Is #OscarsSoWhite going to open up a new can of worms in 2016's award season?

How can you not be for more diversity?" a friend recently asked me on a message board when I was explaining my opposition to the #OscarsSoWhite movement that has exploded over the last two awards season cycles.

Perhaps I am no longer on the side of liberal progress and no longer care about racial representation in film. Or perhaps, it's not an either-or dichotomy. I recognize the value of racial representation AND I thought the #Oscarssowhite movement the past two years has been counterproductive to that cause.

Why? Because the twitter movement was simply counterfactual. In the 21st century, roughly 12% of acting nominees were Black and the proportion of African-Americans to the rest of the population according to the census is also 12%. If discrimination exists in Hollywood, I agree with Oscar winner Spike Lee (who got an honorary Oscar last year by a supposedly racist organization) who said it happens in casting rooms and at studios and to blame the Oscars is a misdirect. The #oscarssowhite movement has largely damaged its credibility by being proudly counterfactual, by lacking nuance in its analysis (if you want to see such a nuanced article, click here for an extremely thorough and reasonable explanation for why no black films were nominated in 2015), by having no definition of its goals, by going after the wrong targets, and by a lack of appreciation for the progress that has been made.

In the midst of one of these conversations, an activist asked me: "Do you expect us to be happy with the crumbs you get?" If you're going to accuse a person or organization of racist behavior, I expect an honest and thorough assessment of whether those are indeed crumbs. If these activists can't recognize intermediate steps of progress, what incentive is there to placate them? This is an awards body that has helped jump-start the careers of such minorities as Taraji P Henson, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Keisha Castle-Hughes, Terrence Howard, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Demian Bichir, Sophie Okonedo and Jennifer Hudson by awarding them with honors when box office receipts and other awards bodies weren't. If you look at the BAFTAs, for example, none of these people (except Jennifer Hudson) were nominated. Fun fact: Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman have been nominated 11 times by the Oscars and neither of them were nominated once by the BAFTAs.

This year, the Oscars will likely be far more inclusive of films with black narratives and many people of color look to make their way into the nominations. I am legitimately happy. I saw "Hidden Figures" and loved it and this week I eagerly plan on seeing "Fences." However, if you think that's not going to open up a whole new can of worms, think again:

1. Is the directorial race this year going to be framed as some be-all account of racial politics? Are Kenneth Lonergan and Damien Chazelle going to have a chance to compete freely against Barry Jenkins or will the social justice movement try to reframe it as a case of justice instead of artistic choice, insisting that votes for Lonergan and Chazelle are simply votes for an oppressive patriarchy. Last year, the movement was upset by the lack of black directors. I fear that even one or two directors won't be seen as an improvement but a further cause for protest if they don't win.

2. Similarly, Jeff Nichols made a well-crafted tale but if his film ends up performing better in the Oscar race than the other black-themed films -- Hidden Figures, Fences, and Loving -- then will activists cry foul at the fact that Nichols has no right to tell a story of people whose race he isn't a member of? Has there even been much discussion of the theory that art and cross-cultural learning is mostly predicated on stepping outside your own experiences and exploring someone else's story?

2b. Or maybe the backlash will try to resurrect the narrative that black stories are only told by white film makers ignoring the recent BP nominations of Lee Daniels, Ana Duverney and Steve McQueen. This is more of a hypothetical because because the acting and directing for Loving didn't rate as highly among critics anyway, so it looks like that minefield will be avoided.

3. However, the flipside of this is that Loving's lead Ruth Negga is far from a lock in her category and could be bumped out while three out of five Oscar nominated best supporting actresses will be black if projections hold up. This really has more to do with variable definitions of lead (and category fraud) than anything substantial, but are we going to be subjected to another barrage of essays about how Hollywood hates black as lead women?

4. Likewise in the acting races, between four and seven of the twenty acting nominations are projected go to black actors with South Asian actor Dev Patel a near lock to add to the diversity mix as well in the supporting category. That is an impressive number and I am nothing but happy for many of these actors that I love. Octavia Spencer and Taraji P. Henson are actresses who I have waited quite a while to see them get a second nomination. However, the ethnic mix of acting performances is random, combined with a lot of other factors (like, for example, who gave the best performance, didn't that used to count for something?) and most importantly cyclical. If the number dips down to one or two again next year, are we setting ourselves up for another cycle of twitter slacktivism next year? The problem with Oscars So White's undefined goals manifests itself in situations like this.

