oscar noms and the long shitty chain
Oscar noms came out this morning.
No women directing nominees.
One Black actress (Cynthia Erivo, for Harriet).
Okay. It’s gonna be one of these now.
We all know what a genius director looks like. Apparently it has a nutsack.
We all know what a virtuoso performance looks like. Apparently, it’s white unless it’s a formerly enslaved person.
Also, it looks like face prosthetics and LOTS OF YELLING and PANTING like you’ve run a thousand miles through the desert to end your marriage even though NOBODY PANTS THEIR FEELS during a fight except high school freshmen doing dramatic interp for speech and debate. (I can say that because I FOR SURE panted my feelings in my dramatic interp in speech and debate. My 3-minute monologue about being stalked sounded like a Gatorade commercial or possibly a weird porno.)
Transcendent art apparently ALSO looks like being a fucking nightmare to work with on set because his ART, man. His ART. His art ate his manners, and for that, he should be rewarded! Bring him all the trophies and incel love letters in the land!
I wanted to be surprised real bad this morning. I’m super bummed.
Top-tier recognition is the last, most visible link in a chain of problematic barriers that select for a certain sex, a certain race, a certain body, a certain kind of eligible candidate.
If we work backward from these nominees, for example, then we know that there were a few movies that Oscar voters considered “of a quality” to be eligible for the top-tier recognition: 1917, Joker, Once Upon a Time In Hollywood (which I wrote about here) (and which I also refuse to write with the ellipsis because can anyone explain the point of that punctuation in the title of the movie? I’m pretty smart and I don’t think there’s any point at all except possibly selecting against viewers who eye-roll at the presence of an ellipsis in a movie title), Ford vs. Ferrari, Jojo Rabbit, The Irishman, Parasite, Marriage Story, and Little Women.
Of those nine Best Picture nominees, eight are about white people. And five are exclusively about white men (1917, Joker, OUATIH, Irishman, Ford vs. Ferrari). Two are about white men and white women on relatively equal footing (Marriage Story, Jojo Rabbit). One is about Korean men and women (Parasite), and one is about white women (Little Women.)
Of those nine Best Picture nominees, five had directors who were nominated for Best Directing. Of those five films whose directors were nominated, FOUR were exclusively about white men (1917, Joker, OUATIH, Irishman). Bong Joon Ho was also nominated for Parasite, which you must see immediately.
People playing devil’s advocate might say, but Katie, these movies are top quality, and they just HAPPEN to be by and about white men. If a black person made a borderline nihilistic movie that made us question the fucked-upness of society or the moral binary, you know, like Joker, then that black man would have been nominated.
If a woman made a movie about the intensely moving ups and downs of domestic life, you know, like Noah Baumbach did in Marriage Story, she’d be nominated, too!
Even IF human beings had the ability to set aside their predisposition for a certain type of person and vote for a product rather than a person, you’d have to ask yourself what kinds of people typically get funding for their movies, and what kinds of people typically get access to power, and what kinds of people typically get high-quality education and networking opportunities, and what kinds of people typically have the economic security to pursue success in an economically insecure field. But setting all that aside (even though “all that” is really the fucking ballgame), let’s take a minute and think about the idea that we recognize STORIES, not the storytellers.
Now, it’s not generally possible to treat works of art as if they are comparable on a line-by-line basis. However, if we fall on our knees ‘neath the glory of Joaquin Phoenix’s grotesque transformation into a pseudo-human with bizarro physicality in a dark thriller, I need someone to explain to me why we don’t also weep before the luminous glory of Lupita Nyong’o’s eerie, subtle, masterfully bizarro pseudo-human performance in Us.
(I don’t need anyone to explain it to me.)
AND HOWEVER, if we are gobsmacked by Baumbach’s humbly titled Marriage Story, a domestic drama about one family of creative thinkers and the people who surround them like satellites, then I need someone to explain to me why we are not also flabbergasted by Gerwig’s HUMBLY TITLED Little Women, A DOMESTIC DRAMA ABOUT ONE FAMILY OF CREATIVE THINKERS AND THE PEOPLE WHO SURROUND THEM LIKE SATELLITES.
(I don’t need anyone to explain it to me.)
Again, I’m not arguing that similar plots prove similar quality. I am saying that Little Women is inarguably at least as polished and critically assured as Marriage Story was, but apparently, only one of the two directors is a genius (The Nutsack Factor strikes again). We choose storytellers at least as much as we choose stories.
But this isn’t just about performing arts nominations, which I won’t cheaply say “don’t matter that much.” They do matter because representation on screen matters. Professional opportunities matter. The systemic bullshit reflected in these exclusionary nominations matters, and the people and stories ignored by these nominations also matter, very much.
I’m as frustrated by these nominations as I am by the current field of Democratic primary candidates. Top-tier access to our governmental seat of power has been selected for a certain sex, a certain race, a certain kind of candidate. Again.
It’s not that Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Michael Bloomberg, Pete Buttigieg, and Tom Steyer are “worthless.” To say that would be like saying OUATIH or 1917 aren’t well-made movies when they objectively are. While I have personal opinions about the value of each of these candidates (and movies), surely we can all agree that they are all at least educated, accomplished (in some field that’s more intellectually taxing than reality television) and experienced (at something that’s at least peripherally relevant to executive leadership).
Like Marriage Story, they’re all competent and bound to inspire many people who spend a couple of hours with them. Like The Irishman, they are familiar. Reeeeeeal familiar. They’re portraits of the kind of people we’re inclined to view as powerful.
I used to be comforted by the familiarity of those characters, and I’d look to them for wisdom and inspiration in both my pop culture and my politics. I wish we were beyond seeking familiar, wrinkly white man faces like our comfort daddies when times get tough. We’re not there yet, though. OBVIOUSLY.
Where are we? We’re at the place where we still seek daddies for comfort, even as we’re grossed out by that impulse because we’ve become aware of their unacceptable failings, unevolved level of sophistication on social justice and equity, and total unconcern about evolving on those issues. We still want them, and then we hate ourselves for what we realize we’ve chosen again. Yet choosing someone new feels too scary at a time like this.
That’s how we get this dialogue around Democratic nominees. That’s how we get this dialogue around Oscar nominees.
That’s how we pull the same fucking guy out of a bigger and more diverse group of people than ever before.
It’s like we’ve always had a seven-foot-tall President of the Running Club and we think, look, we really need someone in office who cares about short people.
So we invite people of all different heights to a race! We think, now that we’ve included everyone in the race, we’ll see who’s REALLY going to be the best President.
But we haven’t taken out the five-foot-tall hurdles that the runners have to jump over in order to win the race. So a seven-foot guy smokes runners who are four-foot-ten and five-foot-eight, and he wins again, easily.
We think, “Fuck! This kind of guy again? Well, maybe he really is the best choice,” when the truth is we’ve tested him on a thing that has NOTHING to do with how well he leads, and ONLY proves how good he is at passing the tests that every seven-foot guy who came before him also passed.
Top-tier exclusion is the end of the chain. Please notice that chain when you’re interviewing people for jobs. Please notice it when you buy books and movies and albums. Please notice when you’re unconsciously gravitating toward a seven-foot-tall white dude Joker because it seems like that guy just looks like a genius, a President, someone who matters.
Work backward from the Oscar nominations or the current Democratic field and figure out where you need to crack open your instincts around what a leader is, what an artist is, whose stories are valuable and whose talent deserves an opportunity.