As another year passes, and another awards season dawns, I personally at least, am left with a strange empty feeling about the Oscars this year. With many award ceremonies being cancelled in 2020, the approach of Oscars night hasn’t filled me with the sense of anticipation that it usually does. Having now seen a couple of Covid-19 award ceremonies, stars dressed up to the nines in their mansions, accepting awards through glass doors, and crying down the camera to an empty theatre, the stripping of award ceremonies down to size has revealed how hollow and meaningless they can feel. Therefore, the cynic in me sees the recent explosion of diversity and inclusion in the Oscars as a calculated move, a scream to a disappearing audience that says ‘we still matter!’. Covid-19 has forced the Academy to modernise in a way with films exclusively released on streaming services finally being considered- I was starting to worry about the Academy’s shoes given how hard they have dragged their feet on the issue.
Fighting against the cynic in me, however, I see the step towards inclusivity to be a positive one. It is refreshing to see a set of Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor nominations where the majority are non-white with increased representation in the Best Actress categories as well. In a post-Parasite world, I do feel that a shift has occurred, a precipice has been crossed which cannot be reversed, and the Oscars hopefully will only continue to diversify and represent talent from marginalized groups as they should. However, this does not change the fact that this year’s nominations continue to fall into the same traps as decades of awards have. It is a consistent feature of award ceremonies that Black and minority actors and artists are placed into ‘consolation’ categories, which technically yes, does increase representation, allowing POC to win awards, but never truly contend for the biggest ones. This can definitely be seen in placing Lakeith Stanfield in the Best Supporting Actor category, as opposed to Best Actor, for which he was originally submitted, and let’s be honest here, does Gary Oldman really need or deserve that nomination for Mank?
As well as people of colour, women have also seen an increase in representation this year, with this being the first year that two women have been nominated for Best Director, and Chloe Zhao being the first Asian woman nominated for Best Director. While a step in the right direction, part of me is shocked that in the many, many years that the Oscars have existed this is the first, and so far only time that this much representation has been seen.
Yet, even as it feels like we are making progress in equality and the Oscars, the film industry and its critics still are imbued and built upon sexism and racism. It is rare that reviews make headlines, but Dennis Harvey’s review of Promising Young Woman, while providing praise and plaudits to the feature, still features an undercurrent of imbued sexism that is difficult to shake. Harvey suggests that Carey Mulligan was an ‘odd choice as this admittedly many-layered apparent femme fatale’ and instead suggesting Margot Robbie as a sexier alternative to Mulligan who he describes as wearing ‘pickup-bait gear like bad drag.’ Although it is good to see Promising Young Woman picking up nominations in multiple categories, reviews like these remind us that as of yet, this progress is shaky and as of yet unproved. It was only in 2019 that Green Book won Best Picture, after all. The Academy is still an antiquated institution, where the majority of voters are old, white and male, and although steps in recent years have been taken to diversify the voting Academy, much has yet to be done to continue this upward momentum of improvement.
So yes, this year’s Oscars are a shift in the right direction, some progress has been made, but there is a strange melancholy to this year’s ceremony, which goes beyond the list of nominations. Part of it is that all these wonderful men and women, and their wonderful films, will not be given the pomp and circumstance that is the true draw for the Oscars. We as viewers and watchers will not be huddled around in friend groups, participating in sweepstakes, guessing at each category, keeping our eyes on the odds. There will be no gasps of joy when your pick wins, no groans of commiseration as your favourite loses, no drinking games and wiping the sleep from your eyes as you struggle to make it through another awful ad break.
I look back on all my favourite moments from the Oscars in previous years, and the unifying connection between them all were the friends I was sharing those moments with, shaking my friend awake as Parasite won Best Picture, or screaming in annoyance as Green Book won (I will never forgive or forget). Even in this year where it feels like so much progress has been made, it is being unable to share and enjoy that progress which adds a bittersweet nature to this year’s ceremonies. Hopefully, as the Oscars continue, and we finally shake ourselves of the beast that has sat on our backs all this year, we will eventually be able to sit in each other’s living rooms, arms around each other, and watch the Oscars once more.
Image Credit: The MovieDB