5. Did #OscarsSoWhite really make this happen? (this is an open-ended question because I do not know the answer)Suppose #oscarssowhite made a lot of noise last year, did that specifically lead to these films being greenlit? I would assume that they were made before the protests happened last year anyway.

Why the 5 picture system has always been a mistake

I'm looking this up and I think the 5-picture system was always a mistake.

My reasoning is that in every decade the Academy has always picked films that don't hold up to history and look ridiculous years later. Throughout the 5-picture years, the academy has a fairly good track record of selecting 1-2 or 1-3 (most people agree that Social Network-Kings Speech-True Grit were all good choices as was No County-There Will Be Blood, Avatar-Hurt Locker, Argo-Lincoln, Crash-Brokeback, Little Miss Sunshine-Departed, Aviator-Million Dollar Baby-Sideways, Mystic River-LOTR) but in slots 3-5, the academy makes arbitrary decisions that could often look stupid down the line.

For example, let's look at 1960. The best picture nominees were Elmer Gantry (worthy), the Apartment (worthy), Sundowners, Sons and Lovers, and Alamo. I'm almost entirely unfamiliar with those films, except I know that the Alamo was heavily campaigned for and yes, ignorance is no excuse for whether a film is good, but there are definitely four unnominated films from that year I've heard of and I'd consider them classics  (as with everything on this post, YMMV): Exodus, Inherit the Wind (although some find Stanley Kramer preachy and he never makes a short list of the best directors in comparison to contemporaries like Kazan, Lumet or Nichols, this is among his best films), Psycho, and Spartacus.

Decisions that are stupid in retrospect at the 3-5 slots have happened in every decade.

The 90's, for example, had Awakenings (about as dramatic as an episode of ER), Godfather III (considered to be a disappointment), Four Weddings and a Funeral (80% of Jon Cusack romantic comedies have more to say than that film), Il Postino (clearly has been forgotten: I just asked eight of my facebook friends if they've heard of that, I got ZERO yeses), Secrets and Lies (I got one of eight on that one), Babe (how many films were influenced by that? I think Homeward Bound 2 and Zookeeper was the only other film ever to use the formula of talking animals), the Fugitive (decent for an action film, but even a good action film today like Source Code or Adjustment Bureau is not going to make the Oscars).

It's pretty reasonable to assume that great films like Ed Wood, Misery, The Player, Leaving Las Vegas, Heat, Usual Suspects or Dead Man Walking would have gotten a nomination considering the other awards they were getting that season.

In the 00's: Almost Famous, Mullholland Drive, Memento, Royal Tenenbaums, Far From Heaven, Adaptation, About Schmidt, Road to Perdition, Eternal Sunshine, History of Violence, Children of Men, Pan's Labyrinth, Dream Girls, United 93, Into the Wild, Sweeney Todd, Wall-E, Dark Knight, and Wrestler, all had a good chance of being included if they expanded the nominee slate.

Would it have made up for questionable choices like Chocolat? Most definitely. I think more movie fans were happy with 2011's choices than 2000 because all the good nominees were included and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (according to RottenTomatoes.com, it was the most unpopular choice of Best Picture nominees in the 21st century with Chocolat) will just be seen as a quirky anomaly in retrospect

Oscar buzz: Is the tail wagging the dog at this point?

I just bought an issue of Entertainment Weekly when I was was on a trip and stressed out and needed to get my mind off things, and it was comfort food to read it.

When I skipped straight to the prediction section, I started to realize a problem.
What I was reading was information I already knew with just minor alterations (i.e. now Steven Spielberg is in the best director category instead of Terrence Malick and Money isn't one of the BP frontrunners).

And then it struck me as ridiculous. I was eagerly wanting to consume information telling me most of what I already know. Then I'll eagerly watch the Oscar ceremony where 70% of the content is what I've already seen before.

The Oscar speeches will be mostly identical to the Golden Globe and SAG speeches and the results will almost be pre-ordained.

