This Year’s Oscar Nominations Are a Reminder That Many Things Can Be True at the Same Time
By Stacy Lee Kong
Image: A24
Sometimes I get so tired of having to qualify my excitement over something. Like, I hate that I always have to say, “This is so great! But we can’t forget…” where the thing that’s so great is some kind of win for representation, while the thing we can’t forget is that we still exist in a white supremacist society, so those wins constitute, at best, relatively small steps forward and, at worst, a reminder that racialized people’s success is still conditional on white acceptance.
You know what I mean?
Yes, I’m talking about this year’s Oscar nominations. The thing that’s so great is definitely the amount of history-making recognition for Asian people. This year, there are more Asian acting nominees than ever before, though that number is only four: Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan and Stephanie Hsu were nominated for their roles in Everything Everywhere All at Once, as was The Whale’s Hong Chau. Hsu and Chau are both recognized in the Best Supporting Actress category, making this the first time two Asian actors have ever been recognized in the same acting category, btw. Yeoh’s nomination for Best Actress in a Leading Role is also notable because it marks the first time an actor who identifies as Asian was nominated in this category. (Welsh-Sri Lankan actor Merle Oberon was technically the first to be nominated for Best Actress in the 1930s, but she hid her ethnicity so she could work in Hollywood.) Writer Kazuo Ishiguro was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay for Living, making him the first Asian person to be nominated in that category. RRR, the action epic everyone on my Twitter feed was talking about for a while there, received a nomination for Best Original Song, the first time an Indian film has been nominated for an award that wasn’t Best International Film. Toronto native Domee Shi’s Turning Red was nominated for Best Animated Feature Film, making this the tenth year in a row an Asian filmmaker was recognized in this category. And that’s just the ‘history-making’ nominations; Asian producers, composers, songwriters, musicians, hair stylists, makeup artists and costume designers also received recognition in categories where Asians had been nominated before.
The thing we can’t forget, though, is that every other ethnicity—and Black artists in particular—were barely recognized at all. Only two Black actors were nominated this year: Brian Tyree Henry was recognized alongside Quan in the Best Supporting Actor category for his role in Causeway, while Angela Bassett’s Best Supporting Actress nomination for her role in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever made her the “first woman, the first person of color and the first Marvel Studios actor to be nominated for an Academy Award for performance in a comic book adaptation,” according to NBC News. Meanwhile, there were some extremely noticeable snubs, including the movie Nope as a whole, as well as Viola Davis and Danielle Deadwyler, who were widely expected to receive Best Actress nominations for their roles in The Woman King and Till, respectively. There was also only one Latine acting nominee (Ana de Armas, for Blonde) and three other nominees: directors Guillermo del Toro for Pinocchio and Alfonso Cuarón for Le Pupille, and Argentine film Argentina, 1985, which is up for Best International Feature Film. Many other ethnicities got no representation at all. And from a gender perspective, no women were nominated for Best Director, though Sarah Polley’s Women Talking was nominated for Best Picture.
The last thing I want to do here is diminish the impact of seeing so many excellent Asian artists recognized by an industry that has so often ignored their work, especially during a week that has been otherwise heavy and painful for Asian people—the joy of seeing EEAAO lead the nomination list with 11 nominations was tempered by the heartache of the two mass shootings in California that targeted Asian people and were perpetrated by Asian elders. But for me, the most difficult realization is that, even though these nominations are so exciting, they’re not a sign that Hollywood has achieved ‘meaningful representation.’ Each of these victories belongs to the individual, not the institution—and in fact, we can never trust that historically discriminatory institutions won’t regress. I mean, the 2021 Oscars were lauded as the most diverse ever with nine out of 20 acting nominations going to people of colour, including three Asian nominees, the highest number ever at that time… and last year, there were just four nominated actors of colour, none of them Asian.
Oscar noms are a numbers game—but not in the way you might be thinking
The only way for racialized people—and queer people, trans people, disabled people, women, etc.—to get recognized by industry organizations like the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is to appear in projects that are eligible to be nominated, right? And yes, for a long time, POC were vastly underrepresented in those projects. But if you’ve ever thought that was the reason the Oscars and other awards shows haven’t fairly recognized racialized people’s work, I’m so sorry to tell you that is probably not the case.
According to UCLA College of Social Sciences’ 2022 Hollywood Diversity Report, the industry is (slowly) diversifying. The report looks at four key employment areas in Hollywood—film directors, film writers, lead actors and total actors—and it found that, compared to the last report in 2020, people of colour have maintained or gained representation in two of those areas. POC reached proportionate representation in the lead actor and total actor categories for the first time in 2020, then maintained that representation in the former category (38.9%) and made gains in the latter (43.1%). So, it’s clearly not a ‘pipeline problem’ when no men of colour or Black women get nominated in the leading role categories, is what I’m saying.
