CAN WE TALK ABOUT?
HOW THE OSCARS TREAT BLACK WOMEN ANOTHER AWARDS SEASON IS PREDICTABLY LACKING BLACK FEMALE NOMINEES
Deciding what is Oscarworthy is fundamentally subjective. So when it comes to the exclusion of Black women, it’s important not to get caught up debating the merits of individual films or performances. Whatever your thoughts on The Woman King, Nope or Saint Omer, when you look at the big picture, it’s clear that Till’s snubbed director Chinonye Chukwu wasn’t exaggerating her industry’s ‘unabashed misogyny towards Black women’.
To sum up their recognition across 95 years of the Oscars, one Black woman has won Best Actress (Halle Berry, 2002), no Black woman has ever been nominated for Best Director, and only one film directed by a Black woman has received a Best Picture nomination (Selma, 2015).
Awards season is not exactly a meritocracy; studios have huge budgets to play with for the awards campaigns of what they deem their most worthy films. In the months before the nominations, they hold screenings, place ‘For your consideration’ advertisements, and send ‘swag’ to increase visibility and curry voters’ favour. As a person who has sat on film juries and last year wrote FYC campaigns for an Oscar nominee and a winner (what can I say, I can be convincing), it takes a village to win a golden statuette. Studio executives’ decisions of what film campaigns to invest in are not necessarily egalitarian – the campaign for critically acclaimed Martin Luther King biopic Selma was infamously half-baked. So when Ava DuVernay wasn’t nominated for Best Director, she claimed to be unsurprised, explaining, ‘This is not me being humble. It’s math.’
The Academy sought to diversify and globalise its membership after #OscarsSoWhite went viral in 2016, but the statistics it released in 2020 showed an overwhelmingly white (81%) and male (67%) institution. For any Black woman to secure an Oscar, it requires overcoming the bias of those who green-light films, distributors, audiences, awards marketing departments and then the Academy membership.
So while this year you may sincerely believe Cate Blanchett, Steven Spielberg, Lukas Dhont, and Jamie Lee Curtis deserved to win above Danielle Deadwyler, Gina Prince-Bythewood, Alice Diop and Keke Palmer, let’s not pretend that it was ever a fair fight.
‘FOR ANY BLACK WOMAN TO SECURE AN OSCAR REQUIRES OVERCOMING BIAS’