'Green Book' should never have won the best picture Oscar. Here’s why

"Green Book" would have been a good best picture winner in 1990, when "Driving Miss Daisy" took the top Oscar. Or in 2006, so we wouldn't have had to hear about "Crash" for the next decade. But in 2019? Not so much. "Green Book" winning Sunday at the 91st Academy Awards just felt really wrong, especially during an awards season where the story of a black classical musician and his white driver in the 1960s Jim Crow South has never quite been all right.

The movie navigated filmmaker controversies – director Peter Farrelly exposing himself, now-Oscar-winning screenwriter Nick Vallelonga's controversial 9/11 tweets – as well as the family of one of its subjects, Dr. Don Shirley, calling it "a symphony of lies" and the story coming under fire for portraying race from a white point of view.

Jim Burke (far left), Charles B. Wessler, Nick Vallelonga, Peter Farrelly and Brian Hayes Currie pose with their best picture Oscars for "Green Book." (Photo11: DAN MacMEDAN/USA TODAY) And somehow "Green Book" still won best picture. It's a head-scratcher of a choice when sitting right there in the category were "Black Panther," the blockbuster Marvel superhero movie that was a humongous, game-changing win for black representation, and Spike Lee's "BlacKkKlansman," which depicted a racist past that mirrors our current tumultuous times.

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It's also the wrong choice on a night where Lee stood exultant with the first non-honorary Oscar of his long career and Hannah Beachler of "Black Panther" became the first African-American woman to win for production design. "Green Book" ending the ceremony triumphant was odd, a dunderheaded decision at worst and a dull one at best. (Also, if your movie is about race relations, maybe don't have your trophy-room pictures be only of white filmmakers?) Following the movie's victory lap, social media wasn't having it – then again, "Green Book" has never exactly been a hit there. Filmmaker Ava DuVernay tweeted a Wikipedia article where people could find out more about the origins of the real Green Book. "Some of Green Book’s best friends are black movies," NBC News reporter Alex Seitz-Wald shared.