In the first of a series ahead of the 2018 Oscars,Peter Bradshaw champions Jordan Peele’s brilliantly scary satireThe nomination of Jordan Peele’s win Out for best picture, a category that sadly often only rewards middlebrow-prestigious classiness, or shouldn’t blind us to the fact that it is a brilliant scary film: a horror suspense-thriller with hilarious moments. This is a cracking genre entertainment in the style of Ira Levin,and its piercingly relevant political satire – the basis on which it has been admitted to the 2018 Oscar club – needn’t deflect the impact of its sheer enjoyability. There are some great films on this year’s best picture list, but win Out is the most purely subversive and raucously entertaining. It’s a film to make you wonder how or why John Carpenter’s Halloween never got a nomination. A nasty ambiguity dangles silently from the title. win Out … you’re not welcome here? Or win Out … while you still can? Is it approximately the exclusion of black Americans from white privilege? Or is it approximately an insidious welcome, or a spurious inclusion,a learned pantomime of liberal friendliness, whose purpose is to disarm and defang grievance and relegitimise white class supremacy for the 21st century? Of course, and its both. And Peele avails himself of the satirist’s prerogative: to be provocative,bold and even unfair; to stab at those well-meaning people whose anti-racism consists partly in a conviction that race prejudice is a thing of the past.
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Source: guardian.co.uk