In the ramp-up to the nominee reveals, the Oscars were in a pretty weird position this year. To start with, their list of potential choices had been badly affected by that whole pandemic business; in the broadest sense, any film that could have made a profit and didn’t belong to a streaming service was a no-show, leaving the Academy voters with fewer blockbusters and crowd-pleasers to waste coveted slots on than ever before.

More importantly though, the Academy had to follow with the heavily publicised controversy surrounding the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s lack of Black members in the run-up to their own show, the (inexplicably) popular Golden Globes. On the flip side, the BAFTAs shocked us all by offering up a surprisingly diverse list of nominees, from His House (Remi Weekes) to Saint Maud (Rose Glass), while even making room for less widely-seen films like Rocks (Sarah Gavron) and Mogul Mowgli (Bassam Tariq).

Basically, the 2021 Oscars could have gone a couple of different ways. Given their unique opportunity to fill the roster of nominees with smaller films, and the precedent set by the disastrous Globes and the refreshing BAFTAs, it was hard to say exactly how the Academy voters would mark their ballots.

The answer, ultimately, proved to be somewhere between the two. Let’s start with the good stuff, shall we?

 

A Year of Firsts…

In more ways than one, this year’s Oscars ceremony will break new ground in diversity and representation. Not only does the Best Lead Actor category feature both the first Asian-American nominee and the first Muslim nominee in Steven Yeun and Riz Ahmed respectively, but for the first time in the show’s ninety-three year history, two women, Chloé Zhao and Emerald Fennell, have been nominated for Best Director in the same year for Nomadland and Promising Young Woman.

There are two ways we can interpret this news. On the one hand, it is truly abhorrent that it has taken until 2021 for the most widely viewed awards show in the world to hit these milestones, and the Academy has been rightly criticised for this over the past number of days. On the other hand, the numerous nominations for the artists behind films like Nomadland, Minari (Lee Isaac Chung) and Sound of Metal (Darius Marder) have afforded these works invaluable attention in public spheres, giving wide platforms to oft-marginalised voices in mainstream cinema. 

For one, Sound of Metal featured a large number of deaf actors who contributed to the construction of that film’s world. “Diversity in film, not only in terms of who we see on camera but who the stories are about, helps to show a representation of the world we live in,” explains Marder. “We fought from the beginning to cast deaf actors in deaf roles.” The fact that Marder’s efforts towards inclusion were contested is immensely frustrating, but the resulting six Oscar nominations and inevitable inflation in viewership for the film might hopefully make inclusivity an easier battle for other filmmakers in the future.

To put it plainly, the Oscars have a long history of gatekeeping and exclusion, but that does not mean that the Academy’s attempts to change in recent years (including offering membership to two hundred and ninety-five new people of colour within the industry last year alone) should not be celebrated for drawing attention to a new and more interesting range of diverse filmmakers. In fact, three of the eight nominees for Best Picture were directed by relative newcomers to the directing game: both the aforementioned Fennell and Marder, and also Shaka King for Judas and the Black Messiah. It seems, at least on first glance, that last year’s surprise victory for Parasite (Bong Joon-ho) was less of a fluke and more a sign of things to come.

 

…And a Year of Tokens.

But there is still rot to spare, make no mistake. The Academy may have taken measures to adjust their ratios towards a more balanced landscape, at least on a performative level, and while this gesture has yielded positive results for many filmmakers, it is still blatantly clear that the majority of voters still have some serious biases. And while these biases are largely obvious to see and point out among the cineliterate, it is my opinion that they do affect which films make it into the public conversation from year to year regardless, particularly when it comes to Black cinema.

Of the serious candidates campaigning for a nomination in 2020, there were realistically only four centred around Black experiences which had a fighting chance (that is, once you discount the incidental Bobby Seale (Yahya Abdul-Matteen II) subplot in Trial of the Chicago 7 (Aaron Sorkin), the writer of which has claimed that, for his part in the fight for representation, showed the script to several “Black friends” upon completion). These four films – Judas and the Black Messiah, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (George C. Wolfe), One Night in Miami (Regina King) and Da 5 Bloods (Spike Lee) – all aggressively campaigned for awards attention, yet only Judas has been treated as a significant player by the Academy, earning six nominations. Most notably among the snubs is Regina King, who was shut out of both Best Picture and Best Director despite gaining more traction than most at the Globes, while Lee’s Da 5 Bloods was overlooked entirely, apart from an utterly random nomination for Best Score. A cynic might say that a significant number of Academy voters delegated only a single vote to what they might call ‘Black films’ on their ballots. In other words, literal tokenism.

This may seem like a stretch at first, but this practice has had a precedent as late as 2018, when Black Panther (Ryan Coogler) and Green Book (Peter Farrelly) dominated the conversation for being films about race which were, to put it mildly, more palatable to a sheltered white audience in need of reassurance. In the same year, If Beale Street Could Talk (Barry Jenkins), a hard-hitting, vision-driven Black narrative from a director who swept the awards circuit only two years previously, was snubbed almost entirely. This is not to say that Judas is a simplistic film on the same level as a Marvel film or that white saviour rubbish from the Dumb and Dumber guy, rather to demonstrate how, regardless of a given work’s quality, the Academy tends to pit Black narratives against one another to an extent that has never been a problem for white candidates (and that’s assuming they even watch these films at all, if the Animated Feature category voting process is anything to go by).

 

So What Next?

This is a critical year for the Academy, make no mistake. The power held by this awards show cannot be underestimated, and excitingly the numerous ceilings shattered by this year’s nominees will likely affect which stories studios will be willing to fund over the coming months. There is a balancing act however, to celebrating the victories of those who break new ground, and holding responsible the old white men who keep relegating some truly great films out of the public eye due to blatant racism and misogyny (in addition to the above, this email from a voter explaining why Never Rarely Sometimes Always (Eliza Hittman) was not in contention is one of the more infuriating things I’ve read this year).

Despite everything, I do enjoy the awards circuit, both as a tool for catching up on the films that I missed over the year (both those that get recognised and those which trend on Twitter once snubbed), and for those rare, genuine thrills when the Academy’s gradual course correction leads to more open doors for up-and-coming filmmakers from a range of backgrounds. Perhaps naïvely, I believe that these next ten years will see the landscape of mainstream film awards change utterly. By 2031, I like to think the red carpet will be open to any and everyone, but for that to happen the conversation needs to remain focused on the difference between milestones and tokenism. There is room for more than one Black story in a given year. This should be the most obvious thing in the world but, for the most part, the Academy is somehow still getting away with it.