In fact, I’m not convinced it’s a pipeline problem even when racialized people are underrepresented, as we still are in the remaining two categories, film writers and film directors. Even when there are just a few POC working in this field, racialized actors, directors, producers, writers, cinematographers, etc. have always delivered exemplary work—and have been recognized by the Academy for doing so. Hattie McDaniel was the first Black person to be nominated for (and win) an Oscar in 1939. Dorothy Dandridge was the first Black person to receive a Leading Role nomination in 1954. (Sidney Poitier became the first Black person to win a Leading Role award in 1963 and Halle Berry became the first Black woman to win in 2001.) In fact, that’s why April Reign started the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag/movement in 2015 and re-upped it in 2016; because the people of colour who were working in Hollywood at that time were doing great work, but the Academy just… refused to acknowledge that, most notably by declining to nominate a single racialized person across 20 acting awards
Instead, here are the numbers that I think actually matter: 81% and 67%. Since 2016, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has been working to diversify its membership, extending invitations to hundreds of new members with the specific goal of increasing the number of women and people of colour among its ranks. And yet, as of March 2022, the Academy remains 81% white and 67% male.
A quick pause to explain how Oscar nominations and voting work: as Variety explained in 2020, “each [member] belongs to one of 17 branches. Each branch nominates for its own category — e.g., editors nominate editors, actors nominate for the four acting categories. Everyone gets to nominate best picture. For the final voting of the winner, all branches vote for everything.” It has been well-established by this point that filmmakers from underrepresented backgrounds hire more diversely than white men. The same holds true for writers, producers… and voting bodies.
We can’t ignore the impact of misgynoir
The result? What The New Yorker’s Richard Brody characterizes as a fear-based focus on ‘tradition,’ that allows for exceptions but mainly uphold the overall rule. Yes, EEAAO is deservedly shining this year—because the mostly white judging body is allowing it to do so. It’s not that this year’s historic recognition for Asian actors, writers and directors is happening because systemic oppression and white supremacy is over; it’s happening because the Academy is trying to maintain credibility in a changing society that will no longer stand for exclusion. But even as it progresses slowly, it’s still exerting control over how many and what kind of minority it allows to be recognized—and it’s always going to skew toward what it perceives as the safest choices.
As Brody points out, there was another 2022 release that also had commercial success and imaginative extravagance, but was not nominated for anything: Nope. “Jordan Peele is the Rodney Dangerfield of Hollywood—he gets no respect at all, at least, none since he won Best Original Screenplay for Get Out. His, and his movies’, neglect is appalling and disturbing. It’s similarly appalling that, although two superb Black actors were nominated this year—Angela Bassett and Brian Tyree Henry—not a single movie by a Black filmmaker, in a year that offered many superb ones, received a nomination for Best Picture, for directing, for screenwriting, or, for that matter, for Best International Feature. Instead, the Academy has thrown its weight behind the stodge of All Quiet on the Western Front: for those who lament that they don’t make ‘em the way they used to, the German director Edward Berger has proved them wrong.”
It’s also important to note that many of the worst snubs were of Black women specifically. Throughout awards season, Till’s Danielle Deadwyler, who played civil rights activist Mamie Till-Mobley, was widely regarded as a shoo-in for a Best Actress in a Leading Role nomination. So was Viola Davis, who played Nanisca in The Woman King. Her co-star Lashana Lynch, who played Izogie, was considered a longshot, but also very deserving of a Best Supporting Actress nom.
You know who did get nominated though? Andrea Riseborough, for her performance in the indie drama To Leslie. The movie, which premiered at SXSW Film Festival in March, grossed only $27,000 and generated very little buzz throughout awards season. But, a last-minute word-of-mouth campaign landed her on the list of Best Actress nominees. According to AV Club, “Riseborough’s backing by the powerful CAA finally came into play in November, when she and [director Michael] Morris turned to their famous friends to help spread the word with screenings and a word-of-mouth FYC campaign. Charlize Theron hosted a screening at CAA, followed by screenings hosted by Gwyneth Paltrow, Courteney Cox, Edward Norton, Jennifer Aniston, and Minnie Driver. Fellow actors (mostly women) such as Kate Winslet, Melanie Lynsky, Demi Moore, Jane Fonda, Naomi Watts, Laura Dern and Frances Fisher began to come out of the woodwork to praise Riseborough’s performance as a single mother living in West Texas who squanders her lottery winnings.”
