Put on a happy face: it’s Awards Season
And the award goes to… the patriarchy
Awards season for the film and television industry kicks off on January 5th with the Golden Globes and comes to a close on February 10th with the 92nd Academy Awards. During that month, smaller scale awards shows such as The Critic’s Choice Awards and the BAFTA’s will take place, stirring up momentum for the big Oscar night.
The 1st Academy Award was broadcast back in 1929 and since then it has praised many outstanding pieces such as All About Eve, La La Land and Titanic (all of which received a record number of 14 nominations each) and also recognised some exceptionally talented individuals such as Meryl Streep who broke records by having 21 nominations to her name. However, it has also sprung controversy as it overlooked some emblematic works such as Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction which was overshadowed by Forrest Gump in 1994 and Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange which lost to The French Connection back in 1972. This year, Joker is the film with the highest number of nominations (eleven), becoming the first comic book movie adaptation to receive such a high number. Among other categories, it is running for Best Picture alongside Ford V Ferrari, The Irishman, Jojo Rabbit, Little Women, Marriage Story, 1917, Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood and Parasite.
From Jennifer Lawrence’s iconic fall on her way to accept the award for Best Actress for Silver Linings Playbook in 2013 to when La La Land was mistakenly announced as Best Picture instead of Moonlight in 2017, The Oscars provide for a night of invaluable entertainment. Amidst all the glamour and potential celebrity gossip, it can sometimes be easy to forget that at its core, awards shows are ultimately a competition where winners and losers will emerge. And more often than not, this competition begins even before the contestants are selected. Year after year, the announcement for the Oscar’s nominees have become larger in scale and are now broadcast live, becoming an event in and of itself.
As the Academy announced all the nominees last Monday (13th), film Twitter began to slowly explore in what can only be described as collective angst. Several users (even high-profile publication editors) pointed out a seemingly never-ending list of diversity issues with this year’s list of nominees.
The Oscars are sometimes known as being a white, male-centric entity and unfortunately, the nominations for this year’s event has only ever increased that reputation. One Twitter user (Kevin Yang) pointed out that the Academy has failed to recognise any outstanding female candidates for Best Director even though they had plenty of options to choose from, from Greta Gerwig (Little Women) to Oliva Wilde (Booksmart). He described Greta Gerwig as a ‘white, privileged film snob who shoots on film, worships Tarantino and has Spielberg’s backing’, meaning that she checks all the boxes of a white male’s definition of ‘auteur’, and even she couldn’t nod off a nomination as Best Director among her male counterparts: Quentin Tarantino, Todd Phillips, Martin Scorsese, Bong Joon-ho and Sam Mendes. This snub has led major newspapers such as The Telegraph to label the Oscars as still being ‘pale, male and stale.’
Another Twitter user pointed out that of all the Best Actress nominees this year, only one of them is a woman of colour, and her character is a slave. Cynthia Erivo was nominated for her role as Harrier Tubman in Harriet, and is running against Charlize Theron (Bombshell), Renée Zellweger (Judy), Scarlett Johansson (Marriage Story) and Saoirse Ronan (Little Women). Saying that this is due to the fact that there aren’t that many stories featuring people of colour simply cannot be used as an excuse anymore. More prominent roles are being written for people of colour, but for some reason the Academy has failed to recognise any of them this year. From Nora Lum’s debut in The Farewell to Lupita Nyong’o’s intricate character in Jordan Peele’s Us, leading roles are starting to shift and encompass a more diverse demographic, but awards shows have yet to catch up.
This inevitably feels like a step backward considering that just three years ago, seven out of the twenty nominees for best actor and actress were people of colour. Does this mean that the Academy willingly turned a blind eye to this issue, or simply that this year the performances from people of colour simply weren’t up to standards? This is a side of the debate supported by professionals such as Steven Spielberg who claim that quality should always overpower diversity. In a recent Tweet he said, “I would never consider diversity in matters of art. Only quality. It seems to me that to do otherwise would be wrong.”
The basis on which the Academy (and awards shows in general) chooses their nominees and winners is yet to be fully justified and transparent. This, however, does not stop people in power from commenting on the issue, especially that of the lack of female nominees under the Best Director category. In 2018, after Ron Howard introduced the category at the 75th Golden Globes, Natalie Portman quickly added, “and here are the all-male nominees”. Following up on this discontent, Issa Rae added a subtle, “congratulations to those men” as she announced the contenders for the same category for this year’s Academy Awards.
With such an extensive list of clearly signposted issues, it’s hard to see how the Academy was able to overlook this without either believing that it was done consciously or admitting that there is something intricately wrong with the film industry as a whole.
However, it’s refreshing to see that nominees for Best Animated Feature haven’t fallen into this trap. The genre has been a pioneer in celebrating diversity not only on screen in terms of the characters it displays but also behind the scenes. Disney’s biggest contender, Frozen 2 which is now the highest grossing animation ever, wasn’t nominated. Instead, Netflix’s I Lost My Body and Klaus have both received a lot of critical acclaim, proving that a traditional studio’s backing doesn’t necessarily equate to an award-worth film. The same can be said of Laika Studio’s Missing Link which took home the Best Animation award at the Golden Globes earlier this month, surprising Disney fans left, right and centre by surpassing Frozen 2, Toy Story 4 and The Lion King. However, this more accepting stance seems to be somewhat restricted to the animation genre as other awards categories, including Best Production Design and Best Sound Mixing (to name a few) have yet to follow the example.
Because of this (not so) recent discontent surrounding diversity at awards shows, people have started to turn to film festivals as a more eminent form of measuring a film’s success considering the vast array that they give high praise to, thus diminishing the influence of awards shows altogether. Festivals such as Cannes and Sundance are known for staying away from traditional blockbusters and instead celebrating the work of foreign and independent filmmakers. This year was no exception; of the nine Best Picture nominees for the Oscars, seven premiered at film festivals but only two received prestigious awards.
Even though Warner Bros.’s Joker won the Golden Lion at Venice Film Festival and received praise from the festival’s artistic director Alberto Barbera who said the film was “going straight to the Oscars”, most critics’ attention was turned to Bon Joon Ho’s Parasite. The modern fable on class division won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and soon made history by being the first Korean feature to be nominated for Best Picture and five other categories at the Oscars. Cinephiles are becoming increasingly more dependent on film festivals as a more reliant means of celebrating films that wouldn’t otherwise reach a mass public. However, this doesn’t stop big studios from trying to use the festival circuit as a way of expanding their films’ marketing campaign. What may come as a surprise is that Netflix succumbed to this trend as well. The Irishman kicked off the New York Film Festival while Marriage Story was screened at all major fall festivals, following in the footsteps of Roma.
In fact, Netflix’s campaign at the Oscars this year has changed industry standards. The streaming service has become the studio with most nominations (twenty-four) attributed to its name, surpassing Warner Bros, Universal and even Disney. The number of Netflix films nominated since 2017 has almost doubled year after year, and the trend looks to be anything but reversible. Awards shows have therefore adapted to the fact that films are now being distributed and consumed differently by audiences. The industry is no longer only praising films that have had a traditional theatrical run, proving that the awards shows can in fact be malleable and shape themselves around industry demands, which at the end of the day, is what should be most highly praised.
