THERE WILL BE BACKLASH
Just like you, Will Smith will not be going to the Oscars this year. Unlike you, he has a moral reason for doing so.
Smith j oined a raft of others — including his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, Michael Moore and, sort of, Spike Lee — in announcing he wasn’t going to attend the awards ceremony, and encouraging others to do the same. Though one of his former colleagues, Janet Hubert (a.k.a. Original Aunt Viv from Fresh Prince) suggested it was mere upset at being snubbed, the Smiths et al. have much bigger golden statues to fry: racist ones. Or at least, like, pronouncedly exclusive ones that seem to have something rather strongly to do with race.
When nominations came out last week, they were quickly followed by a social media meme, # OscarsSo White, and calls for boycott. It’s the second year in a row the major Oscars categories failed to recognize a single person of colour not named Iñárritu. This year felt more egregious not just because of the growing streak, but because the Academy overlooked several buzzed-about performances, most notably, Idris Elba’s turn in Beasts of No Nation. The Academy also took the rather odd step of nominating Sylvester Stallone for his role in Creed, a movie that was largely about being a young black man in America, and ignoring star Michael B. Jordan and director Ryan Coogler, who both happen to be young black men in America.
The Oscars are something of a silly pageant, but they are also perhaps our most culturally central silly pageant, and as such treated as a symbol of where we are as a culture. While the Academy’s choices show how easy it is for a powerful white majority to pretend there is a default race and that it is white, the response is also the latest to serve notice that this kind of thing is not going to fly any- more. Or at least, if it’s going to fly, it’s going to do so with plenty of baggage.
It’s been a noteworthy couple of months for diversity, with institutions first completely ignoring, then getting rightly flamed, and then, occasionally, trying to make amends. We got a taste of this controversy in November when The Hollywood Reporter convened a roundtable on the topic of women in Hollywood and was raked over the coals for not including any women of colour. Their partial defence, that all the Oscar frontrunners this year were white, was an oddly benign foreshadowing of the # OscarsSoWhite complaints that followed the nominations.
Hollywood is not the only place behind the curve, and we got a taste of the potential power of backlash when the Angoulême Grand Prix, which offers a lifetime achievement award in the field of comics, released an all- male list of 30 nominees this month. The French organization was severely chastened when 12 of those men dropped out in protest, an exodus that led to the addition of a whopping two women to this year’s list, amidst a squishy defence about not being responsible for the male- dominated history of comics.
A better response to this kind of thing came from Esquire, who responded to a late- breaking but pretty thorough ripping apart of the “80 books a man should read” — published a few years ago, and featuring 79 titles by male authors — with an updated list this year. The new edition changed it to books “every person” should read and called specifically on a diverse group of women to name 10 works.
Reacting to being called out is a small step, but it’s an important one: calls for diversity have too- often been relegated to the fringe and treated with a shrug, usually a variation on the Angoulême Grand Prix’s avowal that they’re only reflecting the world. This isn’t entirely untrue — years of systemic oppression have made both power and history white and male —though it also fails to recognize the degree to which we perpetuate it by insisting that our hands are tied in who we deem worthy of praise.
Even if the reaction to being called out is as simple as acknowledging the screw-up, the hope is that today’s fixing of a mistake is tomorrow’s starting point, although the fact that advocates for diversity have had to repeat themselves for so long before actually being heard is some proof of how easy it is to fix a list, but how hard it is to fix a point of view.
For that, the only real solution is something that Spike Lee mentioned in an interview with Good Morning America this week, where he explained his decision to not show up at the Oscars. Referencing the song “The Room Where It Happens” from the (exceedingly diverse, and exceedingly lauded) musical Hamilton, he explained: “We’re not in the room. The executives when they have these greenlight meetings quarterly, they look at the scripts and see who’s in it and decide what we’re making and what we’re not making.”
His point is partly that the nominations are more a symbol of the problem than the problem itself, but more importantly it’s about recognizing a diverse slate of people from the get- go, and not just when they react to their omission. A lot has been made of outrage culture and its effects on public discourse, without really acknowledging the fact that we don’t do a great job of listening to voices before they’re loud and angry. Whether or not the Oscars boycott gains more steam, we need to acknowledge the fact there’s been a de facto boycott on diverse voices in the Academy for a long time. If we can be heartened by the fact that’s changing, we also need to acknowledge it’s taken an awfully long time to even get a reaction.