I don’t mention this because I think Riseborough or To Leslie are undeserving. But it’s important to consider who gets this kind of support, buy-in and investment, and why those people so often look like her, and not Deadwyler, Davis or Lynch. And… you already know the answer: misogynoir. This industry stays supporting young white women who are perceived as approachable, innocent and in need of protection, or at least support. Meanwhile, Black women, and especially dark-skinned Black women, face the consequences of unconscious bias and therefore are not considered as deserving of Hollywood insiders’ effort and risk. In fact, they are perceived as lesser, both in terms of their professionalism and the quality of their work. And that matters. As Robert Daniels argued in the Los Angeles Times, “Rather than interrogating Riseborough’s specific campaign—for a harrowing performance, I might add—one should ask a different question: What does it say that the Black women who did everything the institution asks of them—luxury dinners, private academy screenings, meet-and-greets, splashy television spots and magazine profiles—are ignored when someone who did everything outside of the system is rewarded? ”
This isn’t a call to ignore award shows, though
We should also acknowledge that focusing on the record number of Asian artists nominated this year indirectly situates that success in the context of whiteness. Buzzfeed’s Izzy Ampil (who I also quoted last week and who is doing really great cultural criticism) wrote about how focusing on these historical nominations sometimes ends up being reductive. “Homing in on increasingly specific honors—in which any given artist of color might be named the first, second, or third person to attain it—reduces the artist’s success to a pat on the head in a lineup of other artists of their race. And it obscures the distinctions between the work of artists of the same race,” she wrote. Similarly, praising EEAAO “through the narrow lens of representation politics at the Oscars—yay, victory for Asian people at a white-dominated awards ceremony in a white-dominated industry!—both flattens the film’s achievements and bloats the Oscars’ perceived impact on the lives of Asian Americans. Though it’s useful to highlight the entrenched whiteness of the Academy Awards, and to draw audiences’ attention to films that continue to challenge the Oscars’ canon, representation discourse merely reinforces the awards show’s presumed dominance. Elsewhere, as Bong Joon-ho pointed out in 2020, film lovers think of the awards as ‘very local.’ In America, we keep feeding them attention that makes them seem like the center of the movie universe.”
I don’t fully agree with the idea that the Oscars are irrelevant. I’ve written before about the impact of industry awards, and why I think it’s short-sighted to pretend that they don’t matter when being recognized in this way actually leads to quantifiable professional benefits and unquantifiable (but no less powerful) personal benefits. But Ampil’s point dovetails nicely with something Kristen Warner, associate professor of performing and media arts at Cornell University, said this week, too: “While the success of Everything Everywhere All at Once continues with a host of Oscar nominations—three in acting categories that mark dramatic firsts for the AAPI leads—one might be resolved to believe that meaningful diversity has finally arrived in Hollywood awards season, but I would caution that we are still on an incremental set of progressions that can still only favor one racial group at a time. So, it's wonderful to see Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan, and Stephanie Hsu earning Oscar nominations but it also means that the list cannot also include Viola Davis, Danielle Deadwyler, and Lashana Lynch.”
To be clear, Warner’s not saying that’s happening because of Yeoh, Quan or Hsu; this isn’t about a scarcity mindset where there’s actually only room for some of us to succeed. She’s saying as long as the entertainment industry still treats non-whiteness like an exception or a trend, we’ll continue to see recognition and opportunities doled out haphazardly and unevenly. And I think it’s important for us to acknowledge that, too. Because this week, it feels like I’ve seen two conversations happening: one about Asian representation and one about snubs. But the more I think about it, the more I believe this is actually one conversation that we should all be having, all the time.
And Did You Hear About…
Heather Havrilesky’s latest Ask Polly newsletter about taking voice lessons, and what it means to keep trying at something even when you feel like there’s no proof you’ll ever get better.
The curious Twitter ubiquity of Menswear Guy.
Anti-Racism Daily’s list of mental health resources for AAPI communities.
The Toronto TikTok girlies who are saying how so many of us are feeling right now. That is, genuinely worried about our safety on the TTC. Also worth reading: this very thoughtful op-ed about how we actually address violence in our transit system (and our city) from someone who was recently attacked herself. Unsurprisingly, it is never about giving the police more money.
New York magazine features writer Zak Cheney-Rice’s sadly compelling argument that Keenan Anderson’s death at the hands of LAPD officers earlier this month marks the end of the Black Lives Matter era.
That Tarte influencer trip to Dubai, and the incredibly… let’s say robust response on social media.
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