Oscar buzz likely started out as a few people wanting to be the guy in their office who says "I know who will win the Oscars," but 80% of the time, we all know who will win the Oscars and 80% of the time, the participants know who will win. How awful is it to invite Jacki Weaver (nominated last year for "Animal Kingdom") or Mark Ruffalo (nominated for "The Kids Are All Right) to the Oscars when they both know it's a practical certainty that they're going to lose. For all, we know the precursor gluttony decides the voting. Someone might have asked themselves in the 2010/2011 race: "Why should I vote for Jacki Weaver when all of the precursor awards show that it's either gonna be Hailee, Amy Adams or Melissa Leo?"

More disturbing is that when we discuss Oscar buzz, we're not actually talking about movies anymore for the most part. We're simply trying to use statistics and such to predict human behavior. Some of the most prominent people in the film criticism community are nothing more than glorified statisticians. Go to Awards Daily and you'll see that most of their articles consist of announcing press releases by various groups giving their awards of the films of the year. Commentary by the webmasters of the commenters will use this information to slightly recalibrate their attitudes about who will be selected as Oscar winners.

Just the other day, we had the Central Ohio Film Critics Awards announcing their picks. Are we now dividing states into latitudinal thirds for the sole purpose of disseminating a list of best films of the year that closely mirrors 200 other such lists?

I've previously written that the winners of the Oscars were originally publicized before the big night. Now, the stated goal of the Academy is to keep the results sealed. Technically, those awards are still sealed but when we have 8 million awards precursors; when they allow directors, actors, writers and producers of the academy to vote in other awards ceremonies; when sites on the internet are dedicated to using every algorithm they have to predict the results, what's the difference?

The era of the blockbuster

Five years ago, Spiderman burst into movie theaters across the country an unpredented three weekends before Memorial day. Boasting a head start over the rest of the summer films, an unlikely choice for the lead in Tobey MaGuire, and a legion of comic book aficianados eager for the movie's release, the film made movie history by becoming the first film to make one hundred million dollars in its opening weekend.

Since then, Spiderman 3 enters theatered the same weekend, but in an era that's completeley dominated by summer blockbusters. At $151 million Spiderman 3 broke the weekend record once again and has become the eighth picture to do so. Thirty-three movies have grossed $200 million or more domestically and 23 of those came out during the summer whereas only 28 films hit the $200 million mark before this decade.

Ten years ago, there might have been one or two big budget projects like Men in Black, Batman Forever, or Independence Day that would generate water cooler buzz all summer, but nowadays, a big-event picture enters the theaters once every other week during the summer months, with sequels, prequels, remakes. Everything practically falls into this pattern even if it's not technically a sequel. The 2002 hit Signs and M. Night Shamylan's sophomore effort, was anticipated "the next M. Night Shamylan film," which was in essence The Sixth Sense II or we could have called Michael Moore's Farenheight 911, "Bowling for Columbine II."

"Why don't the studios care about originality?" you may ask. They do. In fact, it's because of their love of filmmaking and their desire to want to make innovative and original films that the studios put us through this cycle and it also benefits us as well. Here's how:

By expending a lot of money on these cash cow films and shamelessly plugging away at them until every person and their grandmother has seen the movie twice, studios are able to pay for all the more interesting films that might not be as sure of a commercial bet. These films usually appear in theaters from around the end of the summer to the end of the year, and you can often find many of them spilling over into January and February. The films that are released during this time of year in hopes of winning Oscars, which are little toy statues that the winners like to wave around to their peers in hopes of gaining respect, power, and priority seating at high-class Hollywood establishments. It's a strange culture they have out there.

Nevertheless, once Oscar season ends, we have a season of pretty-much nothing on the movie front. Movie fans can spend their time watching the NHL or college basketball or whatever else catches their fancy, because the state of movies is pretty much unchanged. Sure, there are movies in the theaters between February and April but these are films that are released just for the sake of having something new for the movie theaters to show. With a few exceptions, these movies are usually very forgettable (If films in this category like R.V., the Pacifier, Norbit, Epic Movie, Failure to Launch, The Shaggy Dog, Date Movie or Wild Hogs become classics 10 years down the road, than I will eat my words on this one). I think of it as a kind of absence-makes-the-heart-grow-fonder-type of process where we take a break from watching current releases and might even swear off movies as a whole considering the quality of the films that comes out during this period.

