Tribune News Service

Last issue I wrote about the Oscars and their shortcomings, specifically about their blind spots around what gets nominated and their spotty record in deciding what wins. An award ceremony being bad at giving awards is ultimately pretty benign, and if that was its only problem, it could be taken as seriously as a YouTuber’s top 10 list for how much it impacts the average person’s everyday life.
Unfortunately, the Academy’s biases are far more insidious than how they treat horror flicks. There’s a long and storied history of mostly white people winning big awards. The first African American to both be nominated for and win an acting role was Hattie McDaniel in 1939’s “Gone with the Wind,” who plays the head woman of the plantation the movie takes place in. Her role as the loyal and grateful slave who’s “basically family” to her owners and talks like she’s in a minstrel show is one of many unfortunate things about the beloved classic that pushes the lost cause myth. It’s made even worse by the fact that she was the only Black person to win any acting award for 24 years, when Sidney Poitier became the first African American to win for a leading role in “Lilies of the Field” (1963), only after George Chakiris won while darkening up to try to look more Latino in “West Side Story” (1961) two years earlier. Hattie McDaniel died 12 years before Poitier made history again. We didn’t get another Black Best Acting award winner until 1983, almost 20 years later.
Since then, we’ve thankfully seen a lot more people of color get nominated and win, but that doesn’t mean institutional racism is a thing of the past. I’m sure many readers remember the #OscarsSoWhite campaign, which started after the 2015 nominations were released and every single one of the 20 actors mentioned was white. There have been more diverse picks since that blew up, but I’m still not convinced they learned the right lesson. In 2018, “Dumb and Dumber” (1994) director Peter Farrelly released “The Green Book,” a film which bravely tears down racial systems of oppression by asking, “What if people just stopped being racist?” as well as, “Y’know the Italians weren’t treated the best either, right?” It provides the same “I don’t see color” non-answer that’s been said for decades. This travesty of a film embodies all that I hate about American liberalism and how it refuses to do what is needed to solve real problems and instead plays some moderate middle-ground reach across the aisle compromise nonsense between racists and anti-racists. At no point does it say anything that remotely threatens the status quo.
In an ideal world I’d never have to think about it, but the white guilt in Hollywood must have been thick enough to cut through with a thousand-degree knife that year and despite the steep competition, it managed to receive Best Original Screenplay and Best Picture, two of the most prestigious awards of the night. It was in competition with films like “First Reformed,” “BlacKkKlansman,” “Roma” and “The Favourite,” and any of those would have been more deserving winners. I like to think we’re in a better place now, but with Lily Gladstone getting snubbed for her captivating and intense performance in “Killers of the Flower Moon” (2023), I’m still skeptical. I’m a massive Emma Stone fan, but I think we needed to have the first Native American to win an Oscar for acting. Not to tick a box, but because she earned it. Without her to be the emotional anchor, I don’t think the 206-minute epic would have worked.
As much as I’d like to help solve this problem by telling everyone not to pay attention to the Oscars, these issues run so deep that it wouldn’t have a meaningful impact. Despite the show’s sharp decline in viewership in the past decade, who gets nominated and who wins still matters. Studios will selectively fund certain movies and force changes in an attempt to chase trends. It greatly benefits the individual people who win. For workers like makeup artists and sound engineers, an Oscar win can ensure job security and allows them to negotiate for higher pay. A win doesn’t just benefit already wealthy celebrity actors. Even if the public isn’t paying attention, the industry absolutely is.
At the end of the day, the system is fundamentally flawed. The #OscarsSoWhite campaign may have been a nice wake-up call for the voters, but it failed to address any root issues. It was pushed into being a kinder, gentler, more diverse cutthroat-rat race. People of color may be allowed to rise to new peaks, but the strings are still being pulled by the white plutocrats who own everything.