone sometime before Watergate i.e. still a large voting mass in the Academy) took this personally. Who were these uppity kids to tell them they weren't liberal?
And, yes, there were interviews with anonymous Academy voters of a certain age who basically straight up said "I am voting for Green Book because who are they to tell me I'm not liberal enough? I voted for Moonlight and 12 Years a Slave and if that's not good enough for them, well, they had better learn their place, so there!" And the thing is these voters will almost certainly go to their graves never realizing who this "they" represented even to themselves.
(I mean, it was also a generally agreeable movie that was really more or less harmless, so it probably got a lot of genuine first place votes from older people who probably did realize the critics had a point, but they really liked it, darnit! Which is still problematic, but the lesser evil here.)
As far as furries are concerned, we were pretty apolitical overall; though maybe it could be said some of us voted for our "Best Picture" equivalent because we were mad at blue people.
Basically, the Academy awarded Green Book Best Picture despite being basically Driving Miss Daisy in Reverse (this time, the white guy drives the black person!); critics pointed out that's it's another movie about racism written, directed and produced by white men that ends with an individual overcoming his racism, while ignoring the more systemic aspects of American racism, which would allow the older, whiter audience it was aimed at (and which still constitutes a large portion of the Academy) to pat themselves on the back that they were one of the good ones without actually confronting any biases or privileges that they might have just by virtue of being born white in America.
Sure, it was a movie about "racism is bad"; but that isn't the problem anymore. Everybody knows racism is bad, now. Especially the racists. (I mean, just for an example, Donald Trump's main takeaway from Oscar night was that Spike Lee didn't like him, so Lee must be racist against white people.) When just about every critic pointed out that, despite it's basically true theme, it's still basically a "conservative" movie that does a poorer job actually addressing systemic racism than, well, your average recent Disney cartoon at this point, the audience it was designed to comfort (i.e. old white dudes who consider themselves liberal even if their politics were set in stone sometime before Watergate i.e. still a large voting mass in the Academy) took this personally. Who were these uppity kids to tell them they weren't liberal?
And, yes, there were interviews with anonymous Academy voters of a certain age who basically straight up said "I am voting for Green Book because who are they to tell me I'm not liberal enough? I voted for Moonlight and 12 Years a Slave and if that's not good enough for them, well, they had better learn their place, so there!" And the thing is these voters will almost certainly go to their graves never realizing who this "they" represented even to themselves.
(I mean, it was also a generally agreeable movie that was really more or less harmless, so it probably got a lot of genuine first place votes from older people who probably did realize the critics had a point, but they really liked it, darnit! Which is still problematic, but the lesser evil here.)
As far as furries are concerned, we were pretty apolitical overall; though maybe it could be said some of us voted for our "Best Picture" equivalent because we were mad at blue people.