Oscar nods celebrate diversity - and Mel Gibson’s comeback
UNITED STATES: The nominations handed out yesterday for the 89th Academy Awards reveal a 90-year-old traditionbound institution embracing the future with record levels of diversity, in both demographics and format.
The effervescent, brightly coloured musical La La Land danced its way to 14 Oscar nominations, including best picture, tying the all-time record held by Titanic and All About Eve.
One of nine films to score a best picture nod in this year’s crowded and varied field, La La Land has been widely embraced as a balm in politically turbulent times and a fresh twist on a genre that had largely fallen out of favour.
But beyond the resurgence of the old-fangled musical, Oscar voters gave the recently embattled motion picture academy something bigger to cheer about. Unlike last year’s telecast, which host Chris Rock scathingly branded ‘‘the White People’s Choice Awards’’, the 89th Academy Awards will not be dominated by hot-button questions of discrimination in the film industry.
After two years of bitter controversy over back-to-back slates of all-white acting nominees, actors and actresses of colour earned nominations this year.
A strong group of recent films, including Fences, Moonlight and Hidden Figures, deals head-on with issues of race in ways that have resonated with critics and audiences.
‘‘Diversity pays,’’ said Hidden Figures producer Donna Gigliotti, who helped to bring the real-life story of female African-American mathematicians in the space race to the screen. ‘‘People want to see their own stories up on the big screen. The problem is nobody in Hollywood is really paying attention, so it falls on independent producers to find and tell these stories.’’
To help encourage the telling of those stories, and in response to last year’s #OscarsSoWhite furore, the academy’s leadership has taken dramatic steps to broaden the organisation’s overwhelmingly white and male membership ranks. Of the 683 industry professionals invited to join the academy last year, 46 per cent were female and 41 per cent people of colour.
And while it is impossible to know what impact that new class had on the nominations, six black actors and actresses have earned nominations.
Among them are Mahershala Ali and Naomie Harris for Moonlight, a coming-of-age film about a gay African-American boy growing up in Miami that earned eight nominations in total, including one for its African-American director, Barry Jenkins.
Even so, writer and activist April Reign, who created the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag in 2015, noted the lack of Latino or AsianAmerican acting nominees.
For Hacksaw Ridge director Mel Gibson, the nominations cap a noteworthy comeback. The onetime megastar, who spent years as an industry pariah for his alleged anti-Semitism and other controversial offscreen behavior, picked up six nominations for his war film, including for his directing.
‘‘This was definitely a film that had to overcome a lot of stuff to get in,’’ said Hacksaw Ridge producer Bill Mechanic. - LA Times