If something’s not right with the Oscars, what about them is most wrong? The joylessly algebraic nomination process? All those old white voters? That we seriously call September to February awards season, like it’s weather or the flu? Whatever it is, we’re looking at nine best-picture nominees and 19 actors that have got a lot people rolling their eyes — people like me. And I’m not an eye-roller about these things. I love the Academy Awards.
For reasons too dumb to get into, I’ve bought four different copies of “Inside Oscar,” Damien Bona and Mason Wiley’s drinkably juicy, year-by-year history of the awards and the show. For a chunk of my childhood, I listened to the broadcast on a contraband Walkman because, you know, bedtimes and stuff. In college, my best friend and I used to make lists of the likely nominees until the internet put that part of the friendship out of business. And every year, I still have a surprise-nominee dream. (Alfre Woodard, in my unconscious, you were up for “Passion Fish,” “12 Years a Slave” and “Clemency”!)
Why the hell am I like this? I’m not in the Academy. Lots of what I love never gets near a nomination. And the winners and losers don’t make my life better or worse. But I do think the Oscars are a diagnosis of the health of the movies. They tell everybody what the people who make our movies like — or what they want us to think they like; what they want one another to think they like. They can be miserably transparent (how many movies about show business have won best picture?); and risibly self-congratulatory (bloated epics, vanity projects, “Crash”). But it’s always useful to know where a moviegoer stands with these people. And the five to 10 films nominated for best picture operate as a class that doubles as an X-ray — of the Academy and the movie business.
This year the X-ray feels like it was removed from a time capsule. And a little Oscar radiology reveals that eight of the nine movies (minus “Parasite”) are about white people — and, excusing “Little Women,” and Scarlett Johansson in “Marriage Story” notwithstanding, about white men. “Little Women” is the lone nominee that a woman directed.
O.K., but what’s to roll my eyes at? Welcome to the Nth Annual Academy Awards! I hear that. This might be a reductive way of looking at the Oscars. Math is just organizing the preferences and passions of about 9,000 people. Why’s race such a factor now? Well, for one thing, when it comes to the Oscars, there is some accounting for taste. And this year, the problem isn’t with the particular remaining movies — “1917,” “Ford v Ferrari,” “The Irishman,” “Jojo Rabbit,” “Joker” and “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” — or the white people in them. Not since my wish list and Walkman days, have I despised so few nominees in this category. Most of them I love. As for the one failure, I’ve never worked harder to get with the program. But after four tries, I gave up. ‘The Joker,” quite often literally, has no clothes.
Assembled, these distinct movies become a representative entity, and a person like me notices a theme that could poke out an eye. And whiteness is part of that story. It’s always been, of course. But this year feels different. A homogeneity has set in. The nominated movies start to look like picture day at certain magnet schools. “Jojo Rabbit” is a Hitler Youth comedy! Quentin Tarantino’s “Once About a Time …” is a dream about the accidentally heroic pre-emption of racist Charles Manson’s murder plot. And “Little Women” quietly dramatizes the freedom white women experience after the men have left to fight a war; a war to end the enslavement of black people. Sounds a little too ironic, and yet the movie means us to understand the irony. Those white ladies are better off than any black people. They’re just not equal to the women’s enlisted brothers, fathers and beaus. The border between their time and ours has a gusty permeability.
Some of what’s so strong about “The Irishman” and “Once Upon a Time …” comes from how remembered they both feel — rue-soaked in the first movie; heavy with “what if” in the other. At the movies (in the West), the convenient thing about the past is that you can solve the matter of race by pretending it doesn’t exist. Most of these movies, in addition to their thematic rearview, are based in actual history. (“1917” sends two British World War I soldiers on a critical, thrillingly stressful postal mission.) You can’t put nonwhite people in places they weren’t — and when a movie does, you get something mildly anarchic like a biracial Jewish New Zealander having a ball playing Hitler.
Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time …” has a great line; as they wait for their car, Brad Pitt tells a weepy Leonardo DiCaprio, “Don’t cry in front of the Mexicans.” Their white American maleness is too mythic and valuable to go around blubbering all over valets. “Joker” is about a comedian, but it doesn’t have Tarantino’s sense of humor about its whiteness. Whiteness here is a tragic, symbolic condition. Overlooked, unseen, under-medicated, Joker, and eventually his disciples, discover that being a guy with a carnival-ready white face helps get him the attention he wants. And even though this is the only movie of the bunch (the only non-Korean, Hitler-free movie) to feature even remotely meaningful parts for nonwhite actors (a bunch of Latinos beat up Joker in the opening minutes; his social worker and neighbor are black women), guess what: He kills a lot of them!
