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.
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.
