The Motion Picture Academy has come under attack again for the lack of diversity in its annual Oscar nominations. Similar to 2016, when the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag emerged, only one out of 2020’s 20 lead and supporting acting nominees is a thespian of color. None of the five best director contenders are women—as actor and writer Issa Rae pointedly noted when co-announcing the noms, offering “congratulations to those men.”
To make matters worse, the 92nd Academy Awards are also overlooking most of the year’s progressive pictures. It’s as if Oscar-voters listened to Golden Globes host Ricky Gervais’ snarky rant, during the Globes’ 77th annual awards show on Jan. 5: “If you do win an award tonight, don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech. You know nothing about the real world.”
To be fair, some critics contend that “Joker,” which led the pack with 11 Oscar noms, has a socio-political edge. Cynthia Erivo, who depicts legendary slave liberator Harriet Tubman in “Harriet,” is nominated for best actress and best original song. Anti-Nazi satire “Jojo Rabbit” — directed by Taika Waititi, a New Zealander with Maori heritage — snagged six nominations.
“Parasite,” the Korean black comedy about class struggle, is one of those rare subtitled films competing against Hollywood movies for best picture, as well as for the best international accolade, with six total noms. Fernando Meirelles’s “The Two Popes,” which fictionalizes the relationship between the people’s pontiff, Francis (Jonathan Pryce), and his predecessor Benedict, portrays Argentina’s 1976-1983 “Dirty War,” or military junta, against leftists. It’s up for three awards. And Sam Mendes’s antiwar epic “1917,” which grimly depicts World War I’s trench warfare, is up for 10 of those coveted golden statuettes.
On the other hand, writer/director Terrence Malick’s poetic, pacifist “A Hidden Life,” about real-life antifascist Austrian war resister Franz Jägerstätter, was completely overlooked by Academy voters. So was “The Report,” an engrossing feature dramatizing the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program and Senate efforts to chronicle this illegal abuse devised by rogue shrinks, starring Adam Driver (best actor-nommed for “Marriage Story”) as driven investigator Daniel Jones and Annette Bening as Senator Dianne Feinstein.
After watching Ted Levine depict CIA director John Brennan’s Machiavellian machinations in “The Report” against releasing the 6,000-page Senate inquiry, viewers may find his MSNBC appearances as a “spooksman” eyebrow-raising.
Likewise Academy-snubbed: South African director Gavin Hood’s “Official Secrets,” in which Keira Knightley portrays whistleblower Katharine Gun, who triggered leaks aimed at preventing the Iraq War and a freedom of the press uproar. Dan Krauss’ feature adaptation of his 2013 documentary “The Kill Team,” about 2010 US war crimes in Afghanistan, was also ignored. So was Seberg, the biopic about Iowa-born actress Jean Seberg (Kristin Stewart), who was persecuted and slandered by the FBI’s COINTELPRO surveillance program for her relationship with the Black Panthers.
Another grievous omission was the anti-corporate Dark Waters, co-starring two of Hollywood’s top activists, three-time best-actor nominee Mark Ruffalo, and Tim Robbins, who struck Oscar gold for 2003’s “Mystic River.” Ruffalo portrays Robert Bilott, who the New York Times called “DuPont’s Worst Nightmare” after the environmental attorney tackled the Big Chem company for polluting West Virginia farms. Offscreen, Ruffalo is a longtime climate and anti-fracking activist, showing up at the Standing Rock protests and street marches.
Though “Harriet,” the 19th-century-set biopic of Harriet Tubman, was nominated, the Academy overlooked movies about contemporary police brutality and legal system injustices against African Americans, including “Queen & Slim,” “Black and Blue,” “Just Mercy,” “Brian Banks” and “Clemency.” The failure to acknowledge Alfre Woodard for her bravura performance as Clemency’s prison warden is especially egregious.
