Hollywood wakes up
From the #MeToo movement to #OscarsSoWhite, Hollywood is slowly waking up
This time last year, Harvey Weinstein was considered a visionary movie producer and leading fundraiser for causes ranging from AIDS research to the U.S. Democratic Party.
Now he’s a pariah in Hollywood and everywhere else, his name synonymous with sexual predation and workplace harassment. He’s the poster villain for the #MeToo campaign’s rousting of abusers, not just in the movie industry but also in other male-dominated businesses.
This turnabout occurred in the last quarter of 2017, a year that had already seen seismic upsets in the continuing #OscarsSoWhite controversy over giving gold to palefaces and the emerging Netflix threat against big-screen movie exhibition. If there’s an upside to this downturn in Tinseltown merriment, it’s the elimination of two words that were always implied at the end of any reference to show business. These words are “as usual,” and they refer to an outdated industry and culture where movies and TV shows are made, directed and populated by white men. It’s no longer going to be “show business as usual” in 2018 — and in years to come.
Even before investigations by the New York Times and the New Yorker exposed decades of hushed-up abuse against women (and some men) in entertainment and other realms, sweeping changes had already commenced.
Responding to the #OscarsSoWhite furor of recent years, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences invited 1,457 new members to join its ranks, with many of the new recruits being younger than the 60-plus norm of Oscar voters, and more likely to be female and/or persons of colour. Women now account for 28 per cent and people of colour 13 per cent of the nearly 7,500 members of the expanded academy, which has pledged to double its numbers of women and people of colour by 2020.
Oscar nominations for the 2016 movie year saw seven people of colour nominated in the acting categories, compared to none the previous two years. Two of them won: Mahershala Ali as Best Supporting Actor for Moonlight (the first Muslim to win the category) and Viola Davis as Best Supporting Actress for Fences. The Best Picture win last February by Moonlight, directed by African-American director Barry Jenkins, made it the first film with an all-Black cast to win Oscar’s top category, as well as the first with a gay protagonist.
Diverse faces are becoming more common on the big screen and also on the smaller ones increasingly being grabbed by online giant Netflix, a whole other uprising that roiled this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
There’s industry-wide pushback against “whitewashing,” the hitherto common practice of Hollywood producers giving white actors roles written for Asian, Black and brown characters. British actor Ed Skrein made headlines and received social media huzzahs this year when he refused to play Major Ben Daimio in the coming Hellboy reboot, since the character was Asian in the story’s original graphic novel treatment.
The diversity and gender equity revolutions are likely to continue when nominations for 90th Academy Awards are announced on Jan. 23.
Jordan Peele’s Get Out, a racially charged horror satire that premiered as a surprise midnight attraction at Sundance 2017, is likely to garner nominations for picture, director and original screenplay for African-American writer/director Peele, while Daniel Kaluuya is considered a good bet to take one of the five prized slots for Best Actor.
Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, a rare coming-of-age story about a teen girl, is similarly a strong contender for picture, director and original screenplay noms, with Saiorse Ronan very likely to be included in the tally for Best Actress consideration.
Peele and Gerwig are both firsttime solo directors of non-mainstream movies, a combination that in the not-too-distant path would have seemed to conspire against Oscar consideration.
Not in today’s Hollywood, where many of the old verities are proving false. Remember the unwritten rule that only blockbusters made by and starring men would actually make money? Most of the year’s biggest bombs — among them The Mummy, Baywatch, Dark Tower and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword — were directed by and starred men.
In contrast, one of the year’s biggest success stories was Wonder Woman, a blockbuster superhero saga starring Gal Gadot in the title role and directed by Patty Jenkins, who has now been signed to direct a sequel due in 2019.
Wonder Woman is the first woman-centred comic book movie to also be directed by a woman, and, as Forbes magazine noted this week, it’s one of three female-dominated blockbusters that topped the U.S. and Canadian box office in 2017, the others being Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Beauty and the Beast. Their combined domestic box office take is $1.3 billion (U.S.) and counting.
The trend seems likely to continue: On March 9, Disney is scheduled to release Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time, a sci-fi adventure starring Oprah Winfrey, Mindy Kaling, Reese Witherspoon and Storm Reid. DuVernay is the first woman of colour to direct a live-action film with a budget exceeding $100 million, and only the third woman ever to do so.
Expect to see fewer such superlatives in the years to come, but it’s for a good reason. The rare will become the norm in Hollywood, because after the upheavals of 2017, it’s no more show business as usual. Peter Howell is the Star’s movie critic. His column usually runs Fridays.