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PHILIP MARTIN: The Oscars aren't for us

"The Oscars aren't designed for us."

--Idris Elba, 2011

I try not to spend too much energy thinking or writing about the Oscars.

This indifference ought not be read as hostility. I don't have anything against the Oscars, I just know they don't have much to do with my (other) job as a film critic. I really hate movie reviews that speculate about whether a certain actor will or ought to be nominated for an award. I don't find that sort of hyperventilation particularly interesting or helpful. Critics aren't--shouldn't be--handicappers. You don't have to watch the movies to read the awards tea leaves.

While the Oscars don't exactly have a inverse relation to quality, the best films rarely win. Politics and popularity and the agendas of the studios all play a role in how the statues are divvied up. There are lots of really excellent efforts that don't have any chance of winning an Oscar. (My favorite film of 2015, Carol, didn't get a Best Picture nomination and its director, Todd Haynes, didn't get a Best Director nomination. So it goes.)

On the other hand, it's silly to say Oscars aren't important. They matter--more people will pay to see an Oscar-nominated film than one that's merely gotten good reviews. An actor's asking price will go up with a nomination; it will go up more with a win. A director who wins an Oscar gains more power, more artistic freedom. There are real-world consequences attached to the ritual.

And so the folks who are complaining about the Oscars being "so white" have a legitimate point. When no member of an ethnic minority is nominated for an acting award in any given year, it could be written off as an eyebrow-raising statistical anomaly. When it happens two years in a row--like it has the past two years--it's at least a public relations problem.

And so, people are calling for a boycott of the Academy Awards ceremony. Will Smith--who wasn't nominated for his role as Dr. Bennet Omalu in Concussion--isn't going. Spike Lee--who should have won an Oscar for Do the Right Thing all those years ago--isn't going. Mark Ruffalo, who is nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his role in Spotlight, thought about not going, but ultimately decided he would. Still, he considered joining the boycott because, as he told British talk show host Charlie Stayt, "if you look at Martin Luther King's legacy, what he was saying was the good people who don't act are much worse than the wrongdoers who are purposefully not acting, and don't know the right way."

It's interesting that since 2000 the number of black actors winning Oscars has been fairly in line with the size of America's overall black population, a figure generally given at around 13 percent of the population. They've garnered 10 percent of the nominations and 15 percent of the wins, despite being slightly underrepresented in the movies as a whole (about 9 percent of the characters onscreen are black).

I can think of several black actors who could have been nominated this year. Though I didn't like Concussion much, Smith is very good as Omalu, a part that seems tailored to attract award attention. Michael B. Jordan is very good in Creed (though not as good as he was in Fruitvale Station), Idris Elba and Abraham Attah could have been nominated for Beasts of No Nation, as could have just about anyone from the core ensemble of Straight Outta Compton. I wouldn't have been outraged had John Boyega picked up a nomination for his work in Star Wars--Episode VII: The Force Awakens.

And in a year when the Best Supporting actress field feels thin (both Rooney Mara in Carol and Alicia Vikander in The Danish Girl were actually playing lead roles) it's a shame there wasn't more love for Teyonah Parris' marvelous turn in Chi-Raq.

Straight Outta Compton sure felt like a Best Picture nominee to me, though I almost understand how even with a ballot that allows, in theory, for 10 nominees, the Academy's complicated preferential voting system works against movies that a lot of people like but only a few really love. (That must have been what happened to Carol.)

But it wasn't. None of them were. Some people were scandalized--and then a couple of old British actors, Charlotte Rampling and Michael Caine, said some unfortunate things about waiting one's turn. (Can I still believe Rampling deserves to win for Best Actress?)

I don't think the absence of black actors in the nominations reflects any overt racism on the part of Academy members. It reflects the fact that, according to the Los Angeles Times, the Academy's demographics are that of a '50s-era white shoe law firm: in 2013, 94 percent of its 6,028 members were white, 77 percent are male. Their average age was 63.

That doesn't mean the Academy is incapable of recognizing achievement by people who don't look like them; these are the folks that gave the Best Picture Oscar to 12 Years a Slave in 2014. And I'm sure there are plenty of Academy members who are appalled by the white-out. Last week the Academy's (black) president Cheryl Boone Isaacs announced changes designed to make the group's membership look more like America. By 2020, they hope to double the number of women and ethnic and racial minorities in the group. (If they make it, 14 percent of their members will be nonwhite and 48 percent will be women. America is 38 percent nonwhite and 51 percent female.)

And that's nice, I guess. But more than the Oscars, it's the industry that needs to reform. I hope the Academy gets better but I can't pretend to really care about that. For the Oscars don't have anything to do with me. It's a club I don't have any interest in joining, and the only real power they have is the cultural space they take up. As a film critic, I have to pay a little attention to them. I guess.

The Oscars are a sideshow, a trade association banquet in which millionaires give each other little gold statues in the name of "art." But most reasonable people in the business and outside of it understand that the Oscars have very little do do with art and a whole lot to do with marketing.

They're a diversion, a cultural happening like the Super Bowl. We can pay them as much or as little attention as we want. They're not quite as silly or irrelevant as the Grammys, but they're not really for us, either.

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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.

Editorial on 01/26/2016

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