THE MORE THINGS CHANGE ...
Academy Award omissions are as much about genre as they are about gender
When nominations for the 92nd annual Academy Awards were announced, the headlines wrote themselves: No women were nominated for best director, despite the fact that Greta Gerwig’s highly praised Little Women made the cut for best picture and adapted screenplay.
Gerwig wasn’t the only female filmmaker who made an impressive movie in 2019 — a year when the number of women working as directors, writers, producers, cinematographers and other behind-the-camera positions reached historic highs. Lorene Scafaria did a whiz-bang job directing the fizzy crime caper Hustlers, as did Marielle Heller with A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.
Tom Hanks earned a nomination for his portrayal of Mister Rogers in that film, whereas Jennifer Lopez’s commanding performance as a stripper with a heart of gold in Hustlers was ignored.
Considering that Lupita Nyong’o was also overlooked for her terrifying double-take in the horror movie Us, it’s tempting to chalk up this year’s snubs to the same racist and sexist blind spots at the academy that led in 2016 to the #Oscarssowhite campaign and efforts to invite more women and filmmakers of colour to join the organization.
But if this year’s nominees reflect an inherent bias, it has as much to do with genre as race and gender — not to mention the ways those three things sometimes overlap or cancel each other out in unexpected ways.
It’s not that white guys are running the entire table this year. For the first time, a film from South Korea — Bong Joon Ho’s wealth-inequality parable Parasite — has a credible shot at winning best picture, and he could very well take home the award for best director. Like Roma’s showing last year, that’s a progressive development, acknowledging film as a global medium. But, as imaginative and richly realized as his film is, it’s still more of a piece than not with the Hollywood films he’s competing against: Like Todd Phillips’ Joker, Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman and Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, it relies on familiar tropes of explosive, stylized violence for its most visceral thrills.
Sam Mendes, nominated for his direction of 1917, has been duly recognized for his audacious decision to film the First World War action-adventure seemingly in one continuous shot, a muscular cinematic flex if ever there were one. But as a war picture about men of courage going into battle, 1917 epitomizes the kind of movie Hollywood has always deemed important and canonical enough to deserve its highest honours.
It’s no coincidence that Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win an Oscar for best director for 2008’s The Hurt Locker. It so happens that she deserved that honour, for making a tough, technically flawless movie about a bomb technician’s experience in the Iraq War. But there’s also no doubt that The Hurt Locker fused perfectly with what the academy has always taken seriously as cinema. It bears noting that Jojo Rabbit, Taika Waititi’s whimsically anachronistic satire that was nominated for best picture, seems to have overcome the academy’s anti-comedy snobbery, perhaps because of its anti-fascist message, Second World War setting and climactic battle.
The academy has welcomed hundreds of younger members, which probably accounts for the recognition of such broadly popular films as Get Out and Black Panther, and holds promise for more open-mindedness when it comes to what defines greatness.
But as Gerwig told me, “If you were to take what seems to matter (from) movies, I would say male violence against other men is very high on that list.”
Most of the films being honoured are overwhelmingly male-dominated narratives, albeit sometimes self-consciously so, as in the case of Ford v Ferrari, The Irishman and Joker. Just as Joker is a protracted homage to Scorsese, Bong’s Parasite bows toward Tarantino in its penultimate, hyper-violent set piece, creating a closed loop of mutual influences that is simultaneously hermetic and self-impressed.
From these movies’ visual languages and fascination with flawed heroes to their common interest in codes of honour and mayhem, the result is a hall of mirrors in which, despite nominal differences, they look weirdly — and distressingly — the same. The Washington Post