And the conversation about the Oscar nominations is being way too oversimplified.
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I’m not a big fan of jumping on the flash reaction bandwagon in the hours following the Oscar nominations announcement. It’s easy, predictable and everyone has basically had the same thing to say—which, in broad strokes, I recognize and agree with.
But by cherry picking each category to quarterback what’s the ‘pits’ about it (puns!), we’re missing the larger point: 2019 was not, in any comparable way, a particularly good year for movies.
Anyone out there who claims that all of the solid artistic work done by so many this past year that was overlooked—skin color and lack of Y chromosome aside for the moment—fell victim to there simply being too many strong movies in the mix is telling themselves a stale tale. The fact that four films—Joker, 1917, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood and The Irishman—can claim 41 nominations(!) among them shatters that dream along with the countless others scattered across Hollywood Boulevard.
So, were the pickings too slim? Was the voting period too short? Or, were Academy members too lazy to stream screeners of smaller films that deserved due (and didn’t pivot around a straight white guy)?
We’ll never know, but I’m sure about my opinions on the two biggest talking points swirling around the nominations, so let’s get into it.
YES, WE HAVE A RACE PROBLEM IN THE RACE—BUT THE REASONS MAY BE MIXED: Thanks mostly to on-her-way-to-an-EGOT Cynthia Erivo and Parasite, the Academy just barely escaped a redux of the #OscarsSoWhite misfire from a few years back.
But you don’t need to zoom out too far to acknowledge that, while this is the same group that showed love for Black Panther last year, it ultimately handed the top prize to Green Book. Sure, it was a well-made, well-intentioned movie. But it read to me more as a patchwork celluloid quilt of pat race/gender/sexual orientation tolerance made of chintzy fabric to give certain old white men of a particular generation a warm and cozy feeling about the self-congratulatory progress they think they’ve made on those issues since the ‘50s, rather than the best of a crop of what was a pretty stellar roster. (Run-on sentences mean I’m pretty fired up, folks!)
This doesn’t come as much of a surprise, as it tracks with Academy member demographics: As of 2018, approximately 16% of the membership is made up of minorities. And that’s to say nothing about women totaling only 31%. You don’t need to have ‘a beautiful mind’ to do the math.
So, as we ask ourselves ‘what happened?’ this year, it’s worth taking this into account while also placing a momentary pause on the outrage for a reality check, because I think things are—as is usually the case—much more complex than most of the knee-jerk commentary leaves room for.
First, I thought Jennifer Lopez was stunningly larger than life, fiercely good and recognition-worthy in Hustlers, but did you really think this group was going to anoint her with a nod in the end? Maybe if she had played a struggling, down-on-her-luck hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold single mother in a tattered G-string and eye makeup from last Tuesday. But this gorgeous woman gloriously sauntered onto the screen as a power mama dripping in furs, shading the white Wall Street man from behind Gucci shades and basically telling the police to GFY. An unapologetic minority woman who owns her sexual power presenting an existential threat to the patriarchal power structure? Werk! But no, not this year, or any year.
I think the story is a bit different for Eddie Murphy. The legend deserved to make an appearance in Best Actor for his great return to the screen in Dolemite Is My Name. But don’t forget that the last time he was nominated, and lost, in 2007 for Dreamgirls, he very publicly stormed out in the middle of the ceremony when the award went to, yes, an old white dude (Alan Arkin in Little Miss Sunshine). This is likely due to voters’ distaste for the man himself, as opposed to race or an outright rejection of his work for other reasons. It’s simple, y’all: When you act like an a**hole, you get treated like an a**hole, mmkay?
As for Best Actress, the omissions are a bit less explicable. Lupita Nyong’o should have been in the running for her dual roles in Us (that voice!), especially after being the actress who has nabbed the most critics’ group awards. Sure, she may have won Best Supporting Actress in 2014 for 12 Years a Slave, but it was as a black woman playing—you guessed it—an abused, tortured slave, which is much easier to honor, harkening back to the age-old ‘Green Book effect’ (as it were).
And how about Alfre Woodard for her widely lauded and buzzed about lead role in Clemency? I felt like she might have almost snuck in, but starring in a tiny independent with a largely minority cast about the prison system and executions… well, that apparently didn’t seem like holiday season viewing voters wanted to deck their halls to.
But when it comes to ‘WTF’ injustices, don’t even get me started on The Farewell. I’m not sure if the Academy felt like it hit its ‘quality Asian movie’ quota by heralding Parasite (one of my favorites of the year), but leaving The Farewell locked out of the race is kind of criminal. Moreover, though, it’s a double-whammy: Not only was the minority cast mostly made up of women ignored (Zhao Shuzhen and Awkwafina in particular), but so was writer-director Lulu Wang, who crafted one of the most beautiful, touching and fully realized films of any year.
So here, we have slices from both edges of the sword: Singularly spectacular work from minorities left by the wayside, all of which happen to also be women. These ladies deserved to have their names called on nomination morning, but not simply because they represent an underrepresented group; rather, because they were worthy.
Which brings me to my next point…
NO, GRETA GERWIG WAS NOT ROBBED: I’ve been a big lover of Little Women since I first read it in sixth grade and was called out by classmates for being a boy who liked a ‘girl’s book.’ (To harken back to that JLo commentary: GFY.) Naturally, I was counting the weeks until Greta Gerwig’s new interpretation was released; I love her work, and between the casting (well, mostly) and set photos of Civil War-era Massachusetts (home territory holler!), I was super excited to see it.
In the end, I thought the movie was… fine. Sweet. A lovely ode to Louisa May Alcott and her timeless tale, indeed. But the narrative restructuring (for which Gerwig was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay) didn’t work for me; I felt Laura Dern and Bob Odenkirk were grossly miscast; and, despite some beautiful shots, the cinematography left me wanting more—all of which are shortcomings that fall at the feet of the director.
The funny part is, I didn’t hear hardly anyone passionately ringing a bell for Gerwig to get nominated over the past few months, though when she didn’t make the cut, the anger was palpable. So, I have to wonder: With the Best Director line-up being all male, are people arguing that she was truly worthy of breaking in, or is it that she was just the assumed next-best woman to potentially make the cut? If the latter, it makes sense, as hers is the most-honored film by the Academy with a woman behind the lens—but that does not a director nomination make.
Further, I would argue that what she achieved behind the camera two years ago with Lady Bird far outpaces Little Women’s final product, and if voters agree with that assessment (which we might assume at least some do), it’s probably the key to unlocking this non-mystery.
Either way, if a woman was to have been invited to the party—and I agree that at least one should have—I would have put in the aforementioned Wang for The Farewell, or even Lorene Scafaria for Hustlers, out in front of Gerwig. Again, though, not in an effort to fulfill calls for a balanced ballot—it’s because they deserved it.
But hey, it all boils down to this: Art is subjective, and that’s just my opinion. And Oscar voters—however flawed—gave us a rundown of nominations that reflects theirs. Using pop culture to amplify critical cultural discussions about race and gender is a good way to get a dialogue going, and that’s always valuable. The Academy has a lot of work to do and can improve on many fronts, but the rest of us can do better, too, by taking a more dynamic look at what’s at play instead of firing off hot-drop Instagram and Facebook posts that oversimplify the issues and strip them of any nuance.
In the meantime, though, let’s hope this weekend’s SAG Awards rights some of Oscar’s wrongs. After all, this is Hollywood, and the only thing they love more than themselves is a dramatic cliffhanger with a statuette dangling off the edge for the taking. Stay tuned.