The 2019-2020 Oscars season needed better headlines

Within an hour of the Oscar nominations the following Monday, The Hollywood Reporter had two stories commenting on the lack of diversity at the Oscars (here, here) and commented on it in a third while highlighting the general theme all day on their blog and Deadline took 75 minutes to indict the Oscars for the same thing. The Daily Show did a piece on it the issue that night and The LA Times released a house editorial that the Oscars are still white and male the next day. Since the counterfactual #Oscarsowhite campaign in the 2015-2016 Oscar cycle, the Oscars have become one of the most hyper-policed litmus tests of whether Hollywood is meeting arbitrary benchmarks set from by an entertainment media that’s rampantly consumed with identity politics. The movie industry and these Oscars deserve better headlines than this.

The predominant story line among this school of cultural writers whose take on film criticism can no longer be divorced from activism is that Hollywood has had a long history of failing three groups: racial minorities (defined arbitrarily as “people of color”), women, and people on the LGBQT+ spectrum. As such they owe it to three groups in the present to rectify decades of injustice.

This year there was one Hispanic actor (if you want to classify him as European because nominee Antonio Banderas is from Spain, try telling that to his agent and look at how pigeonholed he has been in his career) and one black actor among the twenty nominees. The other chief complaint was that Greta Gerwig was not nominated for “Little Women” in the directing category.

What many of these #oscarssowhite activists are guilty of doing is taking on a microscopic view when convenient to their data. In the last 20 years of Oscar, 16.5% of the acting nominees have been people of color and & 11.75% of the acting winners have been black. The black population in the US according to the Census is 12.1% which is within less than half a percentage. In other words, any claims that the Academy hasn’t done justice to the black acting community is largely moot unless you’re going out of your way to erroneously read data.

Today’s brand of armchair activist point to extreme spikes in an oscillating cycle rather than present an accurate picture of progress. These intersectional activists conveniently ignore that 6 of the past 7 Best Director winners are people of color which is surely a cause they champion as well as women directors. Additionally, the number of films with black themes has gone up each year with “Green Book”, “Black Panther”, “BlacKKKlansmen”, “Fences”, “Hidden Figures”, and “Moonlight” nominated for best picture the past three years and several more--"Birth of a Nation" "Mudbound" "Race" Loving" "Free State of Jones" "Sorry to Bother You" "Little" "Blindspotting", "United Kingdom" and "Last Black Man in San Francisco"—popping up as well. If these activists don’t acknowledge these gains, where’s there credibility?

Furthermore, what is the incentive of studios to pander to such a group of activists that is most likely to make negative noise? To blanketly call Hollywood unfairly liberal is an overstatement, but the Academy Awards in their current form are producing the kind of films that Black Lives Matter activists can’t possibly be dissatisfied with. Last year’s slate alone had 7 of 8 films with intersectionalist liberal themes: “Vice” was critical of the Bush administration, “Roma” was a female-centered film set in Latin America, “Bohemian Rhapsody” had a queer lead character, “Favorite” was female-centered, and “Green Book”, “Black Panther” and “BlacKKKlansman” had black themes.

This isn’t to suggest that there is nothing to advocate for in terms of visibility. As the low number of female directoral nominees and East Asian and Hispanic actors over the years dictates, there are valid arguments for the marginalization of these subgroups. However, these activists need to concede the grand intersectional argument—that its white men as a whole that are seeking to exclude everyone else in a cabal of sorts—before they can seriously advocate for specific issues in cinema.

At the end of the day, the activists have to ask themselves what they’re even fighting for.

Are they asking for a mandatory quota? Considering the long history of the Oscars and the price of upsetting longstanding traditions, few people in the Academy (even the people sympathetic to the cause) would want that. We can even look at how this happened in practice just one year ago when the Academy attempted to burnish images of elitism by instituting a popular film category a year ago. The producers and fans of films like “Black Panther” and “The Avengers” protested the new designation because they knew it would lead to those films being ghettoized. Any quotas for disenfranchised groups will be seen as a de facto statement against such labels.

Besides, the current rules are the current rules. They could be subject to change but members are explicitly asked to vote for the best. This seems like a simple enough directive, but the current level of noise by the new class of film critics and their advocates on twitter seem to show a lack of consensus.The week after the controversy erupted, Stephen King, a known liberal, tweeted on twitter that he was following the rules as stated and he got attacked so heavily on twitter that he briefly garnered bad press before he back-tracked and apologized. How can a proper discussion of what the rules should be take place when the conversation is so muddled that people can’t speak up?

If this is the case, why should this voting body have to shoulder the headlines of these (not necessarily accurate) imbalances? Why should the film makers, actors, and craftsmen have to endure complaints that their crowning moments of being selected as the best in their field are not signs of progress because they’re the wrong skin color, sexual orientation or gender? 

The bottom line is that if there are any issues with film visibility, micro-policing the Academy on a year-by-year basis is not a solution. Rather the industry needs to be specific and exact about what the representative problems are in the industry and place it in the context of bigger headlines in the movie industry. People looking for a true dissection of what's affecting film deserve better headlines than this.