And this year’s Oscar for inclusivity goes to … the Academy!
Even before the curtain fell, this year’s Oscars attracted a lot of labels. Oddest Oscars ever! That seemed fair: no hosts, no songs, just 170 guests clapping in a train station. Most sombre Oscars ever? Also true. A global pandemic and a lot of films inspired by police brutality don’t make for the frothiest few hours.
Most boring Oscars ever? That, too, has some validity: the meticulous stage-managing dictated by Covid protocols made for a remarkably smooth – and platitudinous – ceremony, with none of the slips that can help keep viewers from snoozing.
And, of course, most diverse Oscars ever. This is the hardest to argue with. February 2019 – when tin-eared “antiracism” buddy movie Green Book won the Oscar and Spike Lee headed for the exit in disgust – seems like a lifetime ago.
Instead, half of the acting Oscars went to people of colour (Minari’s Youn Yuh-jung, Judas and the Black Messiah’s Daniel Kaluuya). Two of the five directing nominees were women (Nomadland’s Chloé Zhao, Emerald Fennell for Promising Young Woman); two were people of colour (Zhao and Lee Chang Isaac, who made Minari). Zhao, who was born in Beijing and moved to the US in her late teens, became the second woman and first woman of colour to win best director. Her film also picked up best picture: a pair of gongs it had won at almost every preceding awards ceremony.
Yet Nomadland, an elegiac drama about people living in their vans in America’s midwest, is not at first glance an especially diverse film. Its writer/ director may be Asian, but every single cast member is white. They all appear to be heterosexual. But its radicalism hides in plain sight. Nomadland is, after all, the first best picture winner ever to be totally focused on women. Women who happen to all be firmly over 60. For 93 years, male ensemble movies have been the meat and potatoes of best picture fare. Even when Kathryn Bigelow won best director and picture in 2010 it was for a testosterone-heavy war thriller. But this year, The Trial of the Chicago 7 – men endlessly yelling in a courtroom – not only failed to scoop the big prize, it failed to win any awards at all.
For all that it actually follows Oscars formula, then, Nomadland might as well have been made on the moon. It is absolutely unapologetic about its lack of interest in rote, gendered plot points. Its politics may be soft-centred – all the trailer park residents encountered by Fern, Frances McDormand’s impoverished widow, are benevolent, and everyone seems to actively prefer living in a van to a house – yet its portrait of women in their third act is clear-eyed and unsentimental. We watch Fern sweat as she cleans public toilets, grapple with her own van’s lack of one and strip off for a solo swim, basking in a lake, unplucked, unwaxed and absolutely happy.
McDormand’s real-life nomad costars, Linda May and Charlene Swankie, are similarly unvarnished. Both have self-shorn grey hair; Swankie’s sling might be as much statement as necessity. Such salon-scepticism comes as contrast to those ageing broads who have sometimes popped up in best picture winners. Generally speaking these women come highly coiffured (Terms of Endearment, All About Eve) or strikingly isolated (Driving Miss Daisy). Certainly, it’s hard to imagine Shirley MacLaine giving herself a buzzcut or using a bucket as a toilet.
Nomadland does feature one man, played by the actor David Strathairn. But he’s disposable. Despite a whisper of attraction between his character and McDormand’s, nothing is spoken, and the film passes without any conventional love scene. Romance is undiscussed, unless refracted through grief. The Bechdel test has passed its sell-by date.
But Nomadland’s other big victory
– best actress for McDormand – has also been flagged by some as a chink in the inclusivity credentials of this year’s Oscars (of the four actors she beat, two – Viola Davis and Andra Day – are black). There’s a similar story when it comes to Anthony Hopkins’s best actor win for The Father. Not only is he, like McDormand, an old stager (she has won twice before; he’s won once and been nominated seven times) he also beat multiple actors of colour, including the frontrunner, the late Chadwick Boseman.
Yet despite their whiteness, both these wins do also tell their own encouraging story. At 83, Hopkins is the oldest ever acting winner. McDormand, 63, is the oldest best actress winner since Jessica Tandy in 1989. It’s very rare any acting winner is over 60: this year, three of four are: Hopkins, McDormand and supporting actress Youn Yuh-jung, who is 73.
Such stats can seem surprising until you process just how eager Hollywood is to swaddle middle-aged actors in latex, rather than risk someone genuinely elderly. Helen Mirren was only 60 when she played the 71-year-old Queen; Meryl Streep was 61 when she played a very decrepit Margaret Thatcher. Pre-Hopkins, the last leading actor Oscar winner over 60 was Henry Fonda for On Golden Pond, 40 years ago. Gary Oldman was 59 when he played a snuffling, shuffling Churchill; Jeff Bridges and Jack Nicholson were the same age for semi-dotage roles in Crazy Heart and As Good As It Gets.
You might imagine there would be more scope for older actors to be celebrated in the supporting categories. This is not necessarily the case. Judi Dench was all of 63 for her gap-toothed monarch in Shakespeare in Love; you have to go back to Peggy Ashcroft 44 years ago to find a supporting actress winner older than Youn.
And yet it was she who was the star of the show on Sunday. Youn who ruled supreme at the podium, where she flirted mercilessly with Brad Pitt and gave another disarmingly frank acceptance speech. Her only competition in the charisma stakes came from Glenn Close, who shrugged off her eighth Oscar defeat to gamely demonstrate a 1988 dance move called “Da Butt” in a peculiar pub-quiz style segment of the ceremony. Now 74, Close may have lost out on an actual Oscar to that whippersnapper McDormand, but she still made headlines – and somehow retained her dignity – with a quick twerk.
“Thank you for showing us that ageing is a beautiful part of life,” said Zhao at the Baftas two weeks ago, paying tribute to America’s nomadic community. “A journey that we should all cherish and celebrate. How we treat our elders says a lot about who we are as a society and we need to do better.” It seems the Oscars were quick to act on her words.
Nomadland's portrait of women in their third act is clear-eyed and unsentimental