While Lupita Nyong’o won best supporting actress for 2013’s plantation-era “12 Years a Slave” and writer and director Jordan Peele became the first African American to win the best original screenplay award for 2017’s “Get Out” (also best picture-nominated), their 2019 collaboration “Us” was likewise cold-shouldered. This was despite the fact that, like “Get Out,” “Us” cleverly uses horror genre conventions to comment on race and class. In addition, Oscar ignored Eddie Murphy’s star turn as Blaxploitation/comedy/rap pioneer Rudy Ray Moore in “Dolemite is My Name”; the gentrification tale “The Last Black Man in San Francisco” (with Danny Glover); and “Burning Cane” (with “The Wire”’s Wendell Pierce) about alcoholism and faith in a black community in the south, directed by then-teenager Philip Youmans.
The Academy was also missing in action for Céline Sciamma’s love story about two women, “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” although this French film was Golden Globe-nommed for best foreign language motion picture and won the best screenplay and Queer Palm awards and was Palme d’Or-nommed at the Cannes Film Festival. And although “Bombshell” — about sexual harassment at Fox News — received three noms, including two in acting categories, Kate McKinnon’s lesbian character went unacknowledged.
On the nonfiction front — a category often focused on weighty political subjects — the Academy recognized such documentaries as the Obamas’ first film, “American Factory,” about culture clash as a Chinese businessman reopens a shuttered Ohio GM plant and rehires hundreds of laid-off American workers, and “The Edge of Democracy,” a deep dive into Brazilian electoral politics featuring ex-presidents Dilma Rousseff and Lula da Silva.
Nevertheless, it passed over many lefty documentaries, including Lauren Greenfield’s “The Kingmaker,” about Imelda Marcos’ political comeback in the Philippines; the Cambridge Analytica exposé “The Great Hack,” by Arab-American filmmakers Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer (best documentary co-nommed for 2013’s Arab Spring chronicle “The Square”); Matt Tyrnauer’s excellent bio-doc “Where’s My Roy Cohn?,” about the unscrupulous attorney who was Senator Joe McCarthy’s right-hand man and Donald Trump’s hatchet man; and Lesley Chilcott’s eco-doc “Watson,” about militant ocean warrior Greenpeace co-founder Captain Paul Watson.
Even “Sacheen” — a documentary short about Apache Sacheen Littlefeather, who declined on Marlon Brando’s behalf his “Godfather” Oscar due to Tinseltown’s stereotypical depiction of Native Americans — was also unrecognized.
As viewership for awards shows declines, Academy voters should consider whether to give awards to talents who get onstage to thank their agents, or those who will use the limelight to take stands of conscience.
Thankfully, some Golden Globe winners ignored Gervais’s warning. Among the night’s best speeches were those of pregnant Michelle Williams, who championed women’s reproductive rights; Patricia Arquette, who made an antiwar and get-out-the-vote appeal; and Joaquin Phoenix, who addressed the threat of global warming.
And, only five days after the Golden Globes, Phoenix (now also nominated for a best-actor Academy Award for “Joker”) was arrested, along with Martin Sheen, at the “Fire Drill Friday” anti-climate change rallies co-organized by Hollywood’s über-activist actor, two-time Oscar winner Jane Fonda, in Washington, D.C.
On receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award at SAG’s ceremony, Robert De Niro seemed to reply to Gervais, insisting on his right “to voice my opinion” like any other citizen, and if fame gives him a larger platform, “to use it whenever I see a blatant abuse of power.” In a similar vein, in “Seberg” a black militant character tells actress Jean Seberg: “The revolution needs movie stars.” Call it “cause celeb” and “star power to the people.”
As poet Percy Bysshe Shelley observed, artists can be “unacknowledged legislators.”
Ed Rampell is a film historian and critic based in Los Angeles. Rampell is the author of “Progressive Hollywood, A People’s Film History of the United States” and he co-authored “The Hawaii Movie and Television Book,” now in its third edition. This first appeared at Progressive.org.
From The Progressive Populist, March 1, 2020
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