A Growing Divide

It's no news that the Academy Awards are to the European film festivals what entertainment is to art in film. Still, expectations start with the New Year. This time the disappointments came as early as the nominations. We didn't even have to wait until the ceremony.  Most disappointingly, the Hollywood of old continues to run through the veins of the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.  Even in the year 2015 it can feel as if we're in the Hollywood of Gone with the Wind.

This year, however, they've been called out on it. (#OscarsSoWhite)

It’s not just about race, but that is certainly the best example of the disassociation of the Academy from the world that surrounds them. That only one black person is among the 20 nominees for the best acting categories in the year of the amazing acting in Selma, most particularly that of David Oyelowo; the year of Tessa Thompson who shines in Dear White People, Riz Ahmed in Nightcrawler, Chadwick Boseman as James Brown in Get on Up (given that this is a year of biopics) and many more who have been so unjustly overlooked.  In the Best Director category we have all white males, when the beautiful film that is Selma was made by the talented Ava DuVernay. It is a shame that the Old Hollywood continues its sorry track record: in the 87 years of the Oscars, of the 2,900 winners of the coveted statuette, only 32 have been black.

This is only one of the controversies to surround the Oscar nominations this year. Besides the snubs, there is the nomination of American Sniper in the Best Picture category. There has not been as divisive a film as this one in many years. But let’s put aside the polarization to which it has contributed and the more than $308 million dollars that it’s earned so far. Even if we overlook the fact that this film has overlooked facts, including the “little” issue of the non-existence of WMDs that led to the whole presence of American troops in Iraq in the first place; even if we pretend that the real sniper was like the Bradley Cooper sniper (the real one was quite racist); or imagine that the “dark” sniper, the Arab one, fabricated as contraposition to the good “white” sniper in typical Clint Eastwood Manichean style was actually killed by the “good guy” (he wasn’t); even overlooking all this, the film is still not nomination worthy. Who can dismiss the sloppiness (or should we say laziness?) Eastwood shows in this film? How will we ever not chuckle, for example, when we remember Bradley Cooper rocking those plastic dolls meant to be his babies? 

Eastwood is certainly Old Hollywood and knows how to pull heart strings in some moviegoers. In a Google survey on the Oscar Best Picture nominees, a whopping 42% voted American Sniper as the Best film, followed distantly by The Grand Budapest Hotel in second place and Selma in (honorable) third place.

My Two Oscar Favorites

No surprise that these three films favored by the Google voters are nowhere near being the front runners for the Oscars. That would be Boyhood directed by Richard Linklater and Birdman directed by Alejandro Gonzáles Iñáritu. One of the two will take Best Picture and the other Best Director. These films are the bland pudding to the fiery hot issues of the world we’re living today. Boyhood was an original feat, filmed over 12 years with the same cast meeting every four, so maybe, yeah, it deserved the nomination for originality. But it’s hard to not wonder why a film that shows a white, working-towards-middle class family living in Texas, where the population is 40% Latino, has no contact with people of color, except for the gardener whose life is changed by an off-hand remark made to him by the character Patricia Arquette embodies. A more “white-savior” moment is hard to find in film. And although the boy in this family drama has a sister, the film is all about him and as he grows, she fades, the point that towards the end it seems like he’s an only child. A more adequate and realistic title would have been “It’s All about the Boy (the White One)”.  The Academy members seems to relate. Patricia Arquette will probably win Best Actress, Ethan Hawke was nominated for Best Actor, Richard Linklater for Best Director in a film that, besides the 12 years it took to make, is otherwise quite unremarkable.

The Front Runners

Alejandro’s film, while made by a Latino filmmaker, is also far removed from the everydayness of people. It’s about an actor doing a Broadway play in New York, another city where about 60% of the people are of color, with another all-white cast. Not that every film needs to reflect the diversity of where it takes place, but, still! The film has a pretentious feel to it, that of someone trying too hard to make a “deep” story of the many times done script of a washed up actor who seems to have made the same mistakes most blockbuster actors of Avengers statute make in Hollywood: drugs, alcohol, infidelities, wasting away lots of money, bad relationships with family and kids. This time the old story is adorned with visual effects and even a drunk man calling out (in case you haven’t picked it up by then) Shakespeare’s Macbeth line about the “poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more”. I say no more.

Major Academy Snubs

The members of this Academy seem to be growing old locked up in their eternal ivory towers, holding tight to what they know best, which is always the safest thing to do. Only thus can we understand tomorrow’s probable Oscar wins. It is how we’ve come to accept that Argo could win over Amour or Beasts of the Southern Wild, or that The King's Speech win over Black Swan, True Grit or The Fighter. The Hollywood of old. That’s entertainment!

It’s not what people want in our very political and much polarized world. The divide between people of privilege and those without grows exponentially and rapidly (in old Hollywood terms: To Have and Have Not).  An excellent movie like Snowpiercer, that addresses this inequality, would have been a great addition to this year’s nominees, as would have Dear White People, which touches upon the issue of race in the 21st Century, or even Nightcrawler about our media and violence-frenzied world. But the Academy has played it safe once again. And this time it has lost.