THE BIG SICK WAS NOT NOMINATED FOR BEST PICTURE at the 90th Academy Awards. That is something I consider to be unreasonable, given that it was not only the second-best movie of all of 2017, but also it’s the best rom-com we’ve gotten since 2003’s Something’s Gotta Give. And so that’s how we ended up with this chapter, as well as the two chapters that follow it. It’s a three-part series rectifying some Academy Awards grievances. The way it came to be is as follows, and I’m going to use little arrows between each sentence because I feel like it helps best show the way a string of thoughts occur in someone’s brain:
I was writing a part of the book late one night in September 2018. 
It was about 2:30 a.m. when I finished what I was working on but I was not sleepy so I decided to turn on a movie and let it play while I stared through the television. I went with The Big Sick, a movie I fell in love with in December 2017 and had watched about thirty times since. Because I’d seen it so many times, I assumed my brain would turn itself off as I watched, which is what needs to happen for a person to fall asleep. That didn’t happen, though. Instead, I got pulled into the movie again, and right at the end—right when Kumail and Emily share the look that lets you know they’re going to get back together before the screen cuts to black and your heart is all full of love and hope and joy—I said out loud to myself, “I need a chapter in the book where I can talk about how good The Big Sick is and how happy The Big Sick makes me.” So, after a bit of brainstorming, I decided I was going to write a thing where I was going to come up with a bunch of new Oscar categories and then hand out awards only to rom-coms. I went with that idea because the Academy Awards have, by and large, historically ignored the rom-com genre.1 And so that’s what I did. But it turned out I didn’t like it. Because it felt too much like the Latin Grammys.
Do you know what the Latin Grammys are? The Latin Grammys have been around for about two decades now. They’re exactly like the regular Grammys, except but it’s an offshoot ceremony designed to honor music recorded in Spanish or Portuguese. It’s always felt dumb to me that they existed. It’s like the Recording Academy wanted to recognize Latin music, but not enough that they’d do it in a way that affected the already established Grammys even one single percent. In my head, I imagine that somebody (or a group of somebodies) complained that not enough Latin musicians were being recognized at the Grammys, and so someone in charge there was like, “Fine. Here. You can have your own Grammys. Just stay over there, okay?”
At any rate, it felt that same way to me when I built the special rom-com version of the Academy Awards for this book. By creating a rom-com-specific arm of the Academy Awards, it felt like I was indirectly delegitimizing rom-coms, which was the opposite of what I was trying to do. So I just deleted everything and settled on this new premise, which is:
The next three chapters here will be a thing where we go through the list of Oscar winners from 1995 forward and correct a bunch of mistakes. And, again, I want to do that because I would like to weave some rom-com recognition into the Academy Awards ceremonies like it’s always deserved to be, but also because the more I dug around in the archives of the Academy Awards, the more I realized how many movies that deserved Oscars didn’t win any. And in part, I say that playfully, yes, as in, “Jean-Claude Van Damme should’ve gotten Oscar consideration for Bloodsport, lol.” But also I say it seriously, as in, “Do the Right Thing not only didn’t win the Oscar for Best Picture at the 1990 Academy Awards, it WASN’T EVEN NOMINATED.”
So that’s this.
A few housekeeping notes here meant to keep things tenable:
• We’re only dealing with the big-ticket awards. That means it’s Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Supporting Actress.
• Also: Just to make things a little more interesting, there will be no instances where all the category winners get replaced wholesale. At the very most, only up to three corrections can be made for each year.
• So as to prevent this from turning into 60,000 words of me just giving Best Actor or Best Actress awards to performances from characters like Kurt Russell’s in Big Trouble in Little China2 or Anna Faris’s in Scary Movie 2,3 the rule is this: For the most part, the replacements offered up need to be serious suggestions based on legitimate arguments. But there are seven We’ll Look the Other Way (WLTOW) exemptions available that can be used to pick a person or a movie as an Oscar winner that otherwise wouldn’t have had a chance. So, for example, say I actually did want to give Jean-Claude Van Damme an Oscar for Bloodsport (I super fucking do), that’s fine. But seeing as how that’d be a silly thing, it’d require me to spend one of the seven WLTOW exemptions.
• The reason 1995 is the cutoff date is there’s a part in The Big Sick where Ray Romano’s character, Terry, is sitting in the hospital with his wife, Beth, and Kumail. (Terry is the father of the girl who is big sick.) The three of them are looking at reviews of hospitals together. The hospital they’re at has gotten several bad reviews. Upon learning this, Terry says, “This is why I don’t want to go online ’cause it’s never good. You go online, they hated Forrest Gump. Frickin’ best movie ever.” Forrest Gump won, among other things, Best Picture at the 1995 Academy Awards. So that’s where we’re starting.
• This one is less a rule and more of a heads-up, but: The Academy Awards take place the year after a movie comes out. So, with something like Titanic, that movie won Best Picture at the 1998 Academy Awards. It came out, however, in 1997. All the awards work like that, so that’s how this will work as well.
To be clear, I do not hate Forrest Gump. I don’t even dislike it. It’s a good-enough movie and an interesting movie and a clever movie and I have seen it many times, and I’m sure I will watch it many more times when it comes on television. BUT, I’m swiping the Best Picture award away from it and sending it elsewhere.
It’s not going to Pulp Fiction, even though many people felt like it should’ve then and still feel like it should now. And it’s not going to The Lion King (a legitimate Oscar contender that should’ve been nominated for Best Picture but wasn’t). And it’s not going to Four Weddings and a Funeral (a movie lifted up into greatness by Andie MacDowell). And it’s not even going to The Shawshank Redemption, which is out and out the greatest prison movie that’s ever been made and also regularly regarded as the best film ever to not win Best Picture. Because here comes a curveball:
Your new Best Picture is Speed, a beautiful action movie starring Keanu Reeves (he is excellent in it as LAPD SWAT officer Jack Traven), Sandra Bullock (she’s so good in Speed that halfway through the movie you’re like, “Well, obviously this woman is headed toward the uppermost tiers of Hollywood stardom”), and a bus that couldn’t go under fifty miles per hour or it’d explode. And the best part with this pick is I don’t even have to use one of the seven WLTOW exemptions because it’s a genuine Best Picture contender, and if that sounds ridiculous then let me remind you very quickly that Harrison Ford’s The Fugitive, another great action movie similar in ethos to Speed, was nominated for two Oscars the year before, one of which was Best Picture (!).4 So there you go.
Another change we’re making here (and this one is likely more obvious than the Speed for Best Picture pick) is swapping out Robert Zemeckis as the Best Director winner and replacing him with Frank Darabont. He really directed the hell out of The Shawshank Redemption and deserves the statue.5
And the final change is: Jessica Lange is losing her Best Actress award because now it belongs to Andie MacDowell, who was flawless as Carrie in Four Weddings and a Funeral. (Hugh Grant has always been attached to Julia Roberts and Renée Zellweger and Sandra Bullock in the rom-com conversation,6 but please let’s not forget that it was Andie MacDowell who first teased out of him the kind of awkward and stutter-stepped likability that he’d eventually center his career around.)