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JUSTIN TANNER REVIEWS OSCAR DIVERSITY:
This just in: There has to be a way to talk about this stuff without offending everyone on the planet, so I’ll try and tread gently. But being a white cisgender male, there is the distinct possibility I might be slipping into hot water. And if I believed in cancel culture, I might even be concerned. But I’m not on Twitter, and I don’t have much of a career to cancel anyway, so here I dive into the murky sea of race and art. Because, oh, those controversial Oscar Nominations! Just when it looked like racial inequity in Hollywood had finally undergone a heartening, much-needed course correction, the Academy voter’s acting branch appeared to snub or, according to the Oxford Dictionary, “rebuff, ignore and spurn disdainfully” every single female actor of color. I’m guessing it was quite an operation to get all 1,336 voters to coordinate in that way, but apparently, according to many declamatory sources, it was managed. How else do you explain that Viola Davis’s performance in “The Woman King” and Danielle Deadwyler’s in “Till” didn’t make the cut? Both had been touted for months and months as Top-Five Best Actress shoo-ins by every single Oscar prognostication site and award-humping pundit in the world. Well, according to CT Jones of Rolling Stone, “The lack of nominations for “The Woman King” are not a failing of the film — they’re evidence of... historical bias and the Academy voters’ continued disrespect of Black women.” It couldn’t be because Andrea Riseborough’s performance in “To Leslie” was extraordinary, easily up there with not just the year’s best work, but with some of the finest cinematic acting in history, comparable to Gena Rowlands in “A Woman Under the Influence," Geraldine Page in “Sweet Bird of Youth” and Susan Tyrell in “Fat City". Or the fact that while Viola Davis has been incredibly moving and nuanced in the past (“Fences," “The Help” and especially “Doubt”), her performance in “The Woman King," though full of glower and tenacity, lacked range. And the movie itself was a piece of comic book fluff, or as I wrote in my review:
“Till” was certainly a better film than “Woman King," but still suffered from a distancing formalism, stuck inside the hermetically sealed, mundane tropes of the biopic, and, outside Deadwyler’s admittedly moving performance had little to recommend it. Of course, these are just my opinions. And yet director Chukwu, writers Daniels and CT Jones would seem to imply that they have nothing to do with personal taste and everything to do with the color of the skin of the participants, along with an undiagnosed systemic racism that subconsciously infects my very thinking process. But what about Ben Whishaw not getting a best supporting actor nomination for “Women Talking?” As an out gay actor, perhaps he should post on instagram about Hollywood’s unabashed homophobia? Or how about compelling Filipino actor Dolly De Leon? She was incredible in “Triangle of Sadness” and was even shortlisted by the GoldDerby.com intelligentsia as a possible nominee. So what happened? Was it some kind of coordinated anti-Filipino cabal that kept her from the list? Is every omission because of bias? Yes, history has unquestionably been unfair to performers of color. I completely understand the desire to be seen and heard, and the vital importance of pointing out the historically egregious underrepresentation of minorities of all flavors in the film industry. And yet it’s silly to deny that any change has occurred. Just as it’s patently ridiculous to deny that more needs to be done. But it seems like what’s being talked about here is the apparent necessity of some kind of PC POC quota. Should there actually be at least one slot out of the five nominees in each category that MUST go to a person of color, or at least a perceptual 'other', even if the voter believes that someone else’s performance is more deserving? Frankly, this stunned and angry reaction to Andrea Riseborough’s Oscar nomination seems like a stunt. As reductive as one of those lawsuits from an unhappy Republican whose election didn’t go their way. The fact is: Nobody gets ‘snubbed’ by the Academy because nobody is guaranteed a nomination in the first place, regardless of race. If Chuckwu and company are looking for someone to blame for their bummer last Tuesday, they might aim their vitriol at the Oscar prognosticators who create the false narrative of nomination ‘locks’ in the first place.
They are the ones on the front lines of who does or doesn’t make it onto the unofficial Oscar short list. They start the conversation. They pick who gets invited to the party. And they leave those they deem unworthy out of the picture. The only reason the campaign for Riseborough had to resort to such extreme measures as simply trying to get eyes on her movie is because the Oscar pundits and prognosticators neglected to include her. End of story. And why? Because she didn’t fit into their narrative, which is not about quality or who is most deserving, but rather who looks like the surest bet, since the only thing that concerns them is correctly picking the winner so as not to compromise their track record. And this cutting and shaping and nudging goes on for months and months until we end up with a very reductive list of not-even-close-to-the-best nominees. But I digress.
Yes, the Oscars have a lousy history when it comes to handing out trophies to people of color. And they have attempted to address this in the last five years, with some success. But to accuse the organization of systemic racism just because Viola Davis and Danielle Deadwyler didn’t get nominated is ridiculous. This year, the story is about “To Leslie," the small movie that nobody saw that broke through the glass ceiling of the Oscar forecaster’s fancy dinner party; it’s about Andrea Riseborough giving a performance that once seen, could not be denied. So, for the love of God, leave race politics out of it.
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This group of bloggers, babblers and film critics scam their paychecks from attempting to turn a conversation about artistic merit into a version of the Daily Racing Form. 
