So it turns out you can't just make a movie where Brad Pitt beats up hippies and Leonardo DiCaprio cries about spaghetti westerns and expect the Academy to hand you a participation trophy for "vibes." Quentin Tarantino's love letter to 1969 apparently peaked at "everyone's second-favorite QT movie," and the internet is handling this news with its trademark grace and emotional maturity.
For the three people who missed it: the film took home exactly one Oscar, for Brad Pitt's performance as a stunt double who may or may not have killed his wife with a spear gun.
The movie itself lost Best Picture to *Parasite*, a Korean film about a family infiltrating a rich household, which honestly sounds like the plot of every Thanksgiving dinner since 2016.
Reddit, predictably, has split into two camps.
Camp One insists the movie is a masterpiece because it captures the dying breath of Old Hollywood, the Manson cult, and the exact texture of Sharon Tate's hair.
Camp Two points out that you could cut forty minutes of DiCaprio doing a fake accent and nobody would notice.
Both camps are correct, which is the most American outcome possible.
The real crime, according to the internet's foremost film scholars (people who have watched *Pulp Fiction* four times and own a Funko Pop), is that *Once Upon a Time in Hollywood* didn't win Best Original Screenplay.
It lost to *Parasite* again, which means Bong Joon-ho personally drove to Tarantino's house and took the trophy off his mantle.
That's not what happened, but it's funnier than the truth.
Here's the thing nobody wants to admit: the movie is basically a two-and-a-half-hour hangout session with a flamethrower at the end.
It's what happens when you give a film nerd $90 million and say "make me feel like it's 1969 again, but also make the Manson family get mauled by a pit bull." And you know what?
Not everything needs to be *The Godfather*.
Sometimes you just want to watch Leonardo DiCaprio yell at a child actor about method acting while wearing a fake mustache.
The Oscars, meanwhile, continue to be a group of people who think "Best Picture" means "most important movie about social issues that also made money." *Parasite* was great. *1917* was great. *Once Upon a Time in Hollywood* was a love letter to a version of Los Angeles that never existed, written by a guy who has never met a foot he didn't want to film.
So here's my closing thought: the Academy got it right, Reddit got it wrong, and Tarantino will be fine.
He's got a play to write and a tenth movie to ruin everyone's discourse with.
Final Thoughts
In the meantime, let's all agree that the real winner was Brad Pitt's dog, who did not receive a single award for his performance as "Good Boy Who Eats Rattlesnake."