The Politics of Oscar 2010

Last year, I made a statement on Sounds of Cinema (which can be found here) explaining why I no longer dedicate an entire episode of the show to Oscar coverage. To summarize, I felt then--and still do now--that the Oscars are a poor barometer of cinematic excellence, that the ceremony exists to preserve the studio power structure, and that the awards do not matter nearly as much as Hollywood would like us to believe that they do. (As proof, try to name the last five or ten Best Picture winners, and then list five or ten films that deeply impacted you in some way. See which list comes out quicker and if any titles on the lists overlap.) This year, I'd like to aim my criticism towards the way the Academy Awards have been used by Hollywood to pad its image as a playground of liberalism and egalitarianism.

In the recent past, the major political statements from Hollywood were directed outward at the Washington political establishment such as Michael Moore's hell raising 2003 speech for Bowling for Columbine or Sean Penn's gentler but still polemic 2009 acceptance speech for Milk. Moore and Penn raged against the conservative machine but this year's politics were much more internal and specific to Hollywood. Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win the Best Director Oscar for The Hurt Locker and Mo'Nique won Best Supporting Actress for Precious, a film that received very polarizing and visceral responses from critics. Much has been made of Bigelow's win, just as much was made of Halle Berry as the first African American to win Best Actress for Monster's Ball, and nominations and awards given to Brokeback Mountain, Milk, and Crash were cast as as some kind of closet opening, glass-ceiling shattering revolutionary act.

But of course they weren't.

Let me pause right now to say I don't want to take anything away from Bigelow or Mo'Nique or any other Oscar winner. The quality of their work--regardless of their gender or ethnicity--made them deserving of their awards; it isn't like the academy gave the Best Picture Oscar to Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. My concern is the way in which the awards are written into a narrative that Hollywood puts forward about itself and its products.

Consider an excerpt from this article by Kate Harding at Salon:

It's fantastic to see black filmmakers recognized -- just as it's fantastic to see a woman win best director, even if it's for a distinctly testosteroney film -- but that hardly means we've transcended demeaning stereotypes. . . . Consider the shocked reaction of umpteen reporters upon learning that the movie's star, Gabourey Sidibe, is nothing like Precious -- that she was, in fact, acting. Consider the clip they chose to show last night that featured Sidibe stealing a bucket of fried chicken, for crying out loud. Consider that four of the best picture nominees were widely criticized for their treatment of race -- "Precious" for all of the above; "District 9" for its arguably sketchy handling of an apartheid allegory and undeniably degrading depiction of human black Africans; "The Blind Side" and "Avatar" for being yet more iterations of a tired and condescending "white savior" narrative. That's not to say those films were wholly without merit or even necessarily undeserving of the praise, but when four of the year's most beloved movies contain problematic racial tropes, it's a bit premature to congratulate the Academy or ourselves for having come so far in the last 82 years.

I don't agree with everything Harding has to say in her article; I would disagree with her take on District 9 and she repeats some of the criticisms of Precious that I did not find convincing. But Harding's overall point, that Hollywood shouldn't be too eager to congratulate itself for giving the equivalent of an employee of the year award to a woman--and it only took them eighty-two years!--is important.

Consider the argument that the United States is post-racial after the election of Barack Obama. It's a nice idea that makes liberals (and conservatives for that matter) feel warm and fuzzy. But it's also plainly false and pretending that racism is now gone from American culture treads from naivete or ignorance into downright idiocy.

And the same is true of the Academy Awards. Putting a woman on a stage and giving her a statue--a statue she deserves, no less--does not exonerate Hollywood of its sexism. The disparities in pay between male and female performers, the generally poor quality of female roles, and the absence of female directors and studio executives should not be ignored.

But why does this matter for the average movie-goer? After all, it might be argued, you've spent a lot of time saying the awards don't matter, so who cares?

It matters because we need to be critical of Hollywood and its product. Like any art form, films shape the way in which we view ourselves, our culture, the outside world, even reality itself. If we take for granted that the creators of film have no agendas and are free of the same biases and prejudices that the rest of us suffer from, then we are setting ourselves up for a fall, and become unable to identify symbols of oppression.

Congratulations to the winners, truly. But as commentators, filmmakers, and moviegoers take note and even celebrate the achievements of these films, we ought not cut Hollywood any slack for images, stories, and business practices that continue to perpetuate the kinds of prejudice that the Hollywood system claims to have put behind it.