I Love ‘CODA,’ But I Don’t Want It To Win Best Picture

The 2022 Oscars are less than a week away, and you know what that means: Movie lovers are fighting on Twitter!

This time around, the discourse is about CODA, Sian Heder’s feel-good drama about a majority-deaf family, which somewhat unexpectedly took home the Producer’s Guild Award for Best Film on Saturday night. Given that the film also took home the WGA’s Best Adapted Screenplay award on Sunday night and the BAFTA for adapted screenplay a week prior, CODA is looking like a late-stage frontrunner for Best Picture at the Oscars, perhaps poised to beat out Jane Campion’s brooding western Power of the Dog. And of course, with every Oscar race—especially an Oscar race looking this close—there is, inevitably, backlash. Which is why, though I love CODA dearly, I sincerely hope it does not win Best Picture—because I simply cannot take any more of the discourse.

The CODA backlash goes like this: CODA is a formulaic coming-of-age movie that, more likely than not, will make you cry whether you want to or not. It’s a tear-jerker, a feel-good film, and also—so its critics say—it sucks. It’s nothing like The Power of the Dog, an intellectual art film about an abusive cowboy that makes you feel bad, but think deep thoughts. That the members of the Academy may be leaning toward CODA suggests they are not intellectually mature enough, nor discerning enough, to appreciate a prestige film like The Power of the Dog and are instead drawn to the equivalent of a puff-piece, simply because it makes them happy. CODA is, film blogger and Awards Daily founder Sasha Stone posited, the new Crash: a movie that, if it wins Best Picture, will go down in history as proof that the Oscars do not have taste.

In case it’s not clear, I disagree with this backlash. CODA is, in my humble opinion, both a cheesy, feel-good movie and a great film. (You can read more about why I think so here.) I loved it when it came out, I love it now, and, based on its 95 percent Rotten Tomato score, many other critics did, too. But I also disagree with the backlash to the backlash: that people only want to see feel-good movies right now, that The Power of the Dog is for high-brow intellectuals, that Hollywood is snobby and elitist if Campion’s film wins the top prize.

As with most insufferable Twitter discourse, there’s a false dichotomy at play. The Power of the Dog, while not exactly a popcorn movie, is quite sentimental. Like CODA, it appeals to viewers’ emotions. Much of the movie is the slow reveal of Benedict Cumberbatch’s character’s love affair with a man, Bronco Henry, for whom he mourns every day. It’s a love story. Not a happy one, but a love story nonetheless. Campion’s script, which she adapted from Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel, is hardly inaccessible. These are ranchers in Montana; this is not The Tragedy of Macbeth. As for the idea that “people only want to watch happy things,” it’s baffling how one can even attempt that argument in a year where the most popular show on Netflix was a dystopian Korean drama about people being brutally murdered.

There’s another side to the CODA backlash that I haven’t touched on: that it’s an offensive portrayal of Deaf people. I hesitate to take a stance here, not being Deaf or disabled myself, but a look at the response to CODA from the Deaf community suggests a mix—that many are happy to see the representation of Deaf actors on screen and to see a story that takes the Deaf community seriously, but that Heder’s script gets some things wrong and relies on a few too many tired tropes. To simplify the Deaf community’s reaction to the movie for the sole purpose of backing up one “side” or the other in an Oscars argument on Twitter feels inappropriate at best, and offensive at worst.

All this is to say: If CODA does win Best Picture, it won’t be undeserved in my mind. Sian Heder is a fine director. Marlee Matin, Troy Kotsur, Emilia Jones, and Daniel Durant all delivered exemplary performances. It’s an excellent film that tells a specific story, and when you cry (and you will cry), it’s the kind of crying that feels meaningful. But I don’t want it to win. Because the backlash that will follow will no doubt be even worse than the discourse we’re dealing with now.

Watch CODA on Apple TV+