This is where the summer Blockbuster season comes to the rescue. It presents us with sequels, remakes and tentpoles which are virtually impossible to turn down. Anyone who's watched Pirates of the Carribean 2 and has even the slightest interest in the characters is going to feel compelled to watch the third one just to see what happens to the characters. This is why sequels are so profitable, although that's based on the cliffhanger element being done well enough. Personally, I thought one of the weaknesses of Spiderman 2 was that it closed off all the loose threads for me to be invested in the third: Spiderman's identity revealed to Harry, Spiderman's identity revealed to Mary Jane, Spiderman's confession to his aunt, Spiderman and Mary Jane getting together, etc.

Still, the people saw it in mass droves ignoring mixed reviews because that's the power of the sequel: It's a must-see and more than that, it's a must-see on opening weekend, which some of us (myself included) have not been able to make.

The tragedy of this summer is that if we mutually agree that Ocean's 12 ruined our good faith in the Ocean's 11 and that the Rush Hour series was never very good in the first place, than the three big trilogy back-ends this summer, Shrek 3, Pirates 3, and Spiderman 3, are all taking place by Memorial Day Weekend which was when the summer seasion is traditionally supposed to start. The Early Bird catches the worm is the philosophy. So if you haven't been able to make the big opening-weekend rushes, don't worry, there's still the actual summer to see them. I myself am a little behind on starting my summer. I just saw Spiderman 3 last weekend and will see Pirates this weekend.

The black hole at the end of the year: pros and cons

The end of the year depresses me, at least as a film critic. Filmwise, I have absolutely nothing to look foward to. I don't even know anything that's coming out next. The end of the year is really climactic. There's like this orgasmic explosion of quality films that come out right at the end of the year. "Blood Diamond" "Children of Men" "Letters from Iwo Jima" "Venus" "Dreamgirls", "Notes on a Scandal" etc, etc, etc. The flipside of this, is that from now until pretty much forever, I have absolutely no idea what's coming to the theaters. Absolutely nothing to look foward to, in a way, although the hype machine will start pretty soon. Last year, I believe it was New Year's Day or January 2nd when the TV Guide channel aired its first trailer of the Da Vinci Code and X-Men 3 and that's when we were like "whoah, that looks cool, i'm really looking foward to that" and the hype builds up over several months to the summer. The truth is it doesn't really matter if the film is good or not, the film industry can run on hype alone. Opening weekend grosses for those films are more than twice as high as the domestic total of the average film and by the time word of mouth gets out that the film is bad, the film's already made a ton of money, and I have no problem with that because usually, we like hype, we live off of it, in the sense that it gives us something to look foward to. Right now, i have no idea what's even playing this weekend (which i wouldn't mind if i wasn't expected to keep watching things and reviewing them at this time, that's why i was trying to get myself in by the end of the calender year) and stuff between January and May is usually very bad. Think Along Came Polly, 13 Going on 30, The Pacifier, Chasing Liberty, Are We There Yet?, The Ladykillers, Walking Tall, Guess Who, Showtime, Jersey Girl, etc. Maybe, the industry should just not release movies during those months and take a hiatus in September and call it the off season.

The end of the year is a great time for the press, however. All of those "end of the year" issues is probably one of your only opportunities where you can write about things that are up to 12 months old and have them considered fresh and current enough to put in current publications. I was able to recycle a lot of old issues and get articles in that otherwise would have had no relavance at all. With a top 10 movies and a top 10 films of the year articles on d.c. scene (www.thedcscene.com) i sort of got the opportunity to review (although in not as much detail) films the second time around.

I think Oscar Season is also a great time for the press and it has little to do with the actual awards ceremony but it gives me a chance to write about films that didn't get printed before or i didn't watch soon enough before and I'm sure that people who are already established enjoy being able to write even more about their favorite films that they haven't done before. The press is so geared around getting things toward deadlines and only writing things that are timely, that anything that you can write about delayed is a relief. I'm sure that's why the press builds up and loves oscar season.