Couldn’t these nine movies just be evidence of taste? Good taste? They certainly could. They are. And yet, after the hash tags and threatened boycotts, after “Hidden Figures,” “Get Out” and “Black Panther” and “BlacKkKlansman”; after “Moonlight” winning over “La La Land”; after no woman being a two-time directing nominee; after the touted diversification campaigns and calls for “inclusion riders” (calls in acceptance speeches!); and in the same year that a popular Latina surprisingly missed the cut and the only black acting nominee is playing a plantation escapee (albeit one of history’s most famous escapees, but still) — the assembly of these movies feels like a body’s allergic reaction to its own efforts at rehabilitation.
Only two of the nine movies are set in what we’d called the present moment; and one of those (“Parasite”) comes to us from Seoul. Which means, the other seven — six of which are set in the United States — take place in the past. The last time something like that happened was in 2009, back when there were still only five nominees and the movie most present was set in Mumbai — “Slumdog Millionaire.” Before that it was the premillennial time warp of 1999: two movies taking place in Elizabethan England and three set during World War II. Out with the new, in with the ancient!
So what’s happening now isn’t exactly novel. Plus, movies set in the present almost never win. The 2017 fiasco that left “La La Land” confused for “Moonlight” is a rare example of front-runners set close to now. I, at least, am amazed that the only two of the nine movies pointing a way forward, embracing modernity (shrewdly in “Little Women”), are by a white American woman and a South Korean man. And that the movie expected to win the Oscar takes place 103 years ago.
Maybe this is just bad luck. I mean, what could the Academy have done to prevent itself from duplicating schisms beyond the movie theater? National schisms. (Nationalist schisms.) According to all the forecasting, these were the nine most predicted nominees. There’s no shafted movie by or about nonwhite people, despite certain passions for “The Farewell” and “Hustlers” or even mine for “Waves.” The last thing I’d want is for the Academy to vet and damage-control the nominees, the way the muckety-mucks who operate the Grammys are rumored to do. Guys, too many whites! We got to get “Queen & Slim” in here. Let the Academy Awards do what they’ve always done: Tell on the film industry.
We’re in the middle of so many shifts. The aim to diversify the movies looks like it’s taking hold just as there are fewer middlebrow studio movies and streaming is becoming king. Some of the shifts involve the remakes, reboots and reimaginings that keep falling from the intellectual property tree — the eternal reliance upon action and superhero movies. Women and nonwhite folks? Put ’em in there! Put ’em in parts that white folks used to have and call it reparations! Comedies and blockbusters with Kumail Nanjiani and Dave Bautista and Issa Rae and Tiffany Haddish and Kevin Hart and Eugenio Derbez and Jason Momoa.
Really, some of that reupholstery is just more integration. The vicissitudes of progress — all that change, all that changing back — can create an optics headache over at the Academy. It could leave you with whiplash, with the impression that the membership is just over it. I can look at these otherwise innocent movies, gathered together, and surmise progress fatigue: We already did that. If Joaquin Phoenix wins the best actor Oscar for “Joker,” he’s likely to remind his fellow industry professionals, as he did last Sunday at the BAFTAs, that their tiredness is not an option, that it’s an embarrassment.
That fatigue starts to mirror life everywhere else, as it used to be and sometimes as it remains. Separate, unequal: You’ve put enough nonwhite people in pop hits that you have to think alternatively. So when the so-called awards season heats up, you can’t find anything serious, nonwhite and good. So come nomination morn, the Oscars suddenly look like evidence of white flight, this reliable suburb of “quality” and “taste” and eligibility. My favorite complaint from longstanding Academy members about more women and nonwhite people joining the gang is that some of them are in violation of a credits criterion. They’re underqualified for membership but only because the industry has thrived on systemic disqualification.
I know, I know. It’s not as though you can’t find nonwhite people at the movies. “Bad Boys for Life” has been at the top of the box office for three weeks. And that might be part of the problem because the closest “Bad Boys” will ever get to the Oscars is three billboards outside the Dolby Theatre.
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February 05, 2020 at 06